What is this thing called the life cycle?

Today I wanted to talk a little bit about chemistry and biology.

In one of my articles the other day, I analyzed in my own way why God did not develop life on silicon.

As you know, life is based on carbon. However, silicon is an element that can make four connections just like carbon. So if desired, the life cycle could have been established with silicon as well.

Today, another question came to my mind.

Plants!

Plants are also a life form. 

What is their main difference from other living things?

While all members of the animal kingdom, including us humans, produce life energy by burning carbon with the help of oxygen, plants get their life energy from the sun. 

The sun produces this energy from hydrogen, which it uses as fuel.

Plants provide carbon, which is the source of life energy for other living things. 

They do the opposite of the chemical reaction that other living things use to produce energy by combining carbon with oxygen, that is, by burning carbon; they incorporate the carbon in the carbon dioxide they take from the air and release oxygen into the air through photosynthesis. 

We can live by consuming carbon from the plant itself and oxygen from breathing it in.

In simple terms, this cycle is a summary of the life cycle on earth. 

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Plants decompose the carbon in carbon dioxide and grow on the carbon they obtain, they release oxygen into the air (in seas and lakes, or into the water in rivers), and other living things obtain life energy by burning the carbon they obtain from whatever sources they can find, either from the air or, for aquatic life, from the oxygen they take from the water.

In this way, the cycle of life has been going on for millions of years.

I think everything up to this point has been clear to everyone in simple terms.

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Life in the natural world is not that simple. 

At least chemically, life requires many other elements besides hydrogen, oxygen and carbon.

For example, an essential element for plants is nitrogen!

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Nitrogen is actually abundant in the air in free form. Almost 80% of the air is made up of nitrogen gas.

And here we come to the question I wrote about at the beginning!

If there is so much nitrogen in the air, do plants obtain nitrogen from the air like carbon?

Unfortunately, no!

When God created plants, He made a system to take carbon dioxide from the air and decompose it through photosynthesis, but He either didn't think of this for nitrogen or He thought of something else.

Plants obtain the nitrogen they need from the soil through their roots.  Moreover, they cannot use nitrogen in its free form.

Nitrates, the compounds of nitrogen with hydrogen, are the compounds that plants need.

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They use water to transport nitrogen compounds to their cells.

While blood circulates in our veins to remove carbon dioxide, which is the burnt form of the carbon burnt in our cells, and to carry the oxygen and carbon we need to the cells, in plants this transportation is carried out by water. As you know, the cells that do this transportation in the blood are red blood cells, iron-containing cells.

But this is plants for now, so I won't go into the details of this process.

Yes, I mentioned that in plants it is water that carries nitrate compounds to the cells.

And plants don't need a heart to pump water into their cells. The water is spontaneously transported by adhesion and cohesion forces in the capillaries inside the plant to the cells. 

It carries the nitrogen compounds (nitrates) that the plant needs as a solution.

Again, I hope this process, which I am trying to explain in a very simple way, is understood.

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So let's ask one more question!

We said nitrogen is present in the air, but is it also present in the soil?

Yes, it is also present in the soil as nitrate compounds, that is, in compound form. 

However, it does not exist in the soil itself, it is mixed into the soil afterwards, and not that much.

More precisely, nitrates enter the soil through living things.

We mix nitrate compounds into the soil either through plants that have died or other living things that have died, but more often through the waste of living things.

Here is another slice of the cycle of life.

Yes, you get the idea, animals mix nitrogen compounds into the soil with their feces.

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Let's name it, yes, I'm talking about fertilizer.

Fertilizer is what plants need to thrive!

Nitrogen, which passes into the soil through animal feces, is another essential element for plants.

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As the human population grows, nutrition is becoming more and more of a problem for people.

Until yesterday, by leaving the fields fallow, using the grasses growing on them and the excrement of the animals they feed as fertilizer by adding them to the soil, human beings were able to obtain soil with suitable fertility for the agricultural products they grew.

However, with the increasing population, he realized that this effort was no longer sufficient.

We are not aware of it, but serious wars were fought in the 18th and 19th centuries even for some islands full of bird droppings in remote places.

Have you ever thought about who could benefit from the islands in remote places that no one visits?

There was a time when bird droppings loaded on ships from these remote islands were actually used as fertilizer for agriculture.

I don't know why God didn't think of a system such as photosynthesis that would at least allow plants to obtain the nitrogen they need from the air.

Maybe he thought of it as an element of balance for life. Maybe he doesn't want there to be so many living things in the world.

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But at the beginning of the 19th century, a chemist makes a discovery that will be of great use to mankind.

Perhaps he is defying God's plan!

Most people don't know much about this scientist's discovery for humanity.

Maybe it was a discovery as important as the discovery of electricity, I don't know, maybe even more important.

Yes, the German chemist Fritz Haber succeeded in producing fertilizer using free nitrogen in the air in the early 19th century and won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918 for this invention.

As you can imagine, this is a very important invention for humanity. 

I would normally expect everyone to know his name like Edison.

However, the main reason why his name is not known by the masses today, in fact the reason why his name is not well known, is that he was also the discoverer of the chemical weapons used during the First World War with his chemical studies.

Being the discoverer of weapons of mass destruction, and being on the losing side of the war, caused his name to be not very well remembered today, even if it is known in scientific circles.

Naturally, he did not have such a popular name for people either.

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Nevertheless, today we owe the principle solution of artificial fertilizer production to him. Fertilizer factories still produce artificial fertilizer using the method he invented.

If we could not produce the artificial fertilizer we use in agriculture today from nitrogen in the air, we would not be able to produce agricultural production to feed the entire human population. 

Humanity would perhaps starve.

Moreover, even if wars between nations were to be fought over remote islands like the oil wars, in any case, the natural fertilizer on those remote islands would not be sufficient for the agricultural production needed.

In other words, even if wars are fought over fertilizer, the only way to feed humanity is the artificial fertilizer we produce from nitrogen in the air.

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But isn't there another solution?

Another solution comes to mind, of course.

As human beings have multiplied so much, they have also started to live densely in cities. The population of cities has increased a lot. We now have megapolises.

And in cities, especially in megapolises, our waste is a really big problem.

We are building huge treatment plants, but we are not actually treating the waste properly.

In many cities, we just pump most of this waste into the deep sea.

This causes huge environmental pollution on the seabed.

The best example of this is the Black Sea. There is no life below a certain depth in the Black Sea.

This is because many of the facilities we call treatment plants are actually nothing more than giant pumping stations that pump wastes to the bottom with giant pumps.

Some modern biological facilities are unfortunately still very few.

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Can human excrement be used as fertilizer?

Why not? How is human waste different from animal waste?

I think it would be possible to use this waste as fertilizer if we wanted to.

Perhaps in this way we can bring the chemical cycle of life back into balance as it should be.

And maybe we could also find a cure for environmental pollution to a certain extent.

Of course, human excrement is not the only source of environmental pollution, but even that would be a start.

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Today I said a little bit of chemistry and a little bit of biology, and I think I've kept my promise. Even though it's a bit dirty, I hope I've been able to give you a good perspective.

Love and respect to everyone from Moscow