Comte de Sats Germain on Nostr: "Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects." - Lourens Baas Becking ^ an ...
"Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects."
- Lourens Baas Becking
^ an apparently famous saying in microbiology, which I just learned. I feel like this Wikipedia page needs some work, but here's the dude :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lourens_Baas_BeckingFound this while researching bacteria called "thiomargarita." Thiomargarita is enormous - easily visible to the naked eye. Its basically a plant, but uses H2S (how make subscripts on phone?) as its energy source instead of light. They live in swampy places, where there's lots of sulfur.
**_thiomargarita_**
Literally "sulfur pearls" in Greek.
Those bright spots are pure sulfur, left over after using the hydrogens in H2S.
So the thing I was wondering was - how do they find the sulfur? There's not that much sulfur laying around that's not in rocks. The answer is... Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects.
This leads me to a new thought : if no one hears the tree fall, did it even fall? But for bacteria - if bacteria are unobserved, do they exist in a wave state or a particle state? Could it be that the microscopic world is actually an information field, and the presence of an energy gradient causes the information to become physical? But only if the field had "learned" the requisite information - has the form of a thiomargarita evolved, to be remembered back into the world wherever sulfur is abundant?
Its probably untestable. For now, Occam's razor dictates materiality.
Published at
2026-10-07 20:52:19 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "\"Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects.\"\n- Lourens Baas Becking\n\n^ an apparently famous saying in microbiology, which I just learned. I feel like this Wikipedia page needs some work, but here's the dude :\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lourens_Baas_Becking\n\nFound this while researching bacteria called \"thiomargarita.\" Thiomargarita is enormous - easily visible to the naked eye. Its basically a plant, but uses H2S (how make subscripts on phone?) as its energy source instead of light. They live in swampy places, where there's lots of sulfur.\n\nhttps://npub12h6h8dj3ale4rk6hkpsp6gcz9kx9xtucyhd3pftn86lnn0j25gdsa9qpsf.blossom.band/df0bc980800f32ae27f6add559eeb658d91b63be14c9597b56284ff867587afd.jpg\n\n**_thiomargarita_**\nLiterally \"sulfur pearls\" in Greek.\nThose bright spots are pure sulfur, left over after using the hydrogens in H2S.\n\nSo the thing I was wondering was - how do they find the sulfur? There's not that much sulfur laying around that's not in rocks. The answer is... Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects.\n\nThis leads me to a new thought : if no one hears the tree fall, did it even fall? But for bacteria - if bacteria are unobserved, do they exist in a wave state or a particle state? Could it be that the microscopic world is actually an information field, and the presence of an energy gradient causes the information to become physical? But only if the field had \"learned\" the requisite information - has the form of a thiomargarita evolved, to be remembered back into the world wherever sulfur is abundant?\n\nIts probably untestable. For now, Occam's razor dictates materiality.",
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