Any form of life that we know of needs two basic things. The first is matter, as life has to be made of something. The second is energy, so life can do something with that matter (e.g., move around, reproduce, watch trailer park boys). Most life on earth gets its energy from the sun. All life on earth gets its matter from...from earth, duh!
As we learned in the last PeePost, the atoms in your body are no different from the atoms in rocks/oceans/air/etc. Additionally, the composition of our bodies is close-ish to that of the earth's crust!!
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| Graph of abundances of chemical elements in the earths' upper continental crust. We are made mostly of the really abundant stuff in the upper left (e.g., oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc.) |
Because of those two facts, I like to think of any kind of earth life as little tiny earth particles--walking, talking, peeing, sometimes neighborly little chunks of the earth's crust.
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| Humans are earth particles. |
