How to Create a Pre-Compressed Spring: Life as Pre-given Energy
While contemplating the structure of living organisms, I noticed that they seem to embody stored energy.
What I’d like to focus on is not just the energy stored like nutrients, ready to be used at any time. Instead, it’s the dynamic energies such as the potential energy stored in the elastic parts that support the body’s structure and the kinetic energy continuously changing within mechanisms that constantly maintain the organism.
These energies aren’t just stored reserves; they consistently support and power the life of an organism. They are indispensable energies that cannot be lacked at any moment. From birth, organisms embody these energies and increase them as they grow.
This continuous need for energy implies that organisms are born with these energies intact. Comparing this to springs, it resembles creating a spring that is compressed, storing potential energy, or a spring that vibrates with kinetic energy.
In this article, using these insights, we’ll reexamine life from the perspective of energy by exploring how to create compressed and vibrating springs.
Compressed and Vibrating Springs
Imagine a coiled spring that stores energy when compressed. To create such a spring, merely shaping metal into a coil won’t suffice. After shaping, you must compress it from both ends.
If you only recognized the shape and composition of a compressed spring, interpreting it as just a short coiled metal, what would that imply? Even if you solidify metal into the same shape, it won’t store energy. While they might look identical and be made of the same material, a compressed spring and a short spring have distinct characteristics.
Similarly, understanding an object’s shape and composition doesn’t always allow for a proper grasp of its properties.
The same goes for a vibrating spring. If you take a picture of a spring mid-vibration and recreate the shape in metal, it won’t vibrate.
Both spring examples involve energy. The compressed spring has potential energy due to its elasticity, while the vibrating spring has kinetic energy. Mimicking the shape and materials won’t replicate their properties because energy reproduction is absent.
Heat and electromagnetic waves are forms of energy, as are potential energy and chemical energy. Beyond visible shapes and analyzable components, it’s crucial to perceive things from an energy perspective. Otherwise, you won’t truly understand or reproduce the subject.
Gathering cellular components and assembling them won’t resurrect life. It might be akin to assembling countless springs. You need to compress or move each spring correctly, reproducing its energy state.
Life is not just an assembly of parts but also about the state of energy within.
Pre-given Energy
A significant trait of life viewed from an energy perspective is that once devoid of energy, it cannot be revived by merely supplying energy. Compared to robots or computers that start working when connected to power, living organisms differ vastly.
This is analogous to the fact that assembling parts won’t resurrect life. The same can be said from an energy perspective.
If supplying energy afterward isn’t effective, how do organisms acquire initial energy?
One possibility is that they are born while being supplied with energy. Apart from the energy required to shape an organism’s body, as the body forms, energy accumulates simultaneously.
We’ll call this foundational energy as “pre-given energy”. With pre-existing, pre-given energy, there’s no need to try reviving life by supplying energy later.
Using the spring analogy, it’s like creating a spring already compressed rather than compressing it after it’s made. For a vibrating spring, it would mean creating a spring that’s already vibrating.
In this manner, the process of forming while possessing pre-given energy is essential for life.
How to Create a Shape with Pre-given Potential Energy
To directly create a compressed spring, there needs to be a frame-like structure in place beforehand to keep the spring compressed.
By placing the spring between this frame and gradually extending it, it seems possible to create a compressed spring.
The way multicellular organisms have an outer skin and grow by cell division within that skin seems similar to this compressed spring creation process. The innermost rings of a tree are the youngest.
In the microscopic world, the cell membrane comes to mind as the equivalent of a frame. One can also view it as the cell membrane forming first, followed by the growth of intracellular structures within it. From this perspective, the cell membrane might not just serve as a barrier to the outside world, but may also play a role in creating objects inside that have potential energy due to their elasticity.
Inside the cell membrane, a fibrous structure called the cytoskeleton is spread out. As the fibers of the cytoskeleton grow after cell division, they will accumulate potential energy while being compressed by the cell membrane. Furthermore, the cell membrane itself has elasticity, so it stores potential energy as it is pushed out.
In multicellular organisms like trees, as they grow by cell division between the hard bark and inner wood, the potential energy of the cytoskeleton and that of the cell membrane or cell wall balance out, accumulating energy overall.
This mechanism neatly explains how the trunk of a tree grows while pushing out hard bark, or how plants grow by pushing through gaps in hard concrete. If you feel a sense of vigor in the growth of plants, there’s likely a mechanism storing potential energy through elasticity at play.
Furthermore, the fact that animals can maintain shape in parts of their bodies not directly supported by bones is probably due to the balance of potential energy from cell elasticity.
How to Create a Mechanism with Pre-given Kinetic Energy
Next, let’s think about how to create a vibrating spring. Creating something that is already vibrating seems challenging at first glance.
To achieve this, you would need a spring that is already vibrating. For example, if you can split the vibrating core of that spring vertically into two without stopping the vibration, you’ll have two vibrating, thinner springs.
If you can then grow these springs back to their original thickness while keeping them vibrating, you would effectively have created a new vibrating spring.
This might be difficult to achieve with a single spring in reality. However, if you think of an object with kinetic energy as being composed of multiple parts, this can be seen as a system’s redundancy.
