Dying is a relatively simple process. All it takes is for one of your body's systems to stop working, and you're gone. Or even if just one vital part of one of those breaks down, goodbye. In fact, scientists say that there are at least 8000 different things that can kill us. But keeping you alive for the next 24 hours; that's a totally different story. It is incredibly difficult and unbelievably complex and complicated. Just a minuscule bit of what it takes to keep you going for that period of time: your lungs have to breathe in and exhale 43,000 times (30 per minute); that's 4,800 gallons of air. Your heart has to pump blood to every part of your body 60,000 times (70 per minute. In one lifetime, that's enough liquid to fill two tanker ships in the harbor). Your kidneys must clean up and filter at least 50 gallons of blood (200 quarts). Your liver has to produce thousands of hormones, proteins, glucose, glycogen, and many other nutrients and chemicals your body needs.
It would take a brain surgeon days to write down what your brain must do non-stop (even when sound asleep). Your magnificent computer brain has 400,000 neurons that have trillions upon trillions of connections. It has to give and receive electronic instructions to every single part of your body. Some scientists believe it is in electronic communication with all our trillion cells. Cells have no brains yet show great intelligence in their workings. And speaking of computer memory, one cubic millimeter can record all the movies that have ever been made. How's that for a supercomputer chip? The list of what all the other body parts do would fill an encyclopedia. And if that wasn't enough, trillions upon trillions of microscopic bacterial organisms are in your 40-foot-long digestive tract, doing all sorts of things needed to keep you alive. We recently started seeing books and articles in all the magazines about your "gut bacteria" (your microbiome) as if it was something new. (We have 3 pounds of these organisms working for us.) Having this knowledge, any sane person can see, understand, and believe that we are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made. (And this is the greatest understatement ever made.) It should be followed by a dozen descriptive adjectives such as awesome and majestic. Now for that big question, what is life? No one can define it, and an even bigger question is, what is the force that causes all these trillions of actions to keep seven billion of us alive?
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It would take a brain surgeon days to write down what your brain must do non-stop (even when sound asleep). Your magnificent computer brain has 400,000 neurons that have trillions upon trillions of connections. It has to give and receive electronic instructions to every single part of your body. Some scientists believe it is in electronic communication with all our trillion cells. Cells have no brains yet show great intelligence in their workings. And speaking of computer memory, one cubic millimeter can record all the movies that have ever been made. How's that for a supercomputer chip? The list of what all the other body parts do would fill an encyclopedia. And if that wasn't enough, trillions upon trillions of microscopic bacterial organisms are in your 40-foot-long digestive tract, doing all sorts of things needed to keep you alive. We recently started seeing books and articles in all the magazines about your "gut bacteria" (your microbiome) as if it was something new. (We have 3 pounds of these organisms working for us.) Having this knowledge, any sane person can see, understand, and believe that we are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made. (And this is the greatest understatement ever made.) It should be followed by a dozen descriptive adjectives such as awesome and majestic. Now for that big question, what is life? No one can define it, and an even bigger question is, what is the force that causes all these trillions of actions to keep seven billion of us alive?
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