existentialism 'n stuff

Ah! I am pretty excited right now. We are talking about mycotic diseases. Translation=fungi! And funguses are pretty cool because A) they're not an animal, a vegetable, or a mineral and B) they're an important part of ecology and my love of that study will never die. 

On a more spiritual note, I thought of this during our first hour of microbiology, the hour we were introduced to virology, which has a complexity I'd never really thought of:

I cannot imagine existing in this world one hundred years ago in a world without an understanding of molecular biology. 

I can approximate, but the mental approximation of ignorance I'd adopt for this thought exercise is daunting--and probably unrealistic--because my life has consistently been one filled with science. I question everyday. Mundane questions, unnecessary questions, purely theoretical questions, central-to-my-existence questions, but always questions. Everyday. And either science has an answer, or it doesn't. I am content to know that there may be an answer one day, or there might not be. But I am comforted to know that there are people always looking for answers through science, and I am proud that I am one of them. 

But a hundred years ago, five hundred years ago… sure there was science and experiments, but was there understanding of what makes us and what kills us?

Example: Viruses. Really? In a world where you can't even see cells, and all you know about the world is the simplistic way we deal with it when we're first born… without technology… how do you explain illness? Could anything be more terrifying?

In this context, superstitions, rituals, and gods make so much more sense to me then I ever thought they would. Even now, it's intimidating that viruses can find ways to infect you at all. We are complex; we grew out of nucleic acids into things orders of magnitude larger. Viruses are also complex, and yet they are still so tiny. How weird is it that over three billion years of creation and co-evolution and things we can't even see still manage to jump between our discreet entities and, excuse me, fuck shit up. So terrifying. We are all still so monumentally unknowledgeable about existing. 

Inconsequential tangent: Tron Legacy was a great movie that was pretty existential.

"...like flowers in a waste land."

tron legacy

But it pretty much captures the way I feel right now: 

Elora: "You're telling me you can recreate life in a computer?"

Elora: "You're telling me you can create life at all?"

Both implausibly impressive.