The Heat of the Moment

What’s that? The olfactory’s been activated! It’s as if “the laws of thermodynamics smell of their human origin”.  But what exactly do I mean by this? Simply put, our bodies are beautiful temples maintaining homeostatic equilibrium and imperfectly perfect machine-like efficiency. The maintenance of temperature, energy transference, and exceptional consciousness that humans exhibit is truly an interesting phenomenon; we stand out within this world. 

Are we humans truly just arranged by nature… are we as common as glucose or other 6-sided rings? We can only speculate that we are original – that no other species maintains a consciousness similar to humanity. But what makes this consciousness and this factory run so smoothly? One could make the case for heat. The breaking and formation of bonds all release energy, or heat, to then perpetuate more creation or transference of energy into a different pathway. This is the maintenance of life. If we couldn’t maintain our 98.6 F temperature, our lives would cease to exist. 10 degrees more than our homeostatic balance would fry us, and 10 degrees cooler would slowly shut our organs down. It’s a hell-of-a thing.

To adequately describe what a human IS, we cannot exclude how equilibrium inherently relies on thermal origins. Why does my skin, my breath, my very being emit heat all the time? Warmth surrounds us and provides us with a net of safety, for without this thermal capacity we would simply not BE. We can all observe each others warmth and its importance to our existence – and we are certainly not alone. We are together in this embrace of conserving energy.

The total energy of our entire body remains constant, shifting through countless energy transfers, forever being conserved over time. This is the First Law. The interesting questions lies in the futile analysis of this energy; can we trace it, can we track its path? To some extent, maybe we can. Empirically we follow metabolic pathways in this fashions, recording each reaction and step along the way. Really, humans wreak of thermodynamics in action. We are a shining example of how energy is occurring in nature, heating and equalizing each moment, brilliantly utilizing every organic situation to its advantage.