dust mites

March 22nd, 2008


I know one of the most horrific moments of my childhood was when I was informed that no matter how often I bathed, and no matter how hard I cleaned, there would be dust mites all over myself and everything I held dear. They are, apparently, all over everything.

Quite frankly, it still freaks me out.

I was just thinking about the first scientists who developed electron microscopes powerful enough to look at the surface of a dust mite. I wonder if, just for a second, the first scientist to put his eye up to the eyepiece might have wondered: “On the surface of this dust mite, am I going to see little cars and little cities, with little tiny people, wearing little tiny hats and little tiny sweaters, walking around on their dust mite, completely unaware?”

Because I would.

~Jeff



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  • cauley

    Are you implying we are living on a dust mite?

    OR

    That on every dust mite there is a community of tiny people decked out in hats and sweaters? Do they have pants in this world?

    Each one raises several thousand questions and is equally frightening, though that second possibility sounds pretty snuggly– given they’re wearing sweatpants and slippers.

  • http://www.shawnfumo.com/ Shawn Fumo

    Forget about dust mites.. what about bacteria? There’s tons and tons of single-cell life everywhere. Without them we’d be in trouble, since a lot of them that live on our skin and protect us against other ones that could be more harmful to us. They help with digestion, etc..

    It seems like the more we look for life, the more we find. They’ve been doing experiments lately where they take a small cube of soil or sample of water from the ocean and find millions of unique microscopic life constantly. They recently found life a mile under the bottom of the oceans. It’s pretty amazing!