The Design of Life The Micro Level

1. The Design of Life • The Micro Level William Blake wrote: "To see a world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour"

2. Boo!

5. Complex Structures

6. Complex Structures

7. Complex Structures Math: It Works!

8. A drop of water the size of the period at the end of this sentence would contain 10 trillion water molecules. A single drop of water has over 10,000 billion hydrogen atoms and 5,000 billion oxygen atoms!     Theoretically, with a drop of water, 10,000 billion hydrogen atomic bombs can be made, able to disintegrate the whole earth in seconds. Don’t let small things fool you! 

9. Living Things • Living things are by far the most complex objects we have yet found in our universe. • The E. coli bacterium (very simple life): • Information content = 1012 bits. 1,000,000,000,000 • Equivalent to 100 million pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. • Humans have approximately 75 trillion cells, each more complex than those of E. coli.

10. DNA • Genetic code: blueprint for what you are • Information content in DNA • Just 1 cell’s DNA = 1000 encyclopedia volumes • 3 billion bits of DNA in human genome DNA: The Most Complex Molecule

11. Living Things • How many atoms are in the human body? • The number of atoms in one person is almost too big to write out. Hydrogen, oxygen and carbon make up about 99% of the average human. Assuming an average adult weighs 70 kilograms. A 70 kg body would have approximately 7 x 10 (27th power) atoms. That is, 7 followed by 27 zeros: • 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms per person! Dang, shawty.

12. Living Things • But it gets even wackier! • A typical atom is 0.000000001 meters across -- that's one billionth of a meter! • By way of illustration, imagine an enlarged atom, magnifying it millions of times until it is like the distance from the Earth to the moon (200,000 miles). That's a massive atom -- 10,000,000,000 inches across! • Now, how wide would the NUCLEUS be on this scale? About 10,000 inches, the length of a golf course. • How big would a PROTON be? About as big as a football field (1,000 inches). • A QUARK (the smallest things known in atoms) would be about the size of a mere golf ball (approximately one inch wide). • In each atom, there are trillions and trillions of quarks! • Thus, the number of quarks compared to the number of atoms in the human body is almost too great to even measure!

13. Incredible Complexity -- The Brain • Prof. Ambrose (Emeritus Professor of Biology in London University) in his book The Nature and Origin of the Biological World: describing the complexity of the brain says that it is like 500 million telephone exchanges all connected properly. The connections possible are 101,300,000,000,000. (To write this number out in the normal form l,000,000 . . . etc. would take about one hundred thousand years to do.) • Fact: The human brain has roughly 100 billion neurons.

29. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.” Psalm 19