In the beginning it was the ice

  from the book "Peoples, Drugs and Serpents"

Danilo Anton

Context I

"It started to take shape ... a spiritual being composed of wind, waves and rains, whose essence was movement and whose body was that of the snake. This snake lived in heaven, and his presence was manifested everywhere ... in tornadoes, in the shapes of the clouds and the winds. In the labyrinthine sheets of rain and streams ...

Sometimes this meandering genius of heaven fell o the earth throwing tiny models himself with the rain. Old little snakes that they slipped into the cracks of the earth and woke up the sleeping souls ^"1   .

Before she fell at high speed into the aqueous blue belly of that world, she had spent much time asleep in the ice, protected by a massive gray rock and dust covering.

It is difficult to know how much time elapsed since she left her ancient world on the other side of these stellar and gaseous worlds. The consciousness of time requires special complexity, at least within this stellar bulge in which she was traveling,

In their old home there were other beings like her, elongated spiral of life nurtured by oceans and different, very old, very distant lakes.

Maybe she was not alone. Probably with her came also hundreds, thousands, millions of sisters also locked in their icy crusts.

In its elongated body he brought all the necessary information to reconstruct herself, to create new daughters replicated from the old codes.

When the rain stopped and rock particles settled within the roaring waves of the great sea, she realized that she had arrived. The crust cracked and the ice melted. She was alive and well in her new home.

This new blue world was unknown, but it seemed as hospitable as her own.

Some, perhaps many of her sisters had also fallen there. They also were looking unhurried, the necessary heat, the lights, the food for their growth and replication.

After a while, they, the tiny celestial serpents, had spread throughout all the waters of the planet, oceans, the clouds, rivers, lakes, and dew. 

Gradually the liquid veins in the depths of the earth came to be populated by a multitude of tiny creatures. Mothers and daughters, many, recreating the ancient codes to generate another sphere of life in space.

Our small progenitors

Our small progenitors brought the life designs in their long and twisted spirals.

They could reproduce millions of copies almost identical and only transmit forward those stronger, more efficient, more beneficial features. ²  

Some millions years later they managed to harness the energy of the star system where the planet was orbiting to build their own bodies and to use the atmospheric gases as the basic cp,´pmemts pf their living matter.

Often the tiny organisms came together to improve their adaptation to the environment. They formed numerous partnerships in which each adopted a particular function. Protected in the crowd they managed to help each other in the difficult task of survival.

Each generation recorded the experience of success and failure. Codes became rich in new information about the blue planet and they were learning and passing on what they learned.

Gradually they occupied all the planetary liquid spaces from the high clouds to the hot water in the cracks of the rocks.

And the planet began to live differently.

They seemed to have a strategy, and perhaps they had one, embedded in ancient inherited millions of instructions from other worlds.

Through their metabolism they changed the gases in the atmosphere, continuing to build their bodies with the help of the central stellar light or other sources of energy from the depths.

Thanks to these changes they managed to keep the temperature of the air and waters relatively stable.

As the central star, which later was going to be called “the sun”, gradually warmed, they created a global system, allowing the cooling of the atmosphere, keeping it within appropriate limits for life. In the meanwhile they developed new systems to promote learning and improve future adaptations. 

There were now thousands or millions of copies almost identical which became divided into two complementary halves.

These two halves joined in different ways to ensure the transmission of traits and genetic changes. In that way it was possible to give rise to more complex organisms

One of these halves, called “female” was devoted to gestate eggs and produce new offspring, and the other, the male counterpart was dedicated to cooperate in various ways for their formation and growth. In this manner many variants were emerging.

Some species grew to gigantic sizes, formed for associations of billion microorganisms in their aqueous spiral wraps, while others were kept separate, as in the old days.

Most living associations continued floating or swimming at all levels of seas and lakes, some groups tried to get out of the water and dragged through the dry earth with their fluid bags in tow.

They also developed roots that grew into the soil to absorb moisture and raised their leaves skyward for light and the precious air gases.

These complex associations where trillions of tiny snakes, grouped, grew and died, replicated in increasing number and in each generation they learned many things which were transmitting to the next.

The whole planet was alive, beating to the rhythm of new life attempts and explorations.

Life vehicles

Besides stars and planets, the universe is populated by countless tiny beings that act as carriers of life in space and time.

Usually they travel far from stars, traversing the huge cold and dark distances.

Some of them, the smallest ones, remain frozen hundreds of millions of years without anything to disturb their long sidereal winter.

Others, the largest ones, have enough mass to generate some heat from radioactive minerals and compounds.

In these larger heavenly bodies interior ice can melt forming underground warm seas. These are probably the most common scenarios of life in the cosmos.

Bacteria and other tiny organisms survive, reproduce and evolve in these environments, using the limited energy available. The solar system contains millions, perhaps billions of such bodies. A lot of them are very far from the Sun, beyond the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.

Some are closer to the center, in warmer regions, and occasionally come so close to their star that ice can vaporize and be ejected in the form of gas and dust.

These bodies, which often show dramatically in the earth night skies are called "comets".

Some astronomers, increasingly believe that comets and their relatives in the dark and cold remoteness, are carriers of life forms whose characteristics are difficult to imagine. Maybe some of them behave like real organisms with their own "metabolism" and history of individual and unique life.

According to Chandra Wickramansinghe, Fred Hoyle and other researchers, life has been a common phenomenon in the universe long ago, almost from the beginning (if there was a beginning), spreading through space onboard of tiny comets.

In that way spatial “seeds” came to Earth in the remote origins, several billion years ago.  At later times they kept coming, bringing new genetic material throughout the geological history of the planet.

For many years there were big and small ice blocks enriching the atmosphere bringing water and other compounds (nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, etc.).

Thus, gradually, in that way, the primordial seas were formed, they were filled with water and created the mixture of gases we call 'air'. 

Gases emanating from the planetary interior contributed to form this enriched atmosphere through a degassing process that still continues. These gaseous emissions were primarily nitrogen and methane. The nitrogen is still present mainly in the atmosphere, and methane oxidation processes enriched the surface of carbon dioxide and water.