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+It all looks so alive. While the large-scale orchestrations and biological systems
+within and around us are near-perfect, working like clockwork in a manner that has
+been unchanged for millions of years, the tiny little bits themselves aren't as perfect,
+which is not only beautiful in a sense, but is also a testimony to why the systems are
+"perfect". In other words, they work. They work and that's what matters. Such things as
+the ones I'm about to describe are insignificant on their own, yet those are traits of
+the most important units that make you.
+
+Here I focus on structure in looks and ordering, not structure in it function.
+The latter is beautifully perfect already, or, well, near-perfect. Again, if it didn't
+work so well, it wouldn't have lasted, and that's an important point, and why I want to
+connect "aliveness" with "imperfection."
+
+Now you're probably confused by the jumble of all the "perfects" and "imperfects" in the
+above text, but I will clarify what I was thinking about a while ago. The systems inside
+us—think of small ones like cellular functions, and big ones like entire organ systems.
+(I will later touch into a bigger one: organisms themselves and ecosystems.*) I want you
+to think of a microscope image of cells together. You're thinking of it? Good. It doesn't
+matter what type of cells they are yet. I want you to focus on the structure. Due to the
+nature of how things grow, those aren't geometrically perfect. They're lumpy and variant
+in size, even if subtly. They're in fluid and contain fluid, so their insides move too.
+When cells split, I doubt that they split wholly "perfectly".
+
+(I digress, but maybe they do, since due to how forces work, the mother cell, when
+squeezing to split, has a tension form in the middle, and as it splits, the two resulting
+parts should be similar in size or volume to maintain enough tension to successfully split
+into two, I believe.)
+
+That aside, my point still stands: the forming cells aren't perfectly circular, or perfectly
+any shape, for that matter.
+
+To me, their floating, jiggling, and nature are among what makes them look so alive, which
+they are, of course, but what is "aliveness" to us? How do we look at a cow and identify
+that it is a living creature? Isn't it its little movements, like its ears', the warmth of
+its blood, its heartbeat, its little sounds here and there? That's a living being. Now back
+to the microscopic. Cells that share a function—say, skin cells—are going to work identically.
+Every cell destined to do something is ideally capable and does it, like being able to
+recieve neurotransmitters, or have the miniscule bits of chemicals have an effect on it,
+such that reactions within it can alter its behaviour. In a cell, there are exchanges going
+on across membranes. There is DNA being copied and packages being transported. If it weren't
+for the existence of disorders that the body cannot deal with, or errors of varying degrees
+occuring at a cellular level, then this system is perfectly and flawlessy functional. And I
+am going to state that regardless of errors that can and do frequently happen inside, because
+such things are what I percieve as the aliveness of it all. In other words, you are alive
+because your body is working. Your parts are playing their role, and your body is equipped
+with the ability to deal with things, expected and unexpected.
+
+The final line is crucial, because those who are disabled aren't less (less perfect,
+less "functional" or less anything). They are still alive and their bodies still work
+enough for them to be alive, not just people but any living thing that doesn't match the
+image of a fully perfect, unrealistically ideal member of its species.
+
+Let's go back to my main topic, which is imperfection in apperance of things that are alive.
+
+What prompted this entire thought process was me thinking about palisade mesophyll, a part
+of leaf tissue that, when viewed in cross-section, has a regular formation of rectangular
+palisade cells. I was thinking; we call them rectangular because that is what they look like,
+and it's perfectly logical to call them that, but they aren't perfect rectangles.
+They are bumpy and uneven and I doubt they sit together in perfect, even, brick-like alignment.
+
+Because of the way those cells form and grow, they won't look like perfect geometrical shapes,
+yet the function is there, and they can form that orderly structure that they are supposed to
+form, and work as intended, and I think that's beautiful. The same idea applies to the spongy
+mesophyll, which are like the opposite of the palisade in a way, consisting of rounder cells
+that aren't evenly placed. In fact, there's no rule to the pattern besides the idea that the
+cells should have gaps between them. This doesn't prevent some cells from lumping together,
+though, as long as the necessary vaccuum exists for the structure to perform its duty normally.
+
+This naturally brings us to the next topic: stem cells. Now let's focus on animals again.
