Interesting article. But surely slime moulds must involve some communication. May I add that bacteria also seem to be going somewhere. No, I don't know where. But they are magnetosensitive. Which means, presumably, that they are really screwed when the Earth undergoes a polarity reversal. Maybe they are all currently going in the wrong direction due to the last one. I wonder what happens when they get there.
Maybe the bacteria are all going to one of the poles? In the absence of other location-sensing equipment, that's surely mostly what being magnetosensitive would be useful for. Assuming they haven't evolved this property recently in order to find microwave ovens or something...
Alec, you did fool me! You bugger!;-)
And of course, thanks to our special guest star, Liam.
Oh dear. So, the bacteria are all going somewhere? Like, the Pole? What happens when they get there? Well, presumably they start communicating - and forming together into A GIANT VORACIOUS SLIME MOULD THE SIZE OF MANCHESTER!
What a great image. Streams of bacteria slipping across the polar ice cap and flowing into the shape of the GIANT VORACIOUS SLIME MOULD, which eventually humps its formless body against the pitiless light of the aurora and roars out its rage and hunger!
It's like "March of the Penguins" meets "At the Mountains of Madness".
(How big would a blob, or shoggoth, composed of all the bacteria in the world be, anyway? Roughly?)
The size of bacteria varies, obviously, but wikipedia says they are usually only 0.5-5.0 μm in their longest dimension, so let's take 0.2μm as an extremely rough estimate of their average extension (a bit less than half, to account for the fact that that's the longest side).
So, if they decided to all line up, it would be a line of bacteria 1 x 10*24 m long, which is apparently a yottametre, or 100 million light years, or 1,000 times the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. Can that be right, or have I made some error, or forgotten how to use my scientific calculator?
Or, if they decided to do the two-dimensional thing (and here opportunites for mathematical error multiply) and form a huge sheet, one bacteria thick, they could make a square sheet 2.24 x 10*15 bacteria long on each side. The sides would be 4.47 x 10*8 m long, or 447,000 km, which is about 3 times the diameter of Jupiter. The area of the sheet would (I think) be 2 x 10*17 m2, or 2 x 10*11 km2, or 9.6 million times the size of Wales.
Progressing to the hypothesized blob, I'm assuming a cube 1.7 x 10*10 bacteria long on each side. That's 3412m, or 3.4km long. That seems a surprisingly comprehensible number compared to the others but maybe that's just the magic of cube roots and volume, etc. I leave converting this into london buses as an exercise for the reader...
Yes I am at home on Saturday night, supposedly cleaning the flat...
Anyway, let's hope the bacterial chatting and co-operation never goes so well they decide to do it. For a start they'd be a damn site more scary than the current world's largest organism, which is a bit 'woah!' but only really threatening if you're a tree.
And furthermore, let's hope the viruses don't join in too or we'd be fucked.
Hmm. So my "blob the size of Manchester" wasn't far off, then. Possible scenes from "March of the Prokaryotes":
Mystery as food left out in New Zealand refuses to decay. Then Australia, then South Africa...
A yoghurt carton bulges on one side and eventually explodes, releasing a trail of yoghurt which crawls steadily northwards;
"Oi don't know what the matter is! All moi cattle keep ending up on the north soide of the field! And they don't look happy..."
The inevitable attempt to destroy the monster inevitably fails. "I don't understand it, Doctor! We hit that mother with fifteen hundred tons of airdropped vancomycin, and it's still coming!" "You fools! What have you done? It's evolved antibiotic resistance!" "No! Now I see the folly of putting Biblical creationists in positions of authority in the US Air Force!"
Well actually, looking at it now, I realise that I meant to take 2μm, not 0.2μm, as the average extension, so all lengths are an order of magnitude short. I believe the cube is 34km across. Which is larger than Telesto, one of the moons of Saturn, or, at 3.9 x 10*13m3, a larger volume than Lake Baikal. Obviously, everyone must have better things to do, but would someone like to check my workings?
Anyway, it's gonna take a lot of antibiotics.
And not only would food cease to rot, but all sorts of other things would go wrong. For a start, 8% of your calories come from food which is digested for you by 'friendly bacteria', so we'd all start losing weight. Milk would cease to curdle into cheese. The nitrogen cycle would be fucked. They must be stopped!
No, cheese would survive, I think; you curdle milk with rennet (or, more often, a lab-produced enzyme). It just wouldn't be very interesting cheese with no bacteria. Food would rot slowly - a lot of decay is breakdown of cells releasing enzymes that cause further damage. Bacteria aren't essential for the whole process, though I think they would probably speed things up. The nitrogen cycle would indeed be fubar. (Fucked up beyond all recognition.) I think that a blob 34km across would be too big - people would have difficulty believing in it. A few hundred metres in length should be ample.
