Survival
Survival
Colin Austin © 14 March2024 This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be copied and republished without further permissions but the author Colin Austin @ gbiota.com must be recognised.
Humans, the great survivors
Humans are the great survivors. We are the dominant species on Earth, spreading across the globe to every corner of the Earth that is vaguely habitable.
Now we are under threat, what could possibly be a threat to this great survivor species? To answer that we have to ask what makes us so good at surviving.
We are not naturally well equipped, we don’t have big teeth or claws like a tiger, we cannot run fast like an antelope and we don’t even have the reaction time of a fly.
Yet I can walk down Bundaberg main street, I am not attacked by a tiger but I could easily be killed by another human being. Not with a knife in some desperate attack but by the driver of a car, not intentionally but either me or the driver not paying attention.
The danger of the unintended error.
That is the big threat, humans just not bothering to pay attention, killing each other or even the entire species.
And what is this great threat that will kill us? Not the atomic bomb, not some local conflict spreading from Ukraine or Gaza to World War 3 but something as simple as friendly as food.
But first, why have we been so good at the survival game?
What makes humans so good at surviving?
Intelligence and cooperation.
All creatures have some form of control system so they search for food, and run away from danger.
But humans have an intelligent control system, far superior to any animal. It regulates every action in our bodies, it has sensors throughout the body that receive information, either by chemicals or electrical signals, processes this information, just like a computer processes information, then sends out action signals.
Air
We need air to breathe, if we are short of oxygen our bodies sense this and send out signals telling our lungs to breathe faster and our heart beats faster to distribute the oxygen.
Our immune system
Every time we breathe we suck in air which will certainly contain some microscopic life that could kill us, yet this is examined by our immune system, and the results reported to our intelligent control system which then decides whether this is a threat, and if the answer is yes, sends signals to our immune system saying ‘deal with this one’.
This happens so automatically we don’t even think about it, but it does not just happen, it is the result of our intelligent control system working so well that we are just not aware of it.
Temperature
This happens with every bodily function, think about temperature.
Our bodies only work over a very limited temperature range, if it gets to cold our intelligent control system sends our signals to shut down the blood flow to our extremities so we lose less heat, our fingers may turn white and we will burn more energy to create heat, shivering and flapping our arms about.
Food
Now think about food, in our affluent Western lifestyle we have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with maybe snacks in between. We don’t think about it much, we just do it, largely out of habit.
But we have two levels of thought, the conscious one saying choosing steak or fish or even vegetarian but then there is the subconscious thinking by our intelligent control system - which is much more intent.
Let us have a look at what is going on under the bonnet with an intelligent control system.
Self-learning
As soon as we are born our gut-brain starts going through a learning process.
We hear a lot these days about artificial intelligence which needs to go through a process of learning and when it is adequately trained can make quite remarkable predictions. When I have finished writing this I will run it through an AI program to check for all those typos and grammatical errors everyone makes.
But it won’t check for any illogical thinking, it takes a human brain to do that.
Human bodies have been using a much superior form of artificial intelligence for many thousands of years.
How our intelligent control system works
It is amazing that the most important system in our bodies, our intelligent control system does not have a proper name, the nearest is homeostasis but that does not describe what it does, so I call it simply our gut-brain.
Our gut-brain works just like AI Artificial Intelligence, except it has real intelligence from our head brain.
Whenever we eat our gut-brain learns. It understands that we need food to provide energy, food to grow or replace our body parts as they age, and food for our gut-brain itself.
If we are short of a particular essential nutrient, some phytonutrient or mineral like zinc, and we eat a food that provides that missing nutrient our gut- brain learns and remembers this, so when we are short of that specific nutrient again, it sends us signals making us crave that particular food.
Baby
Baby will start to hunt around to find something to suck on, hopefully find mum’s breast and have a good feed.
You may say that is just instinct, but it is not. We come pre-prepared with genes from our Mum and Dad which forms part of our intelligent control system, and that part says suck.
If sucking feels good, then the baby will continue sucking.
But breast milk, in addition to containing babies food also contains another mystery substance. That mystery has now been solved as it is food for the baby’s gut biota.
The baby acquires microbes from mum during birth (hopefully) but microbes have a short life so it was essential to develop a system of feeding them.
Solution - put microbe food into breast milk.
Designing the gut
If someone were designing the human body from scratch they would quickly see the need for a gut, with microbes to process the food to make it bio-available to the body.
It is not obvious, at first, that the gut should become a second brain. But with a little thought, the benefits are obvious. The gut is where we receive our food, which until very recently was contaminated with many harmful microbes - germs.
So making the gut a centre for the immune system makes perfect sense. But the immune system needs an intelligent controller, at a minimum to decide which microbes are beneficial and which are harmful and need dealing with.
Intelligent control systems are common in nature, bees, ants, and slime moulds which have intelligent control systems, existed long before humans came on the scene. They are based on the ability of microbes to communicate with each other to form an intelligent system.
The microbes already existed in our food so it was natural that we should develop a second intelligence system in our gut.
