Life Is a Tamed Fire
Translated by AI. Read the Chinese original ↗
My uncle’s two daughters came home for the weekend.
The younger is in eighth grade; biology has just covered respiration.
The elder is in ninth grade; chemistry has just covered combustion.
After dinner, they leaned over the coffee table doing homework.
“What is combustion?”
“Fuel combines with oxygen and produces energy.”
“Respiration does too.”
She wrote on scrap paper:
Fuel + Oxygen → Energy
Then:
Food + Oxygen → Energy
They looked for a while.
“So are we burning all the time?”
“Why isn’t there fire?”
“Maybe it burns really slowly?”
“Wood burns up in minutes. People take decades.”
The younger looked down at her hands and stayed silent.
”…So what is life?”
The elder looked at the two formulas.
“Perhaps a fire,” she said,
“that learned to burn slowly.”
Sitting nearby, I interrupted:
The textbook means more or less the same thing.
Respiration has the same essence as combustion.
That little extra delay in between
is what we call life.
All right, stop talking and interrupting my serious television watching.
This Korean drama, Iron-Fisted Education, is far too good!
Additional note:
| Burning flame | Living respiration |
|---|---|
| Releases energy rapidly in one go | Releases energy slowly in dozens or hundreds of steps |
| Energy mainly becomes heat | Energy is first stored in ATP |
| Burns out in minutes | Can continue for decades |
So scientists often say:
Life is a form of tamed combustion.