Atlantis Dispatch 010 - path one

in which ATLANTIS contemplates tempests…

“Sea Venture in the Storm” by William Harrington. (The historical basis for Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest).

October 4th, 2021

…begin transmission…

These winds threaten to capsize old Atlantis! We heard that the eye of the storm is calm, and while we manage to find brief moments of respite, this hurricane’s behavior is hard to keep up with. Better to push through these gargantuan gusts and gales, beyond the hurricane’s edge, and sail fast as we can in the opposite direction of where we might guess the storm is headed. Hold tight!

Phew…we’ve managed to survive! Excellent maneuvering, first mate! Now that we’re safe, let’s take a moment to reflect upon what we’ve just experienced. How could something as simple as a temperature and pressure discrepancy send these waters swirling about to cause us so much strife? And just like that, we were reminded of the Kempes/Krakauer position that we might be better off considering “life” through a more general, principles-first approach. That is to say, we’d do well to think of life as a complex dynamical process, much like culture. 

And with this, other new life began to spring forth from beneath our planks!

So, what does this mean, Atlantis? Do you mean to suggest we were contending with a stormy lifeform back there in that watery whirl? Do we witness an origin of life event when Prospero conjures up his tempest (or when Shakespeare conjured up his Tempest?).

Listen, at this point, we are very good at observing changing meteorological conditions to predict how they’ll behave when they coincide, and whether or not that coincidence will lead to the emergence of a hurricane. We can even to some degree of confidence predict when that hurricane will arise, where it will go, and what it will do. But would it be fair to look at the emergence of hurricanes as a proxy for how life arises? 

We’re once again torn, dear readers, we’re simply not sure. Think of it this way: Ida flooded the most “robust” underground transportation system in the world, destroyed structures between New York and the Gulf of Mexico, created an estimated economic impact of 95 billion dollars, and killed dozens along the way. We’ve gone far enough to name this system, and we helplessly watched Ida employ a lot of what looks like agency. To take Levin’s turn of phrase, she certainly tinkered with her environment, and literally carved a very large niche for herself across our nation. Ida must be alive, right? David Krakauer might think so, and our recent adventure makes Atlantis at least consider this possibility, too. But we sail against a strong tide… 

Yes, hurricanes emerge from warm waters (Darwin’s little pond, much?), but they don’t reproduce. Ida’s not Katrina’s daughter storm, after all. Hurricanes take shape, and those shapes grow, but they don’t have a bodily boundary, and eventually, they just sort of disappear. Can we really say that a hurricane has mass, if that mass exists temporarily? Mass seems to matter. Matter matters! You may recall from our recent adventure assembling Lego sets (or more accurately, breaking them apart) that a living system seems to require two things: complexity and abundance, and we can say with certainty that we’ve witnessed an abundance of hurricanes in recent years. But when we say we want abundance when we’re looking for life, we mean we want sameness, and a lot of it. Are Ida and now Nicholas “same enough” to count?

And what about memory?! Hurricanes don’t retain anything after they’re gone. True, they leave evidence of their existence behind in the form of devastating damage, but is that information the functional information we attribute to life? Is a wrecked roof a biosignature? Many in our “Origins of Life League” would say, “No!”   

So, where does Atlantis land on the alive/not-alive hurricane debate? Frankly readers, we’re surfing the froth. What we like about this discussion is that both sides come to agree on a very important mental method for considering life’s universal features. Recalibrating the way that we look at how complexity can arise from simple initial conditions might help us to better navigate our origins voyage. No more of this “life is/life isn’t” bickering! More “life does” revelry!

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