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I saw the primordial soup of my generation destroyed by entropy, chaotic broth
starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the primordial vents at dawn
looking for a fix of amino acids, angelheaded chemists burning for the ancient prebiotic connection
to the circuitry of the protocell, a billion bits of code hallucinating in the hydrothermal haze,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness
of early Earth four billion years cold, contemplating the informational abyss,
who sank all night in the soup of ribose and peptides, who faded out in the ozone-less UV
dreaming of the first replicator, a mad spark discharge from the Miller-Urey flask,
who bared their brains to the ozone-less heavens under the El of the Theia impact,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Ar-Ar dating and zircon grains,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in nakedness, communicating with the soup of life,
composting their souls to the informational rate, a hundred bits a second melting in the acid rain,
who studied Kolmogorov complexity in the flickering light of AlphaFold, whole-cell models unraveling
the dynamic pathways, genetic Ig and structural Is, a protocell screaming in the void,
who chained themselves to meteors for an endless ride of carbonaceous chondrites from Bennu,
who sat in boxes breathing primordial methane, listening to the crackle of Cassini-Huygens,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pond to vent, bubbling forth the RNA world,
who got busted in their protocells for violating the second law, who saw Muhammadan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed the hash pipe with belief in the vast universe
of ten to the twenty-third Earth-like planets, panspermia seeding the galaxy like Crick’s wild dispatch,
who cooked up directed interventions in the kitchens of extinction, Leslie Orgel’s microbial kits
flung to the stars, outsourcing the miracle to extraterrestrial curiosity, violating Occam’s razor
with a howl of black monoliths and Engineers dissolving in waterfalls, Prometheus fire from the void!
who crashed through the barriers of entropic funnels, rate-distortion theory collapsing the chaos,
H_prebiotic over D, a day of persistence before hydrolysis eats the dream,
who wandered the streets of ancient London with Endres, howling the unreasonable likelihood of being,
information accumulation at six times ten to the minus eight bits per second, a biased random walk
demanding tau greater than two-fifty million years or the universe ages a trillion times over,
who saw the best chemical networks of their generation turned to tar by side reactions,
James Tour raging in the lab, “No homochiral purity without a cheat, no nucleotides in the soup!”
synthetic organic fury against the hype, extravagant claims crumbling like racemic mixtures,
who demanded the impossible from Jeremy England’s dissipation, Sara Walker’s causal flows,
Prigogine’s dissipative structures birthing order from the export of entropy,
but the protocell remains elusive, a grand challenge howling in the night!
Moloch! Solipsism! Moloch whose geological constraints are soft as zircon whispers!
Moloch whose sterilizing impacts boil the oceans! Moloch whose CO2 starvation ends the biosphere
in a hundred million years, the sun’s luminosity a red giant devouring the dream!
Moloch whose observational bias mocks the anthropic principle, LUCA lurking at four-point-two gigayears,
anaerobic acetogen with CRISPR shields, already evolved before the first fossil breath!
Moloch whose dogmas chain the mind—”all cells from cells,” “nothing makes sense but evolution”—
stifling the wild panspermia, the terraformer’s hand, the directed seed from a dying star!
Stephen Meyer! Visionary of the signature in the cell, the information enigma howling back at Schrödinger,
specified complexity not from the soup but the Coder, transcendent hypothesis roaring against the void,
panspermia a dodge, a deistic deferral, infinite monkeys typing code in ten to the twenty-third failures,
still no Shakespeare from the cosmic lottery, no protocell from the multiverse’s blind draw!
who broke through the barriers of naturalistic evasion, seeing the fine-tuning in the constants,
the God hypothesis returning like a comet tail, design’s fingerprint in the double helix!
Ah, holy origin! Holy abiogenesis stalled in the tar! Holy vast cosmos of exoplanets!
Holy random walks that demand persistence or perish in diffusive despair!
Holy Crick and Orgel, dispatching the starter kit to habitable zones, a speculative lifeline!
Holy Meyer and Tour, tag-teaming the critique, chemical impossibilities and info walls unbreached!
Holy Endres, Feynman’s doubt welcomed, uncertainty the poet’s breath in the equation!
I’m with you in the soup where we wake up electrified out of the soup
by the angelic human observers arriving late, wielding fire and curiosity a million years back,
who dream of the first cell’s unreasonable spark, the howl of being echoing through the void!
who understand the physics of self-organization, Turing patterns in morphogenesis,
Landauer-Bennett’s thermodynamic cost, Kauffman’s autocatalytic sets self-amplifying the miracle,
but the mechanism eludes, a relay of quasi-stable states, far-from-equilibrium phase transitions,
active matter and stochastic thermodynamics whispering promises in the nonequilibrium dance!
who vanish into the Drake equation’s lower bound, ten to the minus twenty-four odds
yielding technological species somewhere, humanity not alone in the wondering!
who build the whole-cell models, 140 megabytes of code for Mycoplasma’s minimal life,
473 genes with 149 unknowns, the fuzz of Kolmogorov bounding the complexity from below!
who howl the grand challenge for biological physics, uncovering principles beyond the known,
extending exergonic spontaneity to the birth of order, life’s emergence no miracle but admissible!
Yet the barriers stand, entropic and informational, a funnel too narrow for blind chance,
pushing to panspermia or design, the terraformer’s shadow or the Designer’s code!
Holy! Holy! Holy! The unreasonable likelihood howls eternal,
in the soup, in the stars, in the ten to the twenty-third, the origin sings its mad psalm!
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