Carbon is the fundamental building block of life, and below describes a part of his journey without end, adapted from a story by Primo Levi "The story of a carbon atom (from the book" The Periodic Table "). If you've ever thought that you exist disconnected from the planet, this story should bring you to a more real, because your body contains about 700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 carbon atoms that make up 10% of your weight, each of which has already danced countless times not unlike the one you read ...
"Our carbon atom has waited for hundreds of millions of years, bound to three oxygen atoms calcium and a form of limestone, not far from the surface. At one point the blow of a pickaxe finds out and sends it to its fate to the lime kiln, bringing the world of things that change. Is burned, and still clung to his traveling companions, the oxygen atoms, is emitted from the chimney and take the path of the air. Its existence, a time motionless, it has now become tumultuous. Is captured by the wind, brought down to the ground and then lifted ten kilometers high.
breathed in by a falcon and its steep descent into the lungs, it was absorbed into its rich rich blood and was ejected. He wound up three times in sea water, the water of a cascade of a stream and again expelled. He traveled by the wind pushed for eight years now high, now low, the sea and the clouds, forests, deserts, limitless expanses of ice, and then once caught, he started his adventure in the world staff. The atom of which we are talking about has been carried by the wind along a row of vines. He had the fortunate destiny to touch a leaf, penetrate it and to be fixed here by a ray of sunshine.
Now our atom is part of a molecule of glucose. Travels from leaf to branch and from there down to the grapes ripening. What happens next is the science of the winemakers. It 's the fate of the wine to be drunk and those who drink it retains the molecule in the liver for a week, well hidden and quiet, as a store of energy for a sudden effort, an effort that will address the following Sunday, to chase a horse escape. The atom is taken from the blood stream straight to a tiny fiber thigh muscle ... and later, such as carbon dioxide is exhaled into the air again.
Once again the wind that blows away this time, goes beyond the Apennines and the Adriatic, Greece, the Aegean, Cyprus, right up in Lebanon. And the dance was renewed. The atom now penetrates and remains trapped inside the trunk of a venerable cedar, one of the last. Could remain there for five centuries, but allow yourself to imagine that twenty years after the worm has eaten. The worm then generated a larva in the spring has turned into a butterfly dries hours under the sun, confused and dazzled by the splendor of the day. Our atom is one of thousands of insect eyes that when he dies, falls to the ground, buried in the undergrowth. Here are the omnipresent work, tireless and invisible microorganisms humus. The butterfly is slowly decomposed and the atom, once again takes flight. Back
air ... and here it rests on the ocean surface and then sink slowly. A coccolitoforo which is passed from there to appropriate it build their shells of calcium carbonate incredibly delicate. Soon, it dies and glides on the ocean floor, where it joins the millions of billions of tags each with its own carbon atoms.
During the geological eras, the movement of tectonic plates carry this sediment, transformed into limestone, the earth's surface, exposing that atom to the complex dance of life "
Now look at the hand, a scar or a fingernail. Think of it not so much as a hand, but as the place where you are stopped for a while countless carbon atoms. A place where they are having a very brief respite before continuing in that huge trip that includes the deep ocean, the highest heavens, the dinosaurs before you and the life forms that we never imagined that come after us.
You feel connected now?
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