Take a look around you right now. What do you see? A room, a building, trees, streets, the material world that makes up our everyday reality. But that’s just what things look like on the surface. The truth is, underlying all of that, an entire invisible ecosystem of constant transactions is taking place – a bustling, high-stakes marketplace of trades and exchanges happening at the smallest scales.
You see, from a biological perspective, every living cell in your body and all organisms on earth are teeming metropolises of ceaseless commerce. Busy hubs where millions of molecular currencies are traded, resources are imported and exported, energy gets stockpiled and spent. It’s an endless cycle of microscopic negotiations and power brokering playing out through every tissue, microbiome, even within each mitochondrial respiratory center powering the city-state of your being.At any moment, glucose molecules are being exchanged for ATP coins that cellular machinery then spends to accomplish tasks. Proteins are built on molecular assembly lines where information transcribed from DNA production manifests gets bartered for material supplies that keep cells humming along. Waste metabolites accumulate and get shipped out through strictly governed disposal channels.It’s like peering down at a vast, futuristic urban landscape of countless intersecting pathways, factories, refineries, and soil utilities hard at work trading and exchanging resources essential for sustaining the larger living infrastructure. Only this isn’t a man-made megalopolis. This is the covert micro-economy that each multi-trillion cell colony we call our bodies must intricately supervise 24/7 simply to remain operational.And the wheeling and dealing gets even more intricate when you zoom out to the larger ecological scale. Because out there, complex networks of symbiosis and mutualisms form interconnected global supply chains and trading guilds spanning entire bioregions. Delicately balanced channels where lifeforms as diverse as fungi, plants, microbes and animals perpetually trade resources, tokens, and energy in return for services that sustain the whole integrated marketplace of their local environment.
Just think about the breathable atmospheric gases you consume, the products metabolic guilds craft from soil and water, the resources that tree ambassadors trade for our derivative manufacturing wastes like carbon dioxide. It’s the unseen Stock Exchange governing the fundamental swaps that circulate the raw materials and energies powering all life on earth.Look again at the material world from a different lens, and the surfaces of reality reveal themselves as frontiers of nonstop commerce and negotiation happening on scales too far up or down for our limited human senses to directly survey. Everything you see around you emerges from the hidden trade routes and market forces of a ceaselessly churning global economy invisible to the naked eye.