Humans - Like Nature's Snow Crystals?
(Top Posts - Philosophy (FREELOVER) - 011501)

Excerpt from a fascinating article on snow crystals follows.

For an interesting comparison to humans, think of ...

o snow crystals as an analogy to humans

o dust/initial formation of snow crystals as an
analogy to the egg/sperm - the genetic source - the
first cause from which each of us sprang

o temperature variation / environment which impacts
snow crystal formation / development as an analogy
to the degree to which humans are exposed to the
variants of external stimuli, including parentage,
religion, country, creed, education, natural forces,
etc.

o clouds as an analogy to the social/cultural groups
each of us is exposed to in our journey through life

- - -

Snow Crystal Science
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DyeHard/dyehard001213.html
Excerpt: ... Most snow crystals begin with a similar
design, a hexagonal prism made up of water molecules,
usually clustered around a speck of dust. But during
its brief lifespan, the prism at the center adds new
features, sometimes making the crystal look like a
flower, or a fern, or an indescribable maze of fingers
reaching outward from each of the six sides of the
hexagon.

How, Libbrecht wondered, could they have evolved in
so many different ways, each with a slightly different
form, all incredibly complex and beautiful?

Temperature Shapes Flakes - Experiments in his lab
yielded the answer, at least partly. It turns out that
snow crystals are highly temperature dependent, and
their rate of growth can vary 100 fold by a change
in temperature of just a few degrees, he says.

“This is quite a puzzle,” Libbrecht says. “I never
realized the growth rate was quite as dramatic as that,
and we don’t have a good explanation for why that is.”

As they blow about in a cloud, the crystals pass through
various temperature regimes. If it’s cold enough, their
arms grow very rapidly, and if it warms up a tad, the
arms are capped, spreading outward slightly, until the
next cold spell causes them to grow again.

Thus each snow crystal changes its structure over and
over as it drifts down toward our driveways, but what
we see outside our windows isn’t individual snow crystals,
which are nearly microscopic in size. As they descend,
the crystals reach warmer air and become “sticky,” the
professor says. Thus they glob together and form snow-
flakes.

The snowflakes, or their component parts — the snow
crystals — may look identical to us. But just as no
two human faces are exactly the same, there is something
a little different about every snow crystal that reaches
the ground, because each has gone through a different
growth process. Even the water molecules that make up
their basic prism may be different.

Even if two crystals had identical water molecules,
laid out in exactly the same way, the trip down through
the cloud would have subjected each to different growth
patterns. So the chances that two crystals would be
identical when they reach the ground are so low that
“the odds of it happening within the lifetime of the
universe is essentially zero,” Libbrecht says.

So each crystal is, in some way, different from all
the others. That’s astonishing, considering the fact
that there are so many of them. Libbrecht estimates
that each year the number of snow crystals forming
in the Earth’s atmosphere is around 10 to the 24th
power. That’s 1, followed by 24 zeros.

- - - end excerpt - - -

Billions of humans have come and gone and over six
billion are currently residing on or near the planet's
surface, unique and special yet totally a result of
natural processes, similar in many ways to nature's
snow crystals.

Does this diminish us in any way or shouldn't it,
instead, embolden us and excite us to know all we
can on our short journey / quick trip through the
clouds of fate/destiny, with so much to know and
so little time to know it ...

Unless, of course, science is able to come up with
significant and dramatic life extension modalities
(quite possible in the coming decades/centuries) -or-
there's something much more profound to a snow
crystal, to all energy/matter/space/time, than we can
even imagine ... natural ... predestined as is all ...
part of an incalculably vast, yet natural ______
[unknown, as of yet].

Some call that unknown God and give it attributes akin
to a human being with absolute power. Others call that
unknown 'unknown and natural' and seek to discover all
that we can know before we melt away and return from
whence we came or continue on to the 'unknown and
natural' of which we know not our ultimate destiny
and have but hope to ponder the possibility, however
remote, of a continued pleasant existence somewhere,
somehow, someway as of yet ... unknown.