We were lucky that the designer, in this case, nature, linked the two intelligence centres together so they worked as an integrated system.
How can nature be so clever?
Our intelligent control system is one of the wonders of the world so how did it develop?
It did take a long time, something like a billion years but time is not enough - it needed something else.
I am in the innovation business so I have to learn how innovation happens. It is not the nice logical process that is normally projected. See Innovation.
If I wanted to give it a posh name I would try something like beneficial variable randomised events but I am not into posh names so I better name would better names would be ‘stuff up’ or ‘mistakes’.
Why we need sex
This is how nature develops such amazing systems and why we need sex.
There are a few creatures that reproduce without sex, stick insects are a common example. The offspring are just like their parents and their offspring will be just like them. That is the way it is and will go on for maybe millions of years.
To develop and change we need variability. Look at all the couples you know, some will be very similar - same ethnicity, social background, and physical characteristics while others will be very different, particularly of different races and colour. Why? Because it is natural to pick a partner that will bring diversity to the offspring.
Darwin may have been a great scientist but his ideas show how totally cruel natural selection is. Create diversity and some offspring will not be successful and die out, which is cruel, while others will evolve into future generations which are substantially different.
The species will survive
I choose the words in my opening remarks carefully. I very much doubt that humans will become extinct due to some unintended error. A nuclear war could be touch and go, but the amount of energy released by the meteor crashing into the earth that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs was much greater than our atomic bombs.
But some creatures survived and evolved into a new spectrum of creatures - including us. When I find the keys to my time machine, which being old I have misplaced, I will zap forward a million years and expect to find some version of humanity existing.
Some will survive even the worst disaster and breed to create new versions of the human species.
What I worry about is humans committing some unintended error which results in my great-grandkids being exterminated.
Unfortunately, it is not a question of if we commit an unintended error - the combination of climate change and destruction of the microbiology in our top soils will lead to widespread deaths of a significant proportion of the population.
Why I am so sure?
Because it is happening right now. When I was a kid people died predominately from infectious diseases. The figures are startling, three out of five babies born would die from an infectious disease before the age of 5, and another would die in the teens but admittedly not primarily from infection. Young boys do daft things and kill themselves.
Now we have made major improvements in the technology of combating infectious diseases.
In some areas the Black Death wiped out half the population, we had absolutely no defence against it other than primitive isolation.
Covid, bad as it was (or is), did not wipe out people on anywhere near that scale.
We are now suffering from an epidemic of chronic diseases, the scale is vast. In some areas two-thirds of the population are overweight, 8 million people a year have a limb amputated from diabetes - the fastest growing disease of all, heart attacks are the most common cause of death, dementia is rampant.
What is the underlying cause?
The underlying cause is simply that we changed our food system so we now no longer feed our gut brain. This is not some devious plot, as thought by the conspiracy theorist, but a simple unintended error with disastrous consequences.
When I was a kid we had little protection against infectious diseases. There were little in the way of vaccines and no available antibiotics. If one kid came down with chicken pox, mumps or measles there would be a party and mum would take us to the party so we caught whatever was going around.
We all knew about germs and anything to avoid germs was automatically good.
Diabetes and other chronic diseases, existed but were rare, certainly not an issue in decision-making.
Swapping infectious diseases for chronic diseases.
Under these conditions producing food that was germ-free, and probably cheaper was considered an improvement. In any case, there was no technology available for killing the harmful microbes without killing the beneficial ones.
So we moved from a people getting sick and dying from infectious diseases to one where people got sick and died from chronic diseases.
It may be one of the worst decisions that mankind has made but it was certainly an unintended error.
But if it man made then we can fix it.
If we get fat and sick it is not simply because we eat too much, it is because we are not feeding our gut brain the right food so it tells us to eat too much, then we get fat and sick.
We just have to learn how to grow gut-brain food with the beneficial microbes but without the harmful microbes.
Now we have defined the problem it has been relatively easy to solve.
The two-stage fix - first information
Before we can make physical changes there must be wide-spread public education about the importance of the gut-brain, how it works, and that we need to feed it.
Modify our diet
We don’t need to make massive changes to our diet, the bulk of the food we eat is simply burned off as energy food and our current food system does an effective job of supplying energy food.
We do need to start eating gut-brain food. That is not difficult - it simply means breeding beneficial microbes in organic waste, adding essential minerals, and growing plants that are eaten fresh.
We just need to create the conditions where the beneficial microbes out compete and out breed the harmful microbes (see Rethinking food and Diabetes)
Fresh is an issue. The beneficial microbes have a short life and die within a short period after picking. You often hear how much tastier food that has just been picked is. That is not some fluke, the beneficial microbes are alive and well.
People with a garden can readily grow gut-brain food, with a little instruction.
But nowadays the majority of people live in apartments or large houses with small blocks so there is no real space for growing.
That is why I developed the Gbiota box system - so people living in an apartment with no growing experience could have fresh gut-brain food growing at home.
