The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: The ocean of the air

25 October 2012

The ocean of the air

femur of an elephant bird, skeleton of a hummingbird

The November/December edition of New Humanist includes an article by me about some of the largest and smallest animals ever to have flown, and how life has shaped the atmosphere.

Here is something to think about:

In every cubic meter of [normal] air there are between 1.6 million and 40 million viruses.
In every cubic meter of [normal] air there are between 860,000 and 11 million bacteria.

Half of the viruses trapped by the scientists who made these observations didn’t match any known virus species. But most belong to groups that infect plants or mammals. Given that we breathe roughly 0.01 cubic meters of air each minute, a simple calculation based on these results suggests we breathe in a few hundred thousand viruses every minute.

Hummingbirds, by the way, fly forwards and backwards with equal ease.

P.S. 13 Nov: The piece is now online here.

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Most real creatures that we think we know embody wonders we have hardly dreamed of. And there are other beings, equally real, which for most of human experience have been beyond imagining. As Zhuangzi wrote some 2,300 years ago, “all the creatures in this world have dimensions that cannot be calculated.”

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson is published by Granta in the UK and by Chicago University Press in the US. In 2013 it was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton prize for science books, a Society of Biology award, and the British Book Design Awards. The Estonian edition is published by AS Äripäev, the French edition by Les Belles Lettres, the German one by Matthes & Seitz, the Italian by Adelphi, the Japanese by X Knowledge Co, the Korean by EunHaeng NaMu Publishing Co, the Polish by Marginesy, the Russian by Alpina, the Spanish by Atico de los Libros.

Reviews here and here. Articles here and here. Chapter by chapter notes here (1) and here (2). What others say here. Podcasts here, here and here. Video here and here (from 43.00)

Caspar Henderson's most recent book is A New Map of Wonders.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
misattributed to Bertrand Russell

Since we cannot predict how ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.
Derek Parfit

We are never 'at home': we are always outside ourselves.
Michel de Montaigne

We are monkeys with money and guns.
Tom Waits

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

Albert Einstein

If you look into infinity what do you see? Your backside!
Tristan Tzara

Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow.

Carl Woese

When you're young, all evolution lies before you...If you compare yourself with the limitations that came afterwards, if you think how one form excludes other forms, of the monotonous routine where you finally feel trapped, well, I don't mind saying, life was beautiful in those days.
'Qfwfq'

75 percent to 90 percent of all living species may remain unknown to science.
IIES

Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.
Roger Revelle (1957)

The rate of change of ocean acidity is many times faster than anything experienced in the last 55 million years.
EPOCA

One cannot reasonably compare the K/T extinction with the current human destruction of the biosphere. The first was a relatively minor setback.

J.C. Briggs

When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.

Plenty Coups

If we act now, maybe we have got a fighting chance.

Bob Watson

The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go here on earth and probably far beyond.
Martin Rees

Our quest, as a civilisation [is] to answer the question, how do we save ourselves from ourselves without losing ourselves?

Jaron Lanier

If you yourself want to become really happy...I suggest you save the albatross from extinction. It can be done.

Margaret Atwood

There is just one real problem -- the problem of human relations.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

The amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.

Joseph Conrad

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:

"I deeply sympathize."

'The Walrus and the Carpenter'

We abandon our own language because we need extra words, for things we had never imagined; and because there are superfluous words in it, for things we cannot imagine any more.

'The Giant, O'Brien'

We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

'Austerlitz'

Those were his first steps on a white sheet/Clutches of wriggling letters in black lead/Like tracks of worms on the Precambrian mud.

'Kaspar Hauser'

The mind does not err from the fact that it imagines.

Spinoza

We are as much automaton as mind.
Blaise Pascal

Much that is intelligent in us is not specifically human.
Alasdair MacIntyre

What knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon? Herman Melville

There is no counting the possible ways to the Millennium and the route to it.
Norman Cohn

By the time human beings start the global nuclear war that will destroy our civilization, there won’t be any great apes left for Earth to become the Planet of the Apes. But chances are there will still be plenty of rhesus macaques around.
Dario Maestripieri

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
George Orwell

The astounding comes towards us, outrider of death and birth.
John Berger

We are so far from denying there is any Unicorn at all, that we affirm there are many kinds thereof.

Thomas Browne

Even that old horse

is something to see

this snow-covered morning

Matsuo Basho

We cannot see the visible except with the invisible.

Eckhart von Hochheim

You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in the Book.
Paul Erdős

If, as the poets say, life is a dream, I am sure in a voyage these are the visions which serve best to pass away the long night.

Charles Darwin

But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor's heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most warn by the generations of pilgrims.

Jorge Luis Borges

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer