breathe

Connection

The pumping lump of love flowing energy through our veins gives us strength and grounding from our earliest moments. The heart starts to beat audibly around two months into a human pregnancy. From the first heart beat to birth the early heart beats about 54 million times; during an 80 year lifespan the heart beats over 3.2 billion times. Varying methods of calculation place the average power per heartbeat at around 2W ( 2 watts ); knowing this, over a lifetime the human heart produces between 2 and 3 billion joules of work. A lightning strike for comparison can reach into the terawatts range of power, but is about one gigawatt and some say 1.21 gigawatts ( or one gigajoule per second, 1 x 10^9 joules per second ) range on average. That is all to say a lightning bolt of energy flows through us over a lifetime. An immense amount of energy.

That time to first pulse and the total energy over a lifetime varies across vertebrate animals. The need to breath, however, has long been thought to be universal for organic life. Breathing connects us to the world around us. Providing critical information about how much energy is being used and whether the body needs to flush out the lactic acid built up as a byproduct after motion. The practice of exercise and meditation in particular help reduce our resting heart rate and better control our breathing.

Vacuum Dive

Thinking of large complex life without a heart beat would be difficult. The way the heart pumps and its role would have to be different than seen today. There has been recent announcement about the presence of deep brine water organic creatures that go their whole life without sunshine or oxygen. This is said to be because the environments in which they live allowed them to develop along a different path to an unexpected environment. These creatures are said to be able to survive in anoxic environments as a result of needing no oxygen but also go without light in the extreme environments they occupy. It is thought to be the use of unique cellular powerhouses, aka. mitochondria functioning more like hydrogenosomes to allow for anerobic resperation. A finding of what would be thought possible only in robotic systems with environmentally separate designs. How could organic matter develop to power itself in such a way? What kinds of possibilities arise with these kinds of creatures? What would life be like without needing to breathe or for the sun? We had mentioned creatures that go without sunshine in the depths of the ocean before but even creatures in the deep need oxygen. The world disconnected from the sun and air are dystopias painted for most animals, but a world experienced for these creatures in the salty Meditarranian waters.