Adam is over five months old now. He's been through many, many changes. Some of these changes have been immense and fascinating while others have been dull and hardly perceptible. I feel almost as though I've deceived everyone who reads this blog. I didn't lie about anything or embellish the truth in any way, I just haven't been writing about the major changes that Adam has undergone in the last month or so as they were happening.
Adam seems to have changed into something almost unrecognizable. Even though I can't say that this change is due to anything other than Adam's exposure to the environment and the passage of time, it is still interesting to see. What began as a liquid mixture then became a more viscous mixture, which then turned into a colloidal amalgam of semen and coagulated blood. This gooey, maroon substance has now turned into a nearly solid black gel with swirls of oil on its surface. When the surface is prodded, stiff peaks are left behind which eventually settle back into the mixture. I don't really know what any of this means, it's certainly not an indication of the presence of life, I can say that with certainty. If anything, I think this change could be attributed to a string of days that were intensely hot and extremely humid. The exposure to the moisture in the air and the subsequent drying out must have made the rate of evaporation increase, which caused the volume to decre
ase so rapidly.I wouldn't consider this a conclusive end or an end at all to Adam's development. This is just one step in a process that I do not yet understand. Adam is setting the pace for the specimen that will follow him and eventually take his place so, really, all I can hope to gain from Adam is knowledge from observation and limited interaction.
Adam II, comparatively, hasn't undergone a single visible change. What I've learned from Adam II is this: after three months, a bacteria-rich substance that is sealed and exposed regularly to light will yield nothing of interest. Of course, that doesn't mean I'm going to pack it all in and give up. It just means I'm going to keep waiting and watching while I start developing new specimen upon which I'll test numerous variables, both in terms of the contents of the substances and the environments in which they're kept. In about one month I'm going to start testing more bacteria-rich substances under various conditions because these are easier to make than something that more closely resembles Adam. I'll make three or four new specimen similar to Adam II at once. While they're developing over time, I'll start putting together another mixture that is identical in its contents to Adam and keep it in a different environment. I'm attempting to design these experiments so that I'll always have something to write about and won't have to wait very long between new developments.
Anyone who has bothered to stick with me this long, I hope that you don't feel like you've been cheated out of your time or shortchanged in any way. I realize that the results of this project as a whole thus far must seem pretty underwhelming but considering how much of a change we've already seen , who can say what will happen in the next five months?
Also, I didn't really sense a strong reaction in either direction towards the other experiment I was conducting along with this one (the fruit & bread kept in a sealed container in the dark) so I don't know if I should post updates about it here or not. I've also started keeping track of another small experiment, which is a collection of bugs that lived and died in a sealed container and have been exposed to a minimal amount of light and fresh air for nearly a month now. If there is any interest in these other two experiments, let me know and I'll write about them here in conjunction with updates about the Adam project.
