Coffee and the Third Nature. Column in KompyuterraOnline #19
In the case of living systems, we perceive structure above all else. That structure must be continuously maintained, "fed." Drinking coffee with sugar — the episode that prompted our discussion — is part of this process.
Everyone has their own obsession — mine is coffee! In the four preceding columns we examined how many streams of energy converge in a simple cup of coffee. How should we classify this diversity?
In primary school, children are taught to distinguish between living and non-living nature. They are told something along these lines: "Non-living nature consists of natural bodies that do not breathe, do not feed, and do not reproduce." And correspondingly, "living nature consists of natural bodies that breathe, feed, and reproduce."
This will do, setting aside the odd construction "nature consists of natural bodies." What, then, do the authors of natural-science textbooks understand by "nature"? "You have observed rain, a rainbow, and birds. Well, the forest, the river, the sky, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the rain, and the snow — all of this is nature. Only what is made by human hands does not belong to nature. All of nature is divided into living and non-living." Here is an eternal logical trap: the human being is part of nature, yet what the human being makes is not. But that is not our subject.
When comparing the living and the non-living, three criteria are named: breathing, feeding, and reproduction. Breathing and feeding are two facets of the same process — the transformation of resources and the extraction of energy. Reproduction… Of course, it is not reproduction as such that matters. An elderly grandmother or a worker bee is also alive, even though neither reproduces. Far more important is the fact that they are themselves the products of reproduction. And what matters is not how they came into being, but how they have been shaped by the prior history of their formation.
Let us recall that the human being, like any other organism, is a product — and even, if you will, a victim — of its own evolutionary history. Do not repeat the myth of the "perfection of nature"; the designs of living systems are far from optimal and can only be explained by reference to their history. This is a consequence of the fact that living organisms arise through a specific kind of copying (in molecular biology the preferred term is "replication"; in everyday life, "reproduction").
Dear reader, you are the product of a developmental process organized (under the appropriate environmental conditions) by your genetic programme. That programme is a copy of fragments of the programmes of two other organisms — your parents — whose programmes were themselves formed by copying fragments of the programmes of your grandparents. This copying was made possible by the fact that your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, almost indefinitely, all successfully survived to reproductive age. The history of such copying that led to you — as to any other living being alive today — stretches back more than three and a half billion years. Throughout this entire history, broadly speaking, one and the same process has been at work. The type of design present at any given moment in any given evolutionary lineage was subjected to multi-directional modifications. Modifications that reduced the chances of leaving offspring were eliminated; modifications that increased the probability of copying the existing design were preserved.
Returning to the difference between living and non-living nature, let us note that analogues of breathing and feeding are not uncommon. A candle "eats" its own material, oxidizing it through "breathing" — combustion. A puddle "feeds" on rainwater, "breathes" by exchanging vapour and dissolved gases with the air, and even "grows" by spreading across the ground. Yet these objects lack genealogy based on copying (reproduction). This is precisely why I am convinced that origination through evolution must be included in any basic definition of life. Life, then, is the maintenance and reproduction of characteristically highly ordered structures, perfected in the course of evolution and sustained, in accordance with an internal programme, by external sources of matter and energy.
The majority of processes in non-living nature are driven by the dissipation of energy. The flux of energy flowing from the Sun into space generates diverse perturbations on the surface of our planet. Winds blow, rivers flow, ocean currents move. The flux of energy from the Earth's interior through its surface into space drives tectonic plates, raises mountain ranges, and triggers volcanic eruptions. These processes dissipate the energy passing through them, but they do not produce complex, highly ordered structures.
When we look at an organism, by contrast, we perceive not so much a process as a structure. Consider a tree. Its trunk consists of conducting tissues that carry water with dissolved soil minerals up into the crown. There, using the energy of light, sugars are synthesized, and from these, exceedingly complex arrays of energy-rich organic compounds. Of course, all this complexity is shaped by flows of matter and energy, but the "characteristically highly ordered structure" spoken of in the definition is plainly evident.
Since in the case of living systems we perceive structure above all else, it turns out that this structure must be continuously maintained — "fed." Drinking coffee with sugar, the episode that gave rise to our discussion, is part of this process. Resources enter; waste products leave. And analogous processes sustain the life of all organisms across the entire planet — naturally, in accordance with each organism's mode of nutrition. We nourish not only ourselves, but also the organisms we make use of, including several species of coffee trees, sugar beets and sugarcane, and a great many other things besides.
