I am alive

I am alive.  I am a hydrocarbon life form filled with atoms and compounds forged in the catastrophic explosions of supernovae millions and millions of miles away in space and time.  I have been around for billions of years now, slowly changing and transforming through repeated replication and reproduction.  I am filled with the ooze and slime of a primordial pond but now I am so much more.

I wasn’t much to start with, just a few simple organic molecules thrown together, catalysed into action with a spark here and there and through a conversion of energy I was able to reverse entropy, if only temporarily.  I have created order out of chaos and copied myself over and over again, sucking heat out of the fumaroles and hydrothermal vents, getting drunk on the cocktail of nutrients that spewed out of the bowls of the earth and the place I was to call my home.

Within no time at all I had devised a way to organise myself better, protect myself in a lipid shell, compartmentalise and componentise my functions raising my productivity and distancing myself slowly and surely from the meagre opportunities that my environment allowed.  How long was it, a few million years?  I have lost count of the endless passing of the sun or the waxes and wanes of the moon or the ebb and flow of the tides.  I have no time for such reminiscences and they are of no consequence.

I became many, very many.  I found myself clumped together for shelter and protection and through photosynthesis, a net little trick I had worked on, I realised that I could change the earth and not for the last time.  Oxygenation gave me an opportunity for a real step change and soon the land became attainable.  By now I had taken on so many forms.  Some worked while others failed but it was of no matter as I kept growing and transforming through careful selection and random chance.

Billions of years are now behind me and I have never been better.  There is nowhere left on this globe that has not been graced by my presence: salt water; fresh water; arid land; wet land; frozen ground and even deep underground.  I have taken the same small number of building blocks and moulded and manufactured them into fantastical and varied forms.  I have played tricks with myself and created life that lives upon another or that lives in symbiosis with another.  I have created life that needs to be frozen to spring forth and grow or be scorched in order to blossom.  I have made beauty and the beast.

And now I have embarked upon a new challenge, a new opportunity and left the confines of planet Earth.  I am alive in space stations, I have been to the moon and I am already floating, orbiting attached to pieces of metal that circle high above the atmosphere.  But my greatest achievement is happening right now.  Tiny fragments of me, sloughed off inadvertently from its makers are attached to a machine that is at the edge of the sun’s gravitational influence.  I have gone further than I have ever been before, through the heliopause and into interstellar space drifting onwards until one day I will make contact with a fresh place to colonise and flourish, somewhere out there.  I don’t know when but I am not worried, I have the time.

I have achieved so much but I have started and cannot be stopped.  I am alive and will be around until the end of all time.  I will live for ever.