The magic beans in the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk" provided young Jack with a great fortune. Other magic beans, and magic seeds in general, have also made great fortunes for such companies as Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, ConAgra, and Continental Grains, which manage the U.S. food supply. Human survival depends on magic seeds, including beans. The continuity of life on earth pretty much depends on magic seeds.

Young Jack got five magic beans in trade for the family cow. His mom threw the beans out the window where they germinated and grew into the beanstalk. That's the magic of seeds: you lay them on the dirt or push them a little way into the dirt and up comes food or flowers or forests, jungles, and continent-covering grassy plains.

All seeds are magic, to be sure, but dirt is the unacknowledged part of the magic. Not much happens to seeds without dirt. By tradition (Western tradition, that is) dirt has such a bad reputation as to make it hardly worth mentioning -- except in negotiating the cost of having it hauled away.

The word "dirt" and its synonym "soil" are of a sort with "shit," united by way of "night soil." The cultural aversion to dirt, in the sense of soil or shit, is plausibly related to the Western religious tradition in which light and God and goodness are above, in the heavens, while darkness, evil and the dust of which we are made are beneath the heavens. The word "earth," uncapitalized and not used as the name of a planet, is also a synonym for "dirt, soil," and "shit."

The magic of dirt is unacknowledged but everywhere evident. Some of its properties are as follows:

One shovel full of dirt, say 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of it, contains (on average) nearly 2 lbs (1.75 lbs) of aluminum, enough to make enough 55 soft drink cans or 40 hand-held camera bodies.

The same amount of dirt contains enough silicon (2.77 kg) to make about 3,000 state-of-the-art computer chips which, at $100 each, would be worth $30,000.

The half pound of iron in a shovel full of dirt is the enough to supply the personal body needs of 130 male people and 220 female people. (http://www.fpnotebook.com/HEM38.htm)

The US RDA for potassium is about 3.5 grams per day. There's enough potassium (258 grams) in 10 kg of dirt for one person for 75 days.

The US RDA for phosphorus is about 1 gram per day. A shovel full of dirt has 13 days worth.

The oxygen in a shovel full of dirt equals the oxygen content of the air in a typical single-car residential garage (670 ft³).

The aluminum in a shovel full of dirt, if combined with the oxygen and a pinch of the chromium there, could be made into a ruby the size of a softball or small grapefruit. If iron and titanium were used instead of chromium, a sapphire of the same size could be made. Or one star ruby sphere and one star sapphire sphere could be made, each the size of a hardball, from a shovel full of dirt.

The uranium and thorium in a shovel full of dirt contain enough energy to supply a typical household with electric energy for three to six months (1,950 kWh).

Dirt contains virtual rubies and sapphires, coke cans and airplanes, automobiles, air, televisions, computers and even lions and tigers and people. To make the virtual real, sunlight needs to be added to the soil and directed in the course of its flow. The top ten meters of a typical suburban housing lot contains a virtual fleet of Mercedes Benz SUVs, equipped with cell phones and GPS guidance systems, plus several airplanes and large power boats, or a battalion of soldiers in full gear.

The amount of lead in 10 kg of typical dirt is 100 mg, enough to cause cancer in California, but nowhere else. It's safe for children to play in the dirt -- except in California.

The magic by which King Arthur extracted Excalibur from the rock, was of the plain old fairy tale sort. By contrast, the recondite processes by which American industry extracts automobiles, paved highways and cities from dirt is more esoteric, requiring knowledge of the properties of dirt and of ways to direct energy.

King Arthur had only to exert the energy of his solar-powered arms to pull the sword from the rock. But getting a Chevrolet out of the ground requires the efforts of thousands of people to build the machines that dig dirt and refine from it iron and glass and plastics which are then shaped into parts that are assembled and delivered to showrooms and roads.

A bottom line rule of applied science is that energy must be expended to rearrange the constituents of dirt into useful forms.

That is, energy must be used to inform dirt with useful shapes. Dirt in the shape of a car has value, while the same dirt in the form of dirt is dirt -- it is the car shape that has value, the shape only, not the dirt from which the car is made.

The work of engineers recapitulates that of God in that we lift dust (dirt) from the ground and give it shapes that have social and monetary value and are worthy of being named. Shapeless earth is nameless, except as dirt or soil, or rock or earth.

An unacknowledged corollary to Newton's First Law of Motion (i.e., an object in motion or at rest remains that way unless acted upon by a force) is this: Shapes and arrangements of matter (dirt) remain unchanged until acted upon by force. Nothing changes without energy being used to enforce shape.

NOTE: For unknown reasons that seem related to consciousness, the shape of a teacup cannot spontaneously come into being without the intervention of consciousness to direct energy in rearranging dirt's material constituents into a cup shape, informing shape upon shapeless dirt. And consciousness itself seems somehow to derive from dirt stirred by sunlight.

If there were no sunlight shining on the earth, everything would be cold and dark, and the only movements would be those related to the heat of radioactive decay inside the earth, i.e., volcanos and continental movement would continue. But the sun does shine on the earth, causing water to evaporate and rise into clouds; it keeps 2,000 cubic miles of water suspended in the atmosphere, sucking it upwards at a rate equivalent to the flow of 200 Mississippi Rivers flowing straight upward, and then raining it back at that rate all over the earth. The process of solar-driven water lifting is called convection. Some of the water that falls back down hits rocks and gradually dissolves them into smaller rocks and particles that interact with each other according to apparently simple rules that govern the dynamics of mud. And from the mud, for those of us who call ourselves materialists, complex molecules are driven into being by the energy of sunlight. The complex molecules then interact with each other according to other simple rules that are different from those of atoms and mud. More complexity comes to exist, eventually leading to George W. Bush in the White House, U.S. troops in Iraq, war protests, lots of bad attitudes intermixed with bright sunny days, taxes due, a stock market that goes up and then down, and a nice-looking body walks past and grabs your attention -- the latter itself somehow having derived from the interaction of sunlight with dirt. THIS WORLD is a result of the interaction of sunlight with rocks, soil, dirt. It's all sun-driven convection of dirt, George Bush in the White House, etc. Convection. Real simple: Sunlight acting on rocks.

The Bible says God created the earth. If the word "earth" in Genesis refers to dirt and soil (which is plausible since the idea of the earth as a planet didn't exist when Genesis was written), then clearly, dirt, as a creation of God, should be sacred and holy. The Bible also says our bodies are made of dirt. Science agrees. The word "human" has a shared ancestry with the word "humus," meaning soil . . . or "dirt," or "shit," or "earth." We are beings of the humus, creatures of the material earth. We can think of ourselves as the means by which dirt, or the matter of the earth, gets up and sees itself, thinks, and moves around, powered by sunlight. This is a perspective, not a belief. Implicit is that one property of dirt, a physical property not generally acknowledged as such -- and certainly not in relation to lowly "dirt"! -- is consciousness itself. No one knows how consciousness might 'inhere' in dirt . . . or in anything. For that matter, no one knows why dirt (matter) or sunlight exist. But one obvious perspective on existence and being is that sunlight interacts with the rocks of the earth in ways that make the rocks, the soil, dirt, awake and aware.

Nothing in this universe makes sense. Nothing, that is, except trivial social things like balancing your check book or buying the groceries. If anything is worthy of worship, it is God the Sun, and the dirt we are made of. Worship or not, though, look and be amazed, as this world is what dirt does in sunlight!

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