Both the cultivation of coffee and its transport, as carried out until just a few centuries ago, were bound up with the process of feeding. Coffee was fed fertilizers, watered, and helped to capture solar energy (by removing competitors, for instance). It was transported from Arabia by camel caravans. You feed the camel grass or hay, water it — and the ship of the desert carries its useful cargo in the prescribed direction. The camel's waste products (dung, urine) are energetically less valuable than its food; this is precisely the difference that powers its functioning.
Yet — does the contemporary situation, in which coffee is transported by lorries, ships, and aeroplanes, differ in any fundamental way from what has just been described? One "feeds" the lorry petrol, "waters" it with coolant…
Let us not rush. Let us return to the wisdom of the second-grade classroom. Lorries, ships, and aeroplanes are not part of nature. So what, then, are they?
Something odd emerges here. A lorry is a non-living body that is not part of non-living nature (since it does not belong to nature at all). So what if it is made of non-living materials — a tree also grows from non-living materials! A lorry, like living organisms, must be fed — supplied with energy sources. It is, incidentally, a heterotroph: it "feeds" on organic matter and, like the majority of living heterotrophs, including animals, oxidizes it with atmospheric oxygen. Moreover, a lorry is the product of copying! There was once a Daimler automobile (a modified copy of the horse-drawn carriage). It was copied, with modifications introduced into the design. Some modifications were unsuccessful; others improved it. The lorry, like living organisms, cannot be understood without reference to its history. The specifications of many of its components are determined not by optimality but by standards established in the construction of earlier, "ancestral" vehicles!
And this is by no means confined to transport. What determined the size of the DVD disc? It is the same size as an audio disc. And the size of the audio disc was chosen as it was in order to accommodate a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Thus, alongside living and non-living nature, we have created a third nature — the technosphere, the totality of technical devices. The overwhelming majority of the flows of resources and energy that pass through contemporary humanity are transformed not by living nature but by the technosphere. We obtain energy from nuclear power plants in order to smelt aluminium, so that it may enter into special alloys from which aeroplanes will be made, which will deliver bombs onto the fortifications and tanks of contemptible people who wish to prevent us from using oil as we see fit… Compared with these flows of energy, the energy in a cup of coffee (and even in a proper serving of fried potatoes with a respectable pork chop) is a trifle.
The waste products of the technosphere are a separate problem. In living nature, broadly speaking, there is no waste. The waste products of heterotrophs (animals and their kin) are resources for autotrophs (plants, etc.); the waste products of autotrophs are resources for heterotrophs. But among the waste products of the technosphere there are many substances that no organism consumes. There is a good term for them — xenobiotics, "alien to the living." Had they been entering the environment throughout the billions of years of Earth's biological history, organisms adapted to utilize them would have arisen; as it is, life has simply had no time to adjust to these strange substances.
Our existence is intimately bound up with the third nature (and, as I once argued, the fifth environment of our lives). Perhaps you drink coffee from a coffee machine? Even if you brew it by hand, the coffee itself and everything you use bears the imprint — the brand! — of the technosphere's influence. The production of fertilizers, agronomy, transport, processing — all are the result of the activity of technical devices that must be "fed" flows of energy (and often of matter as well). And now you put the coffee on the stove… I will not even speak of how the vessel you use and the stove itself were manufactured (though behind them looms the shadow of a planetary mining and metalworking industry). Fire — that was the first process from which the history of the technosphere began! An extra-corporeal process of transforming matter and releasing energy, associated with the formation of a specific structure whose maintenance required the continuous supply of resources…
The use of fire is older than our species. Sustained fires were already maintained by Sinanthropus many tens of thousands of years ago. Today they are classified within the species Homo erectus; the first representative of this species discovered by modern people was given the humiliating name "Pithecanthropus." The erecti — "Pithecanthropus" — were a species of human that persisted for more than one and a half million years; it is by no means certain that Homo sapiens will break this record.
Will you be able to see, in your next cup of coffee, a reflection of the entire history traversed by humanity since that time?