It’s time to get this thing done. It stands currently at 19 Chapters and two substantial appendices. This is Chapter 1, and I will publish Chapter 2 here (Your Second Brain), within a few days to a week, when it feels right.

And it now feels like the right and prime time to drive it home. Timing and circumstances continually plagued me since Tim “Tatertot” Steele and I set out to do this. Over and over, I thought I was on the cusp of diving in and getting it done, only to have a crazy gonzo life get in the way. I’ll not bore you with details. It’s just furiously onward, now.

I present chapter one…

Who are you? A doctor? A farmer? A father, mother, son, daughter? You may be any of these or a few, but it isn’t even close to describing who you really are in total. You aren’t even a single entity, but a collection of living things that work in unison, mostly symbiotically. Inside each and every one of us is a world so bizarre, so strange and alien, that we couldn’t even begin to fabricate a story so implausible. It’s science, not fiction—and the unison of the two is ironically less strange.

To make sense of it, we often call it nature, a sort of catch-all. Or, we punt in various ways, invoking superstition. Doing so is probably nature and natural, too.

LET’S JUST SAY LOTS AND LOTS

There’s about 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of soil and about a million bacterial cells in a milliliter of fresh water. In total, there’s estimated to be about five million trillion trillion, or 5 × 1030 (5 nonillion) bacteria on Earth with a total biomass equaling that of plants. Some researchers believe that the total biomass of bacteria exceeds that of all plants and animals.[1]