At the Reef. 29.5 cm x 21 cm, blue biro on grey paper.
Main theme: A world that breathes and changes.
Date produced: 1986 - 1987.

Each of us has a long line of continuous life that we have lived through, since before we were born. Our lives started as a result of one of our mother’s eggs being successfully fertilised by one of our father’s sperm. Since that point, the newly developing cluster of living cells has continued to survive until now. That cluster of living cells has needed to be kept within a fairly narrow range of temperatures for that whole time, needed to have had oxygen virtually constantly breathed in and added to our bloodstreams, regular water drunk and regular substances eaten, so that our bodies can generate energy, continue living and continue functioning, and waste products removed regularly.

There is an enormous amount of management required to sustain our lives. Fortunately, we don’t need to be aware of all of the the things and processes required to sustain our lives. Most of the processes required to keep our lives going have been automated by our bodies themselves. But hopefully, when you consider that your life has been going for a long time and required a lot of management, from both your body, as well as you deliberately providing things like constant air, water, food, sleep, warmth, etc., then you can get a sense of just how long a line of constant life your body has achieved. I think that this type of achievement is not easy to appreciate properly, yet it is fundamental and extremely important.

Life has to be constant. My life has been constant. The life in my body can’t just stop and turn back on again a few hours or days later. My vital life processes have to run constantly from the time I was conceived until I die. That is quite incredible really, when you consider that my body will also change considerably over the course of my life. It started extremely small (a few cells), and has grown to be a working construction of about one hundred trillion (100,000,000,000,000) cells (Sagan, C., Cosmos, Ballantine Books, New York. 1980. p.21). All through my life, my body keeps its life sustaining processes running. What amazing ‘machines’ our bodies are!

Now consider that each one of us sits on the end of a hugely long [mostly] unique sequence of continuous life, extending back many, many generations through ancient ancestors, and through earlier life forms. Your life has come on the back of one life form’s unique reproduction after another, until your grandparents were born, until they gave birth to your parents, and until your parents gave birth to you.

Amazingly, such a long line of continuous life is likely to extend all the way back to the beginning of life on this planet itself.

If life started on this planet as a single reproducing unit, then our long line of continuous life has to extend all of the way back to that point. Every life form alive today has to have long lines of life that extend back to the first life on this planet.

Every currently living thing on our planet, whether it is an animal, or an insect, or a plant, or a fungus, or a bacteria, has its own unique and incredibly long ‘line of continuous life’, that extends back to exactly the same point: the beginning of all life. Every living thing on our planet must then be related, whether it is an animal, or an insect, or a plant, or a fungus, or a bacteria, etc. And it does seem that way! All life on this planet uses the same building blocks, and uses DNA. Isn’t that incredible?

Acting constantly on all the long lines of life that all extend out from the starting point of life on this planet is ‘evolution’. Evolution is a proven fact. Evolution acts on the interaction of individual life forms, determining which life forms are most likely to succeed in having the next generations of successful life forms. Evolution is the notion that within any new generation of life forms, some individuals, for some reasons, will be better suited to reproduce within the current situation than others, and so most of the succeeding generation will be products of these better suited or “lucky” life forms. There are many factors (mostly environmental factors, such as temperature ranges, or oxygen content of the sea water or air) that have worked with evolution to shape the success or otherwise of various life forms.

Looking back along the long lines of continuous life, they would be amazingly improbable lines of lives and continuous living. Every long line of continuous life goes from generation to generation, and extends through enormous numbers of generations of evolving life forms. Imagine how many continuous beats of the heart that takes in! Imagine all the disease and fear and ignorance and special moments that have been encountered along that extraordinary line of continuous life.

The life forms that exist today (whether they are an animal, or an insect, or a plant, or a fungus, or a bacteria) are all sitting on lines of ‘success’ – they were not the ones that were eaten, or who died before ‘giving birth’ to the next generation, etc. I sit here amazed (mind blown) at the thought of the passage of vast time and life experiences involved.

Isn’t it amazing to consider the long line of continuous life that each one of us has! Our brains don’t cope well with comprehending such extraordinary numbers of things, but to me, I find that concept extremely uplifting and inspiring. To think of my life sitting on the end of an enormous line of continuous life, going back billions of years to the very first unit of life. In a way, what a responsibility! In another way, I know that life is so well established on this planet that even when we humans make the conditions on the planet unsuitable for humans to live, that life will continue (even if it might be life in other forms, such as bacteria, or insects for a long time).

What an amazing thing to consider that through my life, and body, has been a continuous line of life, going back to the start of life! Billions of years of life, going back through countless generations of my current species, back through more countless generations of slightly more primitive humans, primitive primates, primitive mammals like tree shrews, reptiles, amphibians, fish, proto-fish, sea squirts, sponges, single-celled animals, bacteria, DNA, RNA, start of life! (This is only an example of the sorts of things that make up the vast majority of our long lines of continuous life). My estimate of the number of generations of individual life forms in my line of continuous life is around 13,000 billion generations. That is an enormous number of generations! This took me back to about 4 billion years ago, through a range of life forms having different lengths of generation ages (single-celled life forms having very short life spans before reproducing the next generations, etc.). An ant that I kill, by accidentally stepping on it, may have had a long line of life going back through a billion billion generations of life forms. But it would go back to the same starting point of life that my long line of life goes back to as well. That is all just mind-boggling!

A very interesting aspect of these long lines of continuous life, is that through life forms that reproduce through sexuality (not all do, however, especially very early forms of life), the lines follow the female lines of lives, except for the very last leg of the line, which may be male or female. This is because the lines use the lives of mothers until they give birth to the next generation, and then the offspring’s lives take over the line, until if they are female, they give birth to their next generation, or if they are male, they join a different line to make a different female line conceive their next generation. So, for me, my long line of life goes back through my mother, then back through my mother’s mother, then back through my mother’s mother’s mother, etc. This female dominance of the our long lines of continuous life is different to the socially constructed notion of heredity being passed on mainly through the fathers’ lines; I wonder where that notion came from?

Another interesting thing is that I have 3 brothers and a sister, who share the vast majority (at least 99.9999%) of my unique long line of continuous life. They share everything up until when they were conceived. My 3 brothers and my sister all have children. I do not have any children, and in any case, I am a male, so my unique line of continuous life will finish when I die. It is through my siblings’ children that most of my long line of continuous life will ‘kind of’ continue. In fact, my cousins and their children will also continue most of my long line of continuous life too. However, my unique line of continuous life that I have had will finish when I die, as does every life form’s unique line of continuous life finish when they die, even if they are female. All life forms’ unique line of continuous life includes the unique life of that unique individual life form right at the end of each line.

The only way that every living thing on our planet doesn’t have a line of continuous life going back to a single unit, is if at least one other life form has been introduced to the planet from a meteor, or asteroid, or similar collision, at some point along the development of life. And obviously I’m introducing the possibility that within the rock of the meteorite, etc. might be living creatures (typically ‘simple’ life form such as viruses, or single-celled life forms), that could have flourished in conditions they met on Earth. Even under such a situation, the lines of continuous life of all living forms on our planet still go back a long, long way and should still be appreciated as being extraordinarily long lines of continuous life!