Are We Being Colonized By Microbes?
Do we have a synergism with microbes or have they colonized us? That is the question nobody is asking. I have the urge to digress but am encountering a resistance, like "stick to whatever it is you are talking about!" Rarely do I have such a desire to digress. I digress.
Perhaps, I am trying to escape some uncomfortable truth.
Digression could become a crime, like "get to the point" or go to jail. "Digression" can be very much like "diversion", which sounds even more criminal. In the past it was "no one is perfect." Now it is, "everyone is guilty of something."
Microbes are the most successful living creatures on the planet. They are everywhere, inside of us, outside of us, in the most extreme places and they actually weigh together more than all humans weighed together. I know, because I weighed every one of them, every microbe and every human. That is what is behind that statement, so you better believe it. No, actually, I read that somewhere. There are something like 10 times more microbes than cells in the body. I read that somewhere too.
"A ‘reference man’ (one who is 70 kilograms, 20–30 years old and 1.7 metres tall) contains on average about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria, say Ron Milo and Ron Sender at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Shai Fuchs at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada.
Those numbers are approximate — another person might have half as many or twice as many bacteria, for example — but far from the 10:1 ratio commonly assumed. “The numbers are similar enough that each defecation event may flip the ratio to favour human cells over bacteria,” they delicately conclude in a manuscript posted to the preprint server bioRxiv." (https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/01/11/microbes-outnumber-human-cells-10-1-not-fast-say-scientists/)
One can easily see how our identity with the human species is somewhat specious. We are a mix of microbe and human dna. There is the autonomous nervous system that functions without the need of our consciousness. In addition, the microbe population which also functions without the need of our consciousness. If you think of the Universe as functioning with and without our consciousness, one might deduce (it is not the opposite of seduce) or at least entertain the thought that much is functioning without any centralized consciousness, like ants or slime mold. At least it appears that way.
Unfortunately our perception has its limits and just like a candle will send out rays in a room in every possible direction "instantaneously", and our limited perception brings us to the obvious but wrong conclusion that it happened in one instant, it is more likely that if one perceives it in slow motion, one might discover that it wasn't really instantaneous. But it also could be instantaneous even if we slowed it almost infinitely down to the point that we could observe this.
Even with this limited access it is a great gift. And since it is in the realm of possibilities, one can easily see how great it would be to have all of our perceptual limits removed. Even in the same space we know that different worlds exist. The microscopic world, our perceivable world, and the entire Universe all exist together, and are all simultaneously interconnected. Our existences are interdependent and perhaps autonomous. Another small digression, I almost regret to say.
The point that I wish to make is it not possible that we are simply animals that the microbes have colonized?
Another perhaps unnecessary question: Do they prefer us alive or dead? It may be unnecessary since they get to have us both ways.