Biome On The Range

Splash of seawater, magnified 25 times

W  e are all gods of biomechanics.

But our nanobuddy overlords have been around four billion years more than than we have . . . that's a four followed by nine zeros. 4,000,000,000.

If the lifespan of the earth were reduced to 24 hours, bacteria sprang into existence at around 3 a.m.—last night. Homo sapiens, however, has been around since around six seconds ago; the Industrial revolution commenced before the light from the window crossed the room to your eye.

If our human world were reduced to the size of a bacterium's and the bacterium was floating around in the middle of your stomach, the distance from the bacterium to the surface of your skin would be about the distance from here to the moon.

One calculation has it that if bacteria were all dried up and weighed—that's all the water-weight removed—they would weigh 550 billion tons.

This comes to about 128 Mount Everests. And that's if all the bacteria were reduced to dust and crushed into the density of granite. . .

And how prolific are these little guys? Well, if the conditions are right—temperature, availability of nutrients—one bacterium can generate 2,097,152 bacteria in just seven hours. That, folks, is over two million kids—and that's just one bacterium. Just imagine all the kids having their own kids, all at the same time . . .

That means that that piece of chicken breast that you left on the kitchen counter—yes, that one—suddenly became Club Med for bacteria around when its surface became around 15°C/59F.

A square centimeter that contained 10 million campylobacter at 1°C just multiplied by fifteen in about ten minutes.