Heat and Cold in Human Flesh
The hottest I’ve ever been was in Iraq at 50 °C. The coldest was in Ulyanovsk, Russia at –60 °C. That’s a swing of 110 degrees Celsius across one human life. And yet, in a cosmic sense, it’s nothing.
Most of us live between –30 and +30 °C. Sixty degrees of comfort, a thin temperate forest of existence. Step too far out and survival requires fire, fur, or freon. The human body is not built for deserts or Siberias. It is built for this narrow cradle of warmth.
The Animal Mirror
Look around: most animals share our limits. A wolf or a cow can’t survive where the thermometer lives in the extremes without shelter. Sure, some bacteria manage in volcanic vents or frozen lakes, but the majority of living beings cluster in the same band as us. Life itself has been shaped by this window.
Evolution found its sweet spot and stayed there. The forest is temperate not just for humans, but for the mammals, the birds, the plants we depend on. It’s the comfort zone of being.
Machines in the Forest
Cars live here too. A car runs fine at 20 °C, tolerates 30 °C, maybe even 50 °C if you’re cruel to it. But drop it into –30 °C and oil thickens, batteries die, and metal turns brittle. Our machines are built for our world.
Computers? The same. Microchips hum along at room temperature, but push them too hot and they fry, too cold and their materials misbehave. Just like us, they are fragile children of the temperate band.
The AI chip and the human brain aren’t so different. Both are dependent on a tiny thermal corridor that allows complexity to dance.
Cosmic Comedy
Now zoom out.
On one side: absolute zero, –273 °C. A place where molecular motion halts, where physics itself freezes into silence.
On the other: no hard ceiling. Plasma can burn hotter than stars. Theoretical physics gives us the Planck temperature at 10³² K — a furnace so intense the laws of physics buckle.
Between these infinities, life exists in a thin sliver where carbon bonds hold, water stays liquid, combustion engines ignite, and silicon switches flip.
A strip of sixty degrees. A fragile band where everything we call meaning takes place.
The Temperate Forest
It’s almost comical. The universe allows for temperatures from absolute zero to unimaginable infernos, but everything that matters to us — birth, love, memory, machines, thought — survives in a narrow comfort zone.
The temperate forest of being is terrifyingly small, but within it, evolution, combustion, and consciousness bloom. It’s both our prison and our paradise.
We exist not because we conquered the cosmos, but because we are balanced delicately in its mid-range.
Closing Thought
When I stood in 50 °C Iraq, sweat pouring, or shivered in –60 °C Russia, lungs freezing with every breath, I thought I was at the edge of human endurance. And in a way, I was. But in the cosmic scheme? I was just pacing the floorboards of our forest.
That’s the miracle and the comedy: eternity stretches from zero to infinity, but life insists on sixty degrees.