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Just nine percent of our body is us. Ninety one percent is microbes. We are a small minority in our own bodies. We are walking, talking colonies of microbial life, all working together to form us.
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The TSA has figured out how prevent anybody else from lighting their thighs on fire while in flight: they're prohibiting people from having anything in their laps or moving their seats during the last hour of flight. Because none of us can envision how to circumvent *that* clever bit of security.
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Good to know that every bored child with a full bladder will now be branded an international terrorist. That’ll keep the watch lists humming….
The 91% figure is potentially misleading. 9% of our bodies are ‘us’ by cell count – not by total mass. The total mass of bacteria in a typical adult human body amounts to perhaps half a gallon in total volume. To say that we are a minority in cell count is no more meaningful than pointing out that one person is a single consciousness outnumbered 12 to 1 by the dozen lice he may carry on his head.
I actually puzzled through those two logical approaches that before I wrote it, and deliberately described it in terms of numbers, not mass. What it came down to for me is that I’m not sure what makes the size of a cell more meaningful than the number of when grouped—if a bigger cell is more important than a little one, I don’t know about that. As a metaphor, I don’t get twice as many rights as a 3’2″ person. (Unless that 3’2″ is a child. :)
I’ll just wait till someone comes along and states we are nothing more then slave masters and have subjugated those microbes, who have rights that we humans are abusing
And as long as we have pre-school and kindergarten we have all the microbes factories we will ever need.;)