Birds were singing in the trees, and my mind began to wander. There I was, a product of twentieth-century rationality, my faith requiring numbers and molecules rather than myths. Yet I was now confronted with mythological numbers relative to a molecule, in which I had to believe. Inside my body sitting there in the garden sun were 125 billion miles of DNA. I was wired to the hilt with DNA threads and until recently had known nothing about it. Was this astronomical number really just a “useless but amusing fact,”1 as some scientists would have it? Or did it indicate that the dimensions, at least, of our DNA are cosmic? Some biologists describe DNA as an “ancient high biotechnology,” containing “over a hundred trillion times as much information by volume as our most sophisticated information storage devices.” Could one still speak of a technology in these circumstances? Yes, because there is no other word to qualify this duplicable, information-storing molecule. DNA is only ten atoms wide and as such constitutes a sort of ultimate technology: It is organic and so miniaturized that it approaches the limits of material existence.2 Shamans, meanwhile, claim that the vital principle that animates all living creatures comes from the cosmos and is minded.
What do You think about The Cosmic Serpent (2010)?
