Authors Note: I was thinking about something like the planet Juxta for use in a book. I am intrigued by the idea of making reincarnation into a biological function and seeing where it would take me. Then I watched the Netflix series “Alien Worlds” and decided to make a post. If you know the authors of the series, please forward it for an episode in the next season.
Amoebae
In the planet Juxta’s primordial past, Amoeba begat amoeba and amoeba ate amoeba in a never-ending cycle of birth and life and death on the bipolar planet. In the burning season, when Juxta was at its short but scalding perihelion within a half astronomical unit of its sun, all the amoebae dove deep into the soil to escape from the oven-baked surface crusted like a burnt loaf of bread. The oceans boiled and filled the skies with a Venusian-like blanket of steam and clouds smothering the planet in its supersaturated embrace. The tidal forces of the nearby sun activated the interior and the planet reshaped itself with volcanoes and plate movements. Amoeba begat amoeba and amoeba ate amoeba in the depths of the ground of Juxta.
Juxta moved quickly in its orbit when close to the sun heeding Kepler’s law of equal area in equal time. As Juxta retreated from the sun into the recesses of its solar system, the skies poured back into the ocean during the flooding season, eroding and sculpting and shedding the heat of the burning season out into space. The amoebae emerged from their hiding in the dark polar corners of the spherical planet to move about Juxta’s reemerging oceans and rivers and lands. Amoeba begat amoeba and amoeba ate amoeba in the surging waters of the regenerating planet.
In the slushy season with the sun fading to dim light in the distance, the planet turned cool and snow formed first at its poles. The icy polar tentacles of each pole reached toward one another like the magnetic lines formed by iron filings in a dipolar magnetic field. The migration of the amoebas began. Amoeba begat amoeba and amoeba ate amoeba on the great migration running from the icy polar regions to the fading warmth of the temperate zones and on toward the tropical, equatorial belt.
In the icy season of aphelion, when the planet’s orbit reached over 30 A.U. from the sun, reducing its image to nothing more than a pinprick in the distance, Juxta turned into a giant snowball. Some amoeba took time out from the endless cycle of begetting and feasting, hibernating as icy crystals. The creatures that remained behind thrived when free of predators for a brief while and proliferated before entering a hibernation of sorts by dehydrating their cells and using an anti-freeze molecule to survive the long cold winter on the surface. Others begat and ate in the depths of the great ocean as all the mobile amoebae migrated to the fissures where the earth had ruptured and renewed during the tectonics of the burning season to survive the long cold winter. Tardigrades.
During the melting season came the great thaw. Juxta shook its snowy and icy coat showing small patches of growing earth that merged into larger patches like a molting Arctic creature piecemeal-shedding trading its white coat for a dark one during the summer. The thin belt of color at the equator grew to a double patty thick sandwich with polar ice buns and finally disappeared leaving a sparkling blue and brown planet. Amoebae migrated back to their warming poles and hibernating amoebae resurrected from their crystalline slumbers. Amoeba begat amoeba and amoeba ate amoeba on the great dispersion from the vented tropical regions to the once again temperate latitudes and ice-free poles.
During the dry season, the sun grew larger and Juxta warmed with each passing day. Snow-capped mountains lost their white peaks. Rivers and lakes dried. The amoebae sought out shade and shelter in North facing slopes and in deep waters and in caves. Amoeba begat amoeba and amoeba ate amoeba, but mostly ate, as they aggregated and fought to follow the vanishing waters deep into the aquifers and underground rivers and lakes of the polar regions. And so it went for eons. The year and the seasons repeated in a never-ending cycle of hot and cold, steam and water and ice, and birth and death.
Evolution
A billion years passed. And then another. During the Cambrian explosion of Juxta, amoebae and their kin learned to coalesce into aggregate organisms improving their chances of survival over their unallied adversaries, but the only way to survive the burning season was to decompose from their multi-cellular patterns back into their singular cellular selves and dive deep down into the earthen safety of the interior. Slime Molds
When the amoebae emerged from their singular cell sequestration during the flooding season, they would re-aggregate into their colonial selves. The amoebae learned to send chemical messages to other amoebae and those messages differentiated one group from another so that amoebae sorted themselves out into species of amoebae that cooperated and competed in a primeval-soup ecosystem of complex amoebal forms. Amoebal species learned to cooperate with other amoebal species forming more composite species with each colonial form learning to specialize in function like the organs of a complex organism. The patterns of the amoebae become something greater than the amoebae, themselves. An ecosystem and an evolution of cooperating and completing composite species evolved into ever more complex forms convergent with forms one might recognize on Earth. Lichens
The amoebal signaling message of an individual cell was passed from generation to generation. It grew sophisticated enough to remember the same single-celled creatures or their ancestors after the transition of the burning season to create and recreate individuals so they could disassemble and reassemble back into their former selves without chaos and formlessness. And so after each burning season, individuals reincarnated back into their own clones, transcending body and form and season and climate and the harshness of the heat of the burning season, although variation was always inevitable depending on the fortunes and misfortunes of each of its single-celled lives. During the cold and dim icy season, species learned to migrate to their ancestral underwater mounts like salmon returning to the creek of their birth and mostly for the same reasons, though certainly not to die. The emergent creatures engaged in a reproductive process at the level of the aggregated individuals. During sex, two compatible partners would completely dissociate into their amoebal constituents. Each and every amoeba in the pair would replicate. One set of the replicated amoebae would recombine with the partner’s set of replicated amoeba to form two new individuals with new combinations of their parent’s patterns and memories. The original set of individuals would reassemble into their original selves, the whole process as a strange form of cloning and sex passing on new mixes of pattern and meme to the fully grown offspring.
