Life Makes Life

I was listening to two recent articles that had a common theme.

One was about a man that studied hail. He discovered that most hail contain bacteria in the center of the stone. This guy was slicing hailstones up in razor thin sections, and somehow figuring out how to see the growth rings in them, like the growth rings in a tree. In the very center, more often than not, he found bacteria. Not just any bacteria, a few strains of bacteria. Hail needs something crystalline to start freezing on, a starter seed to the hailstone. So it was fascinating to think that this was often a living thing. Certainly dust and other particles are capable of starting the process, too, but you would not think that there would be that much bacteria aloft in the atmosphere. It made me wonder if we were living on a sterile earth, where life was not present at all, would we have as much rain?

That leads back to the fact that we would not be living on this planet as it is if it were not for life. The methanogenic bacteria in Earth's early oceans are responsible for the high oxygen content in the atmosphere. Before this bacteria, the atmosphere was primarily methane, and poisonous to most life as we now know it. Without seas full of these early bacteria, we would not be living in the world we see around us now.

The other related article was about trees. Apparently, they sluff off some kind of bacteria that scientists found to seed rain clouds. In an area with a large amount of trees, much of the rain that is created may be the result of the trees seeding the clouds. This seems like a clear feedback loop. Trees make rain which makes trees. They also pointed out that cloud cover is healthier for trees because rather than blocking sunlight, it more often has the effect of diffusing it. This makes the radiation come to the trees in a variety of directions and gives a tree a greater ability to benefit from the sunlight. Less intense and direct sun and more sunlight going under leaves from a lateral direction. What a neat system of supply water and helping the trees grow. The growth of the forest or jungle is a self-sustaining action.

It shows that life is the key to making life. Once you get it started, it tends to build on itself.