They look so surreal. Like they were build or sth. And they arent even alive.
In: 25
So viruses, like you said, aren’t really living things. They’re basically microscopic mechanical contraptions that inject an RNA molecule into a cell.
Sort of like tiny landmines, they just float around until they bump into a cell they can latch onto, at which point the whole process happens mechanically. It clamps on and dumps the RNA into the cell
At that point the cell sees the RNA and goes “Oh look, instructions to build something out of proteins” which it follows until it explodes like an overinflated balloon, sending more of these protein based machines out to infect more cells.
So in a sense, they are robots, or at least machines. They’re just made of proteins instead of metal.
Small viruses are _so tiny_ they are made of a small number of protein units stuck together rather like you’d build something out of legos. Cells (and larger living things) are made of a truly staggering number of molecules so they are “blobby”…there’s no structure or straight lines because there are just so many molecules that they can be pretty much any shape.
But not these viruses. They are small, rigid protein constructions…and that gives them straight lines and geometrical angles that resemble those of robots.
Here’s a couple views showing the actual proteins of a particular bacteriophage so you can maybe see what I mean
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330079268/figure/fig2/AS:712803031715847@1546956894810/Structural-model-of-bacteriophage-T4-The-enlarged-capsomer-shows-the-major-capsid.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/T4_Bacteriophage.gif/1024px-T4_Bacteriophage.gif
You see, you can actually make an _atomic scale_ model of these things, they have so few parts.
They dont. Its just a depiction to get an idea of how they work. The molecules that make up their “look” kind of have those shapes, but not really. The structure of those proteins are in reallity of course much more complex
Akshually bacteriophages existed before machines so it’s robots that look like them, not the other way around
You should look up what a DNA strand looks like putting itself together, or what happiness looks like. We’re made of machines, and are organic machines ourselves.
Here’s a secret: all organisms are basically tiny robots. Or quite big robots, as it turns out. You’re a robot too. It’s just more obvious on the scale of a virus because viruses are so small that you’re seeing individual proteins. You don’t get the smoothing out effect that comes with flexible cell membranes and scale. If you zoomed into a human far enough, you’d see the jagged robot-like inner workings of our cells too.
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