Cirque du Soleil - Totem - Red-Eyed and Reticulate Poison Dart Frogs

I was super-excited to see Totem because A) a friend who saw it in San Francisco raved about it, and B) it's about evolution! How cool is that? Cirque du Soleil says of their latest touring show, "TOTEM traces the fascinating journey of the human species from its original amphibian state to its ultimate desire to fly."

Wait. Amphibians?

Sure, humans (and dogs and horses and birds) evolved from amphibians. But our amphibian ancestors in turn evolved from fish, so you might just as well talk about our "original fish state." And the fish evolved from some kind of worm, which in turn evolved from something like an amoeba . . .

You know what? Let's just start with the origin of life on Earth, about 4 billion years ago. Pedantic scientist that I am, if I were to design a circus show about human evolution, I'd open with primordial soup. Perhaps a human ladder would construct itself from nucleic acids and proteins. Then there would be an aerial photosynthesis act (2.4 billion years ago) in which "light rays" swing down from above and pass their energy to "cells." The show's first climax would be an acrobatic act that grew ever more intricate as more and more performers joined in–the evolution of multicellularity (600 million years ago).

The creators of Totem decided to skip all this and start in media res, with amphibians–who evolved a scant 300 million years ago. However, I'm not exactly complaining, because the amphibian gymnastics are thrilling and their costumes spectacular. I went to the show with a friend who breeds frogs, and she instantly recognized the artists as red-eyed tree frogs and reticulated poison dart frogs. Score one for anatomical accuracy–but for the sake of evolutionary accuracy, I must point out that these are modern frog species, just as "evolved" as modern humans. They were not around 300 million years ago.

By starting with amphibians, though, and returning to the water theme throughout the show, Totem pays appropriate homage to our aquatic origins. Just a few seconds of beautifully orchestrated sound and background video place the audience beside a rushing river in one scene, a quiet pond in the next. And the ocean, ancient mother of all life, is not forgotten.

The show is hardly an evolutionary textbook, but who could ask it to be? Totem is a tribute to the transcendence of human imagination and hard work–Cirque du Soleil at its best. It'll be in San Jose until April 15. Go see the magic that science can inspire.

There is an awful lot of DNA stuffed into every cell.

Let's start out with people. Each human cell has around 6 feet of DNA. Let's say each human has around 10 trillion cells (this is actually a low ball estimate). This would mean that each person has around 60 trillion feet or around 10 billion miles of DNA inside of them.

The Earth is about 93 million miles away from the sun. So your DNA could stretch to the sun and back 61 times. That is one person’s DNA.

The best estimate I could find of the world’s population of people is around 6.7 billion. When we multiply 10 billion miles of DNA by 6.7 billion, we end up with, well, a really big number. Something like 6.7 X 10¹⁹ or 67 quintillion miles. That is too big a number so let’s convert this to light years.

A light year is around 6 X 10¹² miles. So all human DNA would stretch 11.2 million light years. The closest star to Earth (besides the sun) is around 4.2 light years. So we shoot way past that! The Andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away from us so human DNA could stretch there and back two or three times.

What if we add the rest of the DNA on the planet? It would obviously be much farther but it is hard to calculate because we don’t know how many plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, etc. there are on the planet. We also don’t have detailed information about every species on Earth.

Let's add bacteria to the mix. I decided on this because we know how many cells are in a bacterium—one.

One number I saw was that there are 5 X 10³⁰ bacteria on Earth. Bacterial DNA tends to be a lot smaller than human DNA so there will be less of it per cell. Let's say on average there is 4 million base pairs of DNA/bacterium (this number could be off by a very lot). This translates to around .05 inch of DNA per bacterium which means you need to scrape together around 1.3 million bacteria to get a mile of DNA. So all the bacteria in the world have about 3.5 X 10²⁴ miles of DNA.

How far is 3.5 X 10²⁴ miles of DNA? Well, it is about 640 billion light years of DNA. The end of the observable Universe is about 14 billion light years away. So if we stretched out bacterial DNA it would go to the end of the Universe and back around 23 times. Of course it would be incredibly thin and so actually doesn't take up much space in the Universe.

So that's just human and bacterial DNA. (Well, mostly bacterial since human is so piddly in comparison.) I haven't added all of the rest of the DNA out there. I'll leave that to you.

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