Colin colin@gbiota.com
There does not seem to be much of a problem with making the boxes, they are just a box you can buy from a hardware store, they do need a few holes to be drilled but that does not appear to be an issue.
The real problem for the apartment dweller is how to handle the pongy food waste.
The smell problem can be solved by sealed containers but those pesky flies still seem able to smell out a delicious fly meal - at least in Sunny Queensland where I live.
So I have two experiments.
In the second experiment, I go back to an old system, the compost tube.
I recently wrote an article 
That is not what happened, it can only be described as a lead balloon - but why?
Take something as simple as a bicycle. Was the bike invented because some enterprising applied mathematician studied the theory of gyroscopic couples and the self-centering action of the offset in the forks and so invented the bicycle.
My innovation to reduce the number of people having their legs chopped off is based on a simple observation that the body has an inbuilt intelligence that regulates what and how much we eat and where and how much fat we store.
But, and here comes the punch line, my body, or rather my intelligent control system has learned over time that if I eat certain foods or drinks I replace these salts.
But the problem is we have no idea how it works. In my younger days, I used to write sophisticated software, solving partial differential equations and writing self-learning software. I could be described in Australian slang as a gun coder.
Or we can recall one of my favourite quotations.
So let’s get back to my solution for reducing the number of amputation from diabetes.
My solution is simple, grow plants in living soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients, and eat the plants while they are still fresh so they feed the gut-brain which forms our intelligent control system.
The general view of the medical profession is that this is not a tried and proven method that has gone through the normal scientific verification process.
Learn about the Gbiota technology of growing plants without toxic chemicals by creating the right conditions so the beneficial microbes out breed and out compete the harmful microbes - Eco balance.
Support our gut health movement
‘Prevention better than cure’ looks at our gut brain.
‘Health starts in the soil’ looks at the critical issue of soil biology
My wife, Xiulan is a medical doctor, a surgeon, but she became diabetic, her foot started to turn black and our medical advisers were saying they may need to amputate.
Diabetes is caused by fat in the wrong place, at first in the muscles and then in the pancreas.
But 
We live in an age of hype and super sophistication. People just do not believe that a complex disease like Diabetes can be overcome in such a simple and inexpensive way.
Then actually create soil full of beneficial microbes and minerals, grow plants and eat them while they are really fresh before the microbes die.
Our gut-brain decides how much and where we store fat and then regulates our appetite - how much we want to eat.
The Gbiota system solves this by loading the regenerated soil into boxes so instead of buying already harvested plant people can buy boxes (which they swap over) with growing plants which they pick and eat at home while still genuinely fresh.
Many people are quite rightly worried about the toxic chemicals in their food.
Two hundred years ago the great Mathematicians like Newton and Leibniz knew how to solve coupled partial differential equations, but they could not do it - there was too much computation.
Today I realised that our bodies have a highly sophisticated control system but it needs the right species of microbes to work effectively but that the wrong species make us sick or even kill us.
This is what the Gbiota technology is all about, creating the conditions so the beneficial microbes out-compete and out-breed the harmful microbes.
Yes, we do grow vegetables. But that is not the point. Let’s face it, if you just want a cabbage, and aren’t bothered about beneficial microbes, you can buy one from the supermarket at an amazingly low price.
We need to feed the beneficial microbes and that is just so easy.
What does it cost us to manage this system? We need to collect organic waste, any organic waste which would otherwise be converted into greenhouse gases in waste tips. We also need minerals, typically in the form of rock dust which is readily available as a waste product from quarries.
I need to talk about these together as they are linked.
In addition to these large pores there are channels made by the creatures of the soil, particularly worms but also rotting root systems which provide channels through the soil.
Gbiota beds are, as their name suggests are in-ground beds. We have recently suffered major flooding from climate change so I now use raised beds so they are really on-ground beds.
Gbiota boxes are a lot smaller so don’t have the production capabilities of beds but they do have the big advantage that they can be used at home to grow plants.
I drill a hole in the side as low as I can then use a rubber grommet and connector to make a swivel tube.
I cut a piece of Ag pipe to fit neatly into the base.
I then fill the base of the box to about a third of the height of the box (eg about 100mm) with organic waste. I then add a nutrient mix, containing minerals, manure, and trace minerals, (typically available in blood and bone) on top with of course the worms to process the organic waste.
I set the swivel tube to the vertical position and fill the box to the top of the swivel tube through the filler pipe.
At mid-week, which is the maximum length of time I want the soil blood to be stagnant I twist the swivel tube down and catch the soil blood in a suitable container (eg milk bottle - I am into recycling) for reuse on the next cycle.
Just think what is happening here. When I flood the base of the bed I am expelling the stale air that always accumulates in the soil from the biological action. Rotting organic waste can make growth inhibitors - who wants that?
Gbiota bed work on the same principles as boxes, partial flood and drain and recirculate. But the mechanics are a bit different.
The food system underlies re-solving Diabetes. I was a kid in the war, everyone ripped up their lawns and grew vegetables fertilised with organic waste, and if you were lucky enough to be able to access it, that valuable resource - manure.