How can you have difficulty in believing in something just because it's very big? I believe in mountains, for example.
More generally, if it's 34km high, that means that the top of it will be over half way through the stratosphere. Which means, given the +20 C to -80 C to about -10 C again temperature variation, that the layers of bacteria over the vast middle bulk of it will be frozen solid, I'd imagine, as even extremephilic bacteria have only been found down to about -20 C. With warmer wiggly bacteria above and below it in tow thinnish layers. Sort of like a huge ice-cream waver. Only blueish-green, overall (I'm guessing here. Depends on cyanobacteria versus their less colourful cousins, bio-mass wise. Maybe it's going to be grey).
Well, they're cunning buggers these bacteria. And the 34km high cube was just a way of visualising it. They could probably make a much shorter, much wider blob which remained within the first couple of km of the troposphere. Or maybe displace all the water in Lake Baikal and hang out there, thereby keeping warm and causing massive flooding at the same time.
Yes, I wasn't actually envisaging something cubical - but a flatter, wider blob would be the size of a small country. Which would be a bit much for SF Movie Monster purposes. As for freezing solid, don't forget that the bacteria are heading for the North Pole, which implies they have solved the freezing problem already (otherwise, not much of a story, as they all freeze to death before the GIANT VORACIOUS SLIME MOULD even gets round to forming in the first place). Perhaps a sort of lava tube effect - the outside layers of bacteria freeze solid, insulating the still-liquid streams moving through the resulting pipe? I like the "hiding in Lake Baikal" idea. "You know, Yuri, I'm sure the water here used to be a different colour..." "Gregori! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! Aaaah!"
Or maybe the bacteria could specialise, and you'd have an insulating layer of extremeophiles on the outside who could withstand the cold, and them some heat-producing bacteria inside that to keep everyone else warm.
The bacteria inside that could be specialised to do all sorts of things - make poisons to squirt at people, whatever. We are kind of getting into the realms of multicelled organisms there though...
As for hanging out in Lake Baikal, aye, good wheeze, eh? Not hiding so much, though, as they'd overflow it by quite a bit. But they could hide at the bottom of the Black Sea or the Mariana Trench or somewhere...
If you should see anything amazing in aPieceOfThem, do post about it in aPOU for heaven's sake. It updates far more frequently than any of us look at this page. Unless it's a really slow day.
14 comments:
Ha! Fooled you! You thought it was a real commenter, and it's just me again.
Very interesting article - thanks.
I am reading, but I'm just being quiet.
Interesting article. But surely slime moulds must involve some communication. May I add that bacteria also seem to be going somewhere. No, I don't know where. But they are magnetosensitive. Which means, presumably, that they are really screwed when the Earth undergoes a polarity reversal. Maybe they are all currently going in the wrong direction due to the last one. I wonder what happens when they get there.
Perhaps I'm the special guest star this week, with my credit halfway through the first scene.
Maybe the bacteria are all going to one of the poles? In the absence of other location-sensing equipment, that's surely mostly what being magnetosensitive would be useful for. Assuming they haven't evolved this property recently in order to find microwave ovens or something...
Alec, you did fool me! You bugger!;-)
And of course, thanks to our special guest star, Liam.
Oh dear. So, the bacteria are all going somewhere? Like, the Pole? What happens when they get there? Well, presumably they start communicating - and forming together into A GIANT VORACIOUS SLIME MOULD THE SIZE OF MANCHESTER!
What a great image. Streams of bacteria slipping across the polar ice cap and flowing into the shape of the GIANT VORACIOUS SLIME MOULD, which eventually humps its formless body against the pitiless light of the aurora and roars out its rage and hunger!
It's like "March of the Penguins" meets "At the Mountains of Madness".
(How big would a blob, or shoggoth, composed of all the bacteria in the world be, anyway? Roughly?)
(Time to go home, alec.)
Well, according to William Whitman of the University of Georgia, there are 5 x 10*30 bacteria in the world.
The size of bacteria varies, obviously, but wikipedia says they are usually only 0.5-5.0 μm in their longest dimension, so let's take 0.2μm as an extremely rough estimate of their average extension (a bit less than half, to account for the fact that that's the longest side).
So, if they decided to all line up, it would be a line of bacteria 1 x 10*24 m long, which is apparently a yottametre, or 100 million light years, or 1,000 times the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy. Can that be right, or have I made some error, or forgotten how to use my scientific calculator?
Or, if they decided to do the two-dimensional thing (and here opportunites for mathematical error multiply) and form a huge sheet, one bacteria thick, they could make a square sheet 2.24 x 10*15 bacteria long on each side. The sides would be 4.47 x 10*8 m long, or 447,000 km, which is about 3 times the diameter of Jupiter. The area of the sheet would (I think) be 2 x 10*17 m2, or 2 x 10*11 km2, or 9.6 million times the size of Wales.