The composite amoebal brain learned to encode the patterns of ultra-long term memories in the replication molecules of the individual amoeba so the memory of patterns and the pattern of memories would be passed from one generation of the individual to the next. Memes and genes encoded together. Memories or fragments of memories would be passed from one generation to the next both surviving the amoebal isolation of the burning season when amoeba begat amoeba and the icy season when partners begat partners.
Culture and memory and generation and year became one and the same driving the evolution of Juxta forward through eon and era, playing out over time like a film of Juxta natural history viewed one frame at a time.
A Year
Life adapted to the bizarre seasons and climate and year of Juxta. Complex species, though more accurately described as recurring patterns of interactions between amoeba and other protists, emerged from the fitness functions of cooperation and competition.
After the scorching of the burning season, and as the clouds finished the worst of pouring themselves back into the oceans, the amoebae emerged from the single-celled safety of the deep ground of each pole, sending out cell-smell messages to find their kin and bodily neighbors, of their previous incarnation. As the torrents of rain and flood subsided, the surviving protists reassembled themselves into goo and then back into a facsimile of the creature it once was, filling in missing pieces with redundant cellular replications if necessary to re-instantiate itself, the whole becoming much more than the sum of its parts.
The creature looked about and others like it looked upon him, new yet not, in a new incarnation of itself. The creature found plentiful food in the other creatures it dominated, which had the misfortune of reassembling near its hungry and bellowing stomach. The creature hunted and foraged happily and successfully with its comrades, though even apex predators sometimes fall prey to disease, parasites, other predators, or just bad luck.
The weather turned cool. The creature and its clan undertook the mass migration from the poles to the equators always staying ahead of the worst of the weather. Snow began to fall at the poles and ice appeared on the surface of calm waters. The chill triggered instinctual memories and even distinct memories of past migrations in its previous incarnations. Mobile creatures of all types migrated from the poles toward the equator and from the lands to the sea.
As the long winter fell and the sun looked like nothing but a bright dot in the distance, the creature’s protists reorganized itself to form gills and webs and a bioluminescent organ used as both a lure for prey and a method of communication with the members of its clan like a lifecycle-confused amphibian. It entered the ocean and swam to the spot of its birth, migrating to underwater heat vents like a salmon returning to the spawning grounds of its birth, feeding and growing on the concentrations of life at the vent. Great Animal Migrations
The clan aggregated with other clans into an underwater city of aquaculture and society.
When the time was right, the creature sought out and competed for a compatible and willing mate. When the courtship succeeded and a partner was found, the pair engaged in something that we would call sex in the safety of private corners of an underwater nook but would not recognize as such. At the height of mutual orgasm, the constituent protists of each individual released the hold of one another dissolving into an amoebal solution. Each amoeba divided and replicated itself so the organism was at once itself and a clone. One copy of the clone intermingled with one of its partner’s copies, exchanging compatible protists in the process. When the moment of orgasm passed, the protists reassembled themselves such that four individuals now stood where there were once two, two identical as the original and two mixed into something new. The new individuals held mixed memories and features of the two originals after the biological exchange of form and culture.
You may find it difficult to call a full-grown, mentally ready creature your child, but the new mixes would need time to learn their new bodies and adapt to their new memories, having only a half-intimacy of both their parents that could prove both enlightening and uncomfortable to all concerned.
When the smells of the long winter were replaced by the smells of the thawing waters, and the creatures of all species began the reverse migration, a dispersal back to the land and then outward to the poles following the thaw both north and south, the creature and its clan swam back to the land, surrendered their aquatic forms, and began the long walk back to the pole following the warming weather.
When the land dried and the oceans shrank into the clouds and the creatures had long resettled into their polar homes, the creature dissolved itself into a pile of goo which then disbanded, its constituent protists diving deep into the earth as single-celled creatures struggling to survive and thrive to start anew in the next generation.
Authors Addendum: Do you think it would make a good episode? A good backdrop for a book? Let me know. author.mike.angel@gmail.com.