Consider two springs, A and B, connected in series. Both types of springs vibrate while interacting with each other. In reality, A consists of two parallel springs, A1 and A2, both vibrating identically. B is the same, being a bundle of B1 and B2, both vibrating identically.
A and B can be said to be doubled.
From here, if A and B split and A1 gets connected with B1, and A2 gets connected with B2, you end up with two identical vibrating spring systems.
After that, if a spring A3 is added parallel to A1, and a spring B3 is added to B1, you’ll have a system identical to the original doubled springs. If A2 and B2 are similarly doubled, you would have effectively copied the vibrating set of springs.
This process can be carried out gradually without stopping the springs’ vibration. This is the mechanism for replicatively creating a system with kinetic energy.
Adding another spring C in series, or adding a spring D1 parallel to A1 when doubling, can change the structure while maintaining kinetic energy. This enables the creation of new systems with kinetic energy.
In biology, this is analogous to the mechanisms of DNA and its surrounding transcription and translation into proteins. All these mechanisms, which are the main axis of cellular activity, are redundant, and during cell division, they’re distributed to two cells. This allows cells to replicate without ever stopping, maintaining their state of kinetic energy.
Furthermore, when expressing new traits or functions due to mating or mutations, the pre-given kinetic energy can be maintained while progressing.
Energy Balance of Life
If we consider an organism as a collection of components and the way energy exists within those components, we can deliberately ignore the components and look at it solely from the perspective of energy. Of course, there are aspects of an organism that can’t be seen just by the flow of energy alone, so it’s impossible to explain everything solely from the energy aspect. However, by narrowing our perspective, new facets should become apparent.
When viewing an organism from an energy perspective, it can be thought of in terms of its relationship with the external world and its internal state. Additionally, there’s also a perspective that considers the transitions of energy that encompass both the external and internal realms.
First, let’s focus on the relationship with the external world.
Organisms need to absorb energy from the external environment in some form. The absorbed energy is used for life activities and then released back into the environment.
In the long term, as an organism grows from birth, it accumulates the energy it absorbs. Then, during aging and eventual disappearance, the stored energy is released until it ultimately becomes zero.
In the short term, organisms acquire energy and temporarily store it within their bodies. They use this stored energy for basic metabolism and as capital for the next energy acquisition. If the acquired energy is greater than what was used for basic metabolism and energy acquisition, there will be an energy surplus.
This surplus energy will be stored in the body if not used. If not stored, the energy is used for purposes other than those essential for life maintenance, such as “play.”
Uses of Energy
Apart from acquiring energy, organisms use energy to heal injuries and fatigue, and to maintain respiration and body temperature. They also grow their bodies using potential and kinetic energy. This can be described as the application of energy to the internal state.
The remaining energy may be used, for instance, to make the living environment more comfortable or to defend territory. If there’s still an excess, it’s used for play. Play might simply be for satisfying emotions, or it could serve a purpose like discovering or learning something new. For social creatures, it might also foster camaraderie and teamwork.
Thus, from the energy perspective, when observing an organism’s external and internal aspects, it’s clear that they use a portion of their stored energy to acquire even more energy. Typically, organisms require the capability to acquire more energy than what’s essential for survival and energy acquisition. Otherwise, they would suffer an energy deficit and wouldn’t survive.
Consequently, life forms always have a mechanism to use small amounts of energy to acquire larger amounts, and they should live within an environment that allows for this. In terms of energy balance, life can be described as having a system that can consistently keep the energy balance in the positive.
Organisms not only aim to keep their energy balance at zero but use energy to grow their bodies and create new life. In this process, they accumulate not only stored energy but also potential and kinetic energy to support the body’s static structure and its various movements and vibrations.
In Conclusion
I used the example of a compressed spring’s potential energy and a vibrating spring’s kinetic energy, but in this article, we’ve contemplated the biological characteristic of building a body that encompasses both static and dynamic energy.
While DNA replication is often thought of as the key to life multiplication, DNA is just one component.
As reiterated in this article, even if components are assembled, it doesn’t mean the organism is revived. Just because DNA can replicate doesn’t mean life can be copied. Unless both the pre-given static and dynamic energy states are involved in the generation or replication, life cannot multiply.
I believe this applies even before the appearance of cells with DNA and cellular membranes, tracing back to the origins of life.
Even when cells evolved from precursors, they must have adhered to this principle or they wouldn’t have emerged as living entities. Going even further back, when only inorganic materials existed on Earth, chemical substances underwent chemical evolution, and I believe the same principle applied. The mechanism to encapsulate energy should have evolved within the process of chemical evolution.
Otherwise, we would need to assume the existence of chemical robots, which upon being powered, would eventually evolve into living beings. Is there really such a robot made of chemicals?
I’m skeptical of that assumption. I believe that from the very beginning, chemical evolution that initiated life had a direct mechanism to produce entities containing pre-given energy like compressed or vibrating springs. Within the long chain of this mechanism, chemical evolution proceeded without interrupting the encapsulation of the pre-given energy, leading to the birth of cells.