Progressing to the hypothesized blob, I'm assuming a cube 1.7 x 10*10 bacteria long on each side. That's 3412m, or 3.4km long. That seems a surprisingly comprehensible number compared to the others but maybe that's just the magic of cube roots and volume, etc. I leave converting this into london buses as an exercise for the reader...
Yes I am at home on Saturday night, supposedly cleaning the flat...
Anyway, let's hope the bacterial chatting and co-operation never goes so well they decide to do it. For a start they'd be a damn site more scary than the current world's largest organism, which is a bit 'woah!' but only really threatening if you're a tree.
And furthermore, let's hope the viruses don't join in too or we'd be fucked.
Hmm. So my "blob the size of Manchester" wasn't far off, then.
Possible scenes from "March of the Prokaryotes":
Mystery as food left out in New Zealand refuses to decay. Then Australia, then South Africa...
A yoghurt carton bulges on one side and eventually explodes, releasing a trail of yoghurt which crawls steadily northwards;
"Oi don't know what the matter is! All moi cattle keep ending up on the north soide of the field! And they don't look happy..."
The inevitable attempt to destroy the monster inevitably fails.
"I don't understand it, Doctor! We hit that mother with fifteen hundred tons of airdropped vancomycin, and it's still coming!"
"You fools! What have you done? It's evolved antibiotic resistance!"
"No! Now I see the folly of putting Biblical creationists in positions of authority in the US Air Force!"
Howdy pardner.
Well actually, looking at it now, I realise that I meant to take 2μm, not 0.2μm, as the average extension, so all lengths are an order of magnitude short. I believe the cube is 34km across. Which is larger than Telesto, one of the moons of Saturn, or, at 3.9 x 10*13m3, a larger volume than Lake Baikal. Obviously, everyone must have better things to do, but would someone like to check my workings?
Anyway, it's gonna take a lot of antibiotics.
And not only would food cease to rot, but all sorts of other things would go wrong. For a start, 8% of your calories come from food which is digested for you by 'friendly bacteria', so we'd all start losing weight. Milk would cease to curdle into cheese. The nitrogen cycle would be fucked. They must be stopped!
No, cheese would survive, I think; you curdle milk with rennet (or, more often, a lab-produced enzyme). It just wouldn't be very interesting cheese with no bacteria.
Food would rot slowly - a lot of decay is breakdown of cells releasing enzymes that cause further damage. Bacteria aren't essential for the whole process, though I think they would probably speed things up.
The nitrogen cycle would indeed be fubar. (Fucked up beyond all recognition.)
I think that a blob 34km across would be too big - people would have difficulty believing in it. A few hundred metres in length should be ample.
How can you have difficulty in believing in something just because it's very big? I believe in mountains, for example.
More generally, if it's 34km high, that means that the top of it will be over half way through the stratosphere. Which means, given the +20 C to -80 C to about -10 C again temperature variation, that the layers of bacteria over the vast middle bulk of it will be frozen solid, I'd imagine, as even extremephilic bacteria have only been found down to about -20 C. With warmer wiggly bacteria above and below it in tow thinnish layers. Sort of like a huge ice-cream waver. Only blueish-green, overall (I'm guessing here. Depends on cyanobacteria versus their less colourful cousins, bio-mass wise. Maybe it's going to be grey).
Well, they're cunning buggers these bacteria. And the 34km high cube was just a way of visualising it. They could probably make a much shorter, much wider blob which remained within the first couple of km of the troposphere. Or maybe displace all the water in Lake Baikal and hang out there, thereby keeping warm and causing massive flooding at the same time.
Yes, I wasn't actually envisaging something cubical - but a flatter, wider blob would be the size of a small country. Which would be a bit much for SF Movie Monster purposes.
As for freezing solid, don't forget that the bacteria are heading for the North Pole, which implies they have solved the freezing problem already (otherwise, not much of a story, as they all freeze to death before the GIANT VORACIOUS SLIME MOULD even gets round to forming in the first place). Perhaps a sort of lava tube effect - the outside layers of bacteria freeze solid, insulating the still-liquid streams moving through the resulting pipe?
I like the "hiding in Lake Baikal" idea.
"You know, Yuri, I'm sure the water here used to be a different colour..."
"Gregori! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! Aaaah!"
Or maybe the bacteria could specialise, and you'd have an insulating layer of extremeophiles on the outside who could withstand the cold, and them some heat-producing bacteria inside that to keep everyone else warm.
The bacteria inside that could be specialised to do all sorts of things - make poisons to squirt at people, whatever. We are kind of getting into the realms of multicelled organisms there though...
As for hanging out in Lake Baikal, aye, good wheeze, eh? Not hiding so much, though, as they'd overflow it by quite a bit. But they could hide at the bottom of the Black Sea or the Mariana Trench or somewhere...
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