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September 10, 2003
Breathing Iron The Times
Breathing Iron
The Times reported today that scientists have discovered deep under the sea, in those hot water vents which are beyond sunlight, creatures that breathe iron.
The average brain struggles with this one, stuck dumbly on the image of human lungs and iron rods or wrought iron fences. We are forced to reconsider what exactly it means to breathe, or to “respire,” as the scientists put it.
And that, of course, is the best part. If there was ever something we take for granted, it’s breathing. The discovery of iron-breathing microbes, bizarre and fascinating in its own right, suddenly makes our own respiratory capacity seem exotic.
According to a poetic entry in Webster’s, “respiration” involves “inspiration” and “expiration.” Not bad: as though with each new breath we find some new life-giving insight, and with each exhalation we die a small death.
Respiration clearly involves absorbing one batch of chemicals and expelling another – over and over again. Who knows why we have this appalling dependency, but it’s a reminder that the boundary between us and our world is porous and our self-conscious sense of separateness an illusion.
And the dependency is not small. It turns out that we suck in about a million gallons of air per year. That’s roughly 17 soda cans of air inspired and expired per minute. Fat free, of course.
One might indeed wonder how breathing differs from eating or drinking, the other basic input-output operations? Is it just a question of frequency, or perhaps the strict uniformity of our respiratory diet?
Ours being the best of all possible worlds, we never tire of breathing air. For better or worse, there is not a breathing menu from which to choose our life-giving compound each day: weekday specials on air in most places, except very near the coasts where water can be substituted, or in the Midwest where heavy metals are favored. In California, of course, one would order off the menu -- no doubt a noble gas served in a ginger-infused tofu mist.
No, the difference between breathing and eating is not just one of degree. There are qualitative differences. Perhaps foremost is the fact that one is voluntary while the other is not. You will respire while asleep or unconscious, but you will not eat. You can hold your breath, but you can not hold your breath until death.
In our world, breath and life are virtually synonymous. And so to be alive means to be in a constant state of exchange, in an environment set permanently on “recirc.” Scientists believe that the discovery of the “dark biosphere” under the sea will help us to piece together the very earliest steps in life’s evolution on earth. One imagines, all those millions of years ago, the first gasping breath of iron, a blind inspiration.
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Posted by oliver at September 10, 2003 01:00 PM