+Stem cells are incredible. You start as a little ball of cells, an embryo, yet your "code"
+"knows" that cells are supposed to be different in order to perform different functions, and
+those cells do "latch" onto their designated functions and grow accordingly. Isn't it amazing
+how cells just "know" that they're supposed to form an ear, and can indeed follow with creating
+an ear? And I mean, an actual ear, one whose outer structure they don't start with and work
+around, yet create from essentially and structurally nothing but the genetic definition of an
+ear! It works the same for everyone. The ears are similar for all humans. They're meant to be,
+and are programmed to be. How did it come to that, the ability to have an ear that looks like
+that across a species? Yes, evolution, but *how*? I can think of the details of how, from the
+parts of an ear, since those parts each have a reason they're there, and we can trace each to
+what made them a need, but that's a different topic, and you can probably find a decent text
+on evolution that isn't this ramble.
+
+This is also applied to the fact that we have skeletons. It amazes me how an embryo can grow
+into a baby with organs and a skeleton. Let's take it even further. At some point, life was
+merely boneless aquatic creatures, yet they eventually became creatures of flesh, blood, and bones.
+
+Ears, faces themselves livers, and skeletons, too—none of those are meant to look perfectly
+even. Your and my liver aren't identical. They're the same organ and they work the same, but
+they wouldn't look exactly the same, and I don't think they should. Again, it's the result of
+how tissue forms: imperfectly! The cells aren't all the exact same shape and size, and that
+combined with them growing over time, forming the organ as they go, relying on a genetic
+blueprint and not some physical outline to build on, will create a liver, which is liver-like
+in shape and can do the function of a liver. That's simply what a liver is, and that's what
+my cells and your cells have successfully gathered into. Our livers do the same thing; we are
+the same species, and we are both alive. Unless you're reading this in the future, in which case,
+I was alive at some point, and this is proof that I was. Anyway, moving on.
+
+Before I conclude with the biggest point of this passage ("what is aliveness in appearance"),
+I will explore two last examples: offspring of asexual reproduction in plants. The mental
+image I had was that of succulents or small plants with many small thick leaves lined up.
+While each of those leaves are identical to each other, and the plant itself being
+genetically identical to its parent plant, neither are 100% perfectly identical. The genes
+are identical, but, yet again, it is how those cells form tissues that have these little
+imperfections which create the life that we see.
+
+The final example is the existence of mathematical patterns in nature. Designs on insects
+or spirals in the form of some plants are technically perfect, but the aliveness factors
+into this again and produces little imperfections in the form of bumps or curves or
+varied-sized parts in lumps. (A reader added wax honeycombs when discussing this and it made
+me look up images. It's very stunning how perfect they look geometrically, but those too,
+because of both the nature of the matter they're made of and the fact that they were made by
+living animals, fall victim to the idea presented here. You'll have too look closely to see
+it, though.)
+
+Perhaps inanimate things can look alive as well. What to you, would make a robot look alive?
+I am thinking of a robot with many appendages or arms: a spider-like giant robot (something
+similar to "can't help myself" by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. I imagine its base to be stationary
+but it has many arms sticking out, whose movement is anchored to that base). To me, a pure
+mechanical motion that is identical in each movement, predictable and repetitive isn't alive,
+but it can move in ways that make it seem alive. After thinking, I noticed what I'm looking
+for: what makes a motion look alive? I found it to be how it interacts with and is influenced
+by its surroundings. A robot arm that moves purely based on how it's programmed to move is,
+well, functioning, but it doesn't feel alive in any way. It's a machine. Yet a machine, say
+the spider-thing, moves imperfectly, such as a motion that isn't even or predictable
+(it stumbles around, hesitates, doesn't move its arm for the same distance each time, and
+so on), can perhaps make me sympathise with a lifeless machine, and even make me see it as
+a very large metal animal.
+
+You were never meant to look perfect. You were meant to be alive. Biologically, your body
+is perfect enough to keep you alive.
+
+*I ended up not mentioning ecosystems here, but briefly, it was about the sheer diversity
+of life on Earth, and the food chains that dominate the flow of the living part of nature.
+I don't have anything to say that you can't reach yourself, but the key idea is the systems
+that simply work.