philosophycorner: Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy? Why life is constrained to be about t
Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
Why life is constrained to be about the sizes we see on Earth.
By Gregory Laughlin
The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the tiny 10-19 meter scale that characterizes quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 1026 meters away. In these 45 possible orders of magnitude, life, as far as we know it, is confined to a relatively tiny bracket of just over nine orders of magnitude, roughly in the middle of the universal range: Bacteria and viruses can measure less than a micron, or 10-6 meters, and the height of the largest trees reaches roughly 100 meters. The honey fungus that lives under the Blue Mountains in Oregon, and is arguably a single living organism, is about 4 kilometers across. When it comes to known sentient life, the range in scale is even smaller, at about three orders of magnitude.
Could things be any different?
Sat, 04 Feb 2017 18:00:32
