Under the Microscope: Discovering the Mars-Like Features of Avocado Pits
Exploring Valles Marineris in miniature
I place my eye on the microscope. I am observing the seed of an avocado, the pit inside the fruit. The seed emerges as not an inert object but a living universe. The agile chant of serpentwithfeet, a real urban preacher, with the ethereal notes of his album "Soil", converges with my observation. This sonic liturgy transforms this scientific act into a cosmic ceremony. His spiritual voice accompanies my gaze as I penetrate the secrets of this organic matter.
Persea americana. Mexican origins, a history traversing three thousand years of civilization. Here, under the optical glass, each cell is a geological archive, each depression a tale of transformation. The colours bring me back to Titian, the great Venetian Renaissance painter known for his luminous and sensual colour palette: burnt ochres, deep rusts, and reddish browns that translate oxidation and internal metabolism.
The microscopic craters recall Valles Marineris, the massive canyon system on Mars - the longest and deepest known in the entire solar system. This is not a metaphor: it is a comparative anatomy of matter. Lignin and cellulose interweave a rigorous grammar where every structure narrates a phase of growth, every groove a resistance.
At 600x, the seed is no longer a seed. It becomes territory. Compressed universe. Its mineralized surface speaks a language older than words, deeper than scientific concepts.
Technology does not record. It generates. Each magnification redraws the boundaries between object and subject, between observer and observed universe. Where does my gaze end and infinity begin? This seed contains the same laws governing planets and galaxies, compressed in a few millimetres of organic matter.
I have seen opened avocados countless times and handled thousands of seeds. But only now, under this technological gaze, do I realize how complex every fragment of matter is. A universe within a universe.
Science is not a catalogue. It is poetry. Each magnification is an act of creation, where the precision of instruments becomes a door to invisible worlds. The microscope does not measure: it reveals. It transforms objects into cosmologies, and cells into narratives.
What does observing mean? Not just recording. Generating. Every gaze creates universes, and every point of observation produces a new reality. Here, in the microscopic realm, the distinction between observer and observed dissolves.
I am an archaeologist of hidden universes.
serpentwithfeet — “messy”- (Soil)
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