I’ve just read an interesting article about a third state of being. That would be something other than dead or alive. It seems biology is getting turned on its head by the realization that when living cells die they do not just go to dust as the old expression goes. “Dust to dust” might have to be stricken from the vernacular as we further develop our scientific research and thinking about this supposed third state of being.
One would expect that such a profound realignment of our existential existence would come from the New England Journal of Medicine or the British medical journal The Lancet, or at least Scientific American or Smithsonian, the popular publications on science. But I found out about this through good old Popular Mechanics that I so enjoyed leafing through when I was a boy. I spent many hours in that rag looking for the best deal on X-ray specs to look at naked girls or for a DIY computer kit to build a Soap Box Derby version of a four-function calculator…the sort of thing Alan Turing would appreciate. So, this is my way of saying that I am still somewhat cautious in wanting to say that there is definitely a third act after life and death. I’m not entirely sure my sources are fully reliable.
The key elements of this new discovery are these things called xenobots and anthrobots. Xeno as a prefix means alien and strange and anthro generally means to attribute a human form to something. So, I guess scientists are viewing these cellular bots as different from living cells, but ones that act somewhat like humans living cells at the same time.
This is starting to feel a little bit like Zombie Apocalypse or Night of the Living Dead (versions 1-8) or any one of the 400 or so Zombie movies, series or documentaries that have been made since White Zombie, the first Zombie movie made in 1932. THe term Zombie has been with us for 200 years, having sprung from the bowels of African lore about ghosts and wandering souls. The undead have always been a morbid fascination to young moviegoers. I think the horrific aspect of these zombies is that there are very few ways to kill something that’s stalking you if they are already dead. It is actually a terrifying and nightmare-worthy topic since there seems to be no way to escape them. I found the concept very frightening in one of the better and seemingly more serious treatments of the subject in World War Z when Brad Pitt tries to save humanity by fending off zombie hordes that have fallen subject to a global pandemic (very prescient for a 2018 film) that kills them, but then doesn’t, turning them into a movie version of a xenobot.
None of us ever thought trees talked to one another and yet now we know that they do through neural networks in their root systems and with the help of external living things called fungi. And as we know, fungi defy all sorts of botanical descriptions for many reasons not so terribly dissimilar to these third state organisms. If you asked most people to classify fungi as animal, mineral or vegetable, as the kid’s game goes, they would likely say vegetable. In fact, scientists now know that fungi are more like animals than plants and yet here they are helping big plants (trees) communicate with one another over the millennia. When we went last year to visit Pando, the 140+ acres of aspen trees in Utah that have been deemed to be the largest and oldest living organism on earth, it is hard not to think about the secret life of tree’s communication since the ice age with the help of their little fungi buddies.
But this third state seems to be less a sensationalist thing than a suggestion that organismal death has a place in the transformation of life as we know it over time. I’m not sure any of us could have anticipated every evolutionary change that brought us to our current high-functioning state, so who’s to say that this third state of being isn’t just natures random way of evolving to its next logical form? Like fungi, these xenobots and anthrobots enjoy this not living and not dead state based on what goes on in the outer membranes of the cells, where specialized channels and pumps create an intricate electrical circuit of sorts. These channels and pumps allow cells to communicate with one another in order to perform certain collective functions that are normally attributable only to living organisms. These are things like growth and movement, again, very similar to what fungi do in their “living” state. This all starts to weird me out and brings your mind back to the unnatural movements we see in zombie movies where the zombies seem to have collective objectives that are more instinctive than cognitive or reasoned.
I haven’t watched enough zombie movies to know if you can wait out a zombie. I know with the undead of vampires you can wait until dawn and then these creatures of the night must go dormant, but I don’t know whether there is a universal agreement on what zombies do or don’t do for how long. Luckily for my simple mind at this stage of my life, these third state organisms do NOT seem to be immortal…yet. They are sort of like human hair and fingernails in the crypt, they keep on ticking after death, but not on into infinity. At this point in their evolution, these xenobots and anthrobots seem to last only about four to six weeks after the death of the host organism. I’m sure some theologian will find a way to suggest that these are God’s clean up crew just sweeping the corners of the soul out to tidy up man’s challenging existence as he heads off to the heavens or elsewhere. I’m more inclined to think that this whole natural evolution to a third state is just getting started and that it will take a few more blinks of the evolutionary eye to get this third state fully cooked in an evolutionary sense.
Science fiction has done a mighty fine job of predicting lots of things that eventually came to us as the millennia have marched by. You could argue that this is just so many chimps at typewriters trying to randomly pound out a Shakespearian play, or you could say that man’s mind’s eye is more omniscient than we like to give it credit for. And given what our current life form has done to the resources and ecological balance of this planet, who’s to say we wouldn’t be better off as a species being more like aspen trees with fungi, communicating and acting, but doing so with more collective wisdom and less individualism. Maybe collectivism is nature’s nirvana and we are all just suffering through our individualistic lives on our way to this better third state place. That feels like a much brighter interpretation of this new third state future than to think we will all be zombies trying to eat one another until we are all gone.
J