āX bodily fluid is just filtered blood!ā buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).
āOkay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicatedā well buddy, thatās because your blood is imitation seawater. See? Itās very simple.
Blood is what now?
Itās imitation seawater what part is confusing
#are you telling me#humans are just sentient aquariums?Ā
Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.
Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.
Thank you thatāsā¦very disturbing
Itās not my fault youāre human.
Ok but āItās not my fault youāre human.ā Is the best comeback ever.
You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.
#/blood is imitation seawater/ is the part thatās confusingĀ
Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. āWow,ā you think, metaphorically, āit sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me thatās the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I donāt explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.ā
āWait a minute,ā you say a couple of generations later, because youāre not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, āinstead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the worldās water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I donāt, I dump back into the outside water! Iām a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process thatās a GENIUS!ā
āWow,ā you think a great many generations later, ābeing able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big Iām getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.ā
At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehtyāer fish, butā¦ look, Iām trying to keep things simple here.) āWhat the FUCK,ā you think. āMy inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I canāt have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.ā At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesnāt get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)
You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. āItās a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,ā you think. āIf I wasnāt carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?ā As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that itās a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isnāt specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.
And thatās what a human is!
Well, thereās another few steps, of course.
Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.
A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyoneās a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,
and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: āmy internal ocean is so good-ā
āBullshit,ā said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)
āMy internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,ā you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, āthat for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-ā
āOh, ANYONE can lay an egg,ā yodel the fish, and the ray adds: āontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!ā
And youāre like, āyeah no, itās an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically Iām going to take some cells and brew them up-ā
āLike an egg.ā
āLike an egg. An egg but internally.ā
āYeah,ā said the viviparous reptile, āyeah, like, that can work really well. Iāve always said itās the highest test of oneās chemical know-how. Itās a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.ā
āIām gonna do it on purpose forever,ā you said. āThe highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. Itās gonna be my thing.ā
āIām with you,ā said a viviparous fish, stoutly. āRepresentation.ā
You kindly donāt point out, once again, that youāre planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5ā¢ solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.
āItās solid,ā says the coelacanth.
āBut is it metal?ā says the deep-vent organism.
āOh, itās metal. I will feed the young,ā you say, magnificently, āon an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-ā
Everyone waits.
āWill be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.ā
Everyone looks uncomfortable.
āBut,ā a hagfish says carefully, ādonāt you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?ā
You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.
The outrage that follows includes questions like āis this some furry shit?ā And: āmilk has WATER in it?ā
And you won the bet. āMy inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.ā
That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the worldās children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.
