Are We Smarter Than An Amoeba?

As best we can, let's try to imagine fitting the entire universe into a small gymnasium. Inside that gym are a few trillions of molecules swirling every which way. I am obviously either exaggerating the "trillion" estimate or underestimating since I can't really know for sure as neither can scientists. The enormity of the number alone - a trillion is a thousand billion - is enough to cause a light mental conniption.

One of the molecules of air in that gym is our Milky Way galaxy. In it are an estimated 200 to 400 billion stars. One of those stars is a medium-size one that is our sun. Empty space predominates the entire volume of the gym (the universe, no kidding, is all space with a sprinkling of matter) keeping vast distances between galaxies, stars and planets, asteroids, gasses, etc.

If you have not yet grasped the insignificance of our own individual existence, think just a little bit more.

What humility we have can sometimes be overshadowed by hubris in how many ways we think we know about our world. C'est moi, who is guilty as charged, managed to just inoculate myself for crafting the previous sentence in acknowledgement of our human frailty. 

Even more humbling would be to drill further down into the human physiology. An average human body has anywhere from 30 to 40 trillion cells.  Scientists had to guess  that number at the same time that they need to account as well for the number of microbes that are either permanent residents or visiting migrants that go in and out of our system, at one time or another.

Not surprisingly, red blood cells in number make up 80 percent of our body; or, the reason the term life blood makes a lot of sense.  However, our red blood cells may be that numerous but they make up only about 4 percent of our body weight.

As tiny as our red blood cell is, a mere 8 micrometers or about a tenth of the thickness of a human hair, an amoeba is even smaller - 2 to 3 micrometers. It can easily enter our body to cause all kinds of mischief. So, in our human body "universe" unimaginably tiny stuff makes up everything that we are.  Behold, these tiny denizens individually have no clue what goes on in their world that is the human body. A single red blood cell has no idea about how the circulatory system works, every fat cell oblivious to how much it affects  the entire body. It cannot make an assessment of how much of them are just enough or how too much may not be good for the body's well being.

Here is the point of all of these.  Just recently, cosmologists crafted another updated theory on the state of the universe. More than a couple of hundred years ago Isaac Newton thought the universe was a static clockwork of a system. He was right for the most part because his Laws of Motion held and even effectively helped humanity's trip to and back from the moon.  Albert Einstein refined everything and proved Newton was wrong about how gravity worked, although old Albert held on to the static universe idea.  When confronted later by Edwin Hubble that the universe was expanding, Albert took his lumps.  He admitted that the universal constant he came up with was his biggest blunder to kind of fudge his calculations to make the static universe work.  Lately, cosmologists have theorized that the universe is expanding even faster than first thought. Then Albert may have been vindicated about his universal constant thing.  We probably have not heard the last theory. Why?

Let's go back to the gymnasium analogy from the first paragraph. Individually, each of us is one of almost 8 billion people on a planet orbiting an average star that is one of maybe 400 billion in a galaxy, that is that one molecule of air in the gymnasium. Every now and then someone will claim to explain what goes on in that gymnasium and even explain how it came about, how everything in it works, and how  the gymnasium will hold up over time.

Anyone of us, or a combination of many who have accumulated the vast knowledge put together so far, explaining the universe would be like a handful of amoeba trying to explain and understand the human body.  In fact, a colony of amoeba will know no more about why they caused so much discomfort when their presence caused the individual person to be sick as we would know why the universe is behaving the way it does.  We are therefore no smarter than an amoeba, in a manner of speaking. Oh, but yes, we've become smart and have even now come to a point when we are able to outsource and sort intelligence from some inanimate objects we call the computer chip.  

We've become very smart indeed. But never forget that we are one insignificant micro spec in a micro spec that is tinier than a molecule of air that is one of trillions inside a gymnasium that is mostly empty space.

Lastly, a colony of amoeba can effectively affect our physiology; our antibodies have better chances to make us well from a horde of pathogens than our dis-united political and sociological world can  lower the global temperature by 1.5 deg C.