pine tar

 

for most of our (Homo) time on this planet, all we had at our disposal was basically plants and fire. we had so much time (>50,000 years) to experiment, that we've done just about everything to plant products. if you light wood on fire, it burns. if you instead heat it up without lighting it aflame (heated in an anoxic environment since oxygen=explosion), instead it acts in a purely physics-type manner. all the molecules inside the wood have their ambient temp raised, turning solids into liquids and liquids into gases. the liquid and gas products then escape outwards (terpentine from smoke, pine tar from liquid run-off - to be captured by humans), while anything resilient enough to still be a solid is left behind (charcoal). chemistry, and the phases of matter, explains it all. 

can we leach human bones as if they were blocks of pine? bones are animal (not plant) and therefore seem to be more protein filled - bones boiled yield liquid collagen, which is a sticky glue-like substance, that solidifies when cooled. plant resin, in contrast, is more pure carbon - benzenes, phenols, cellulose (carbon-rich), polysaccharides - with less protein/nitrogen/amino acid content (?). 

plants REALLY LIKE benzene. but all Life loves squalene - an unsaturated hydrocarbon. cells wrap it around itself to form rings = steroids, different types between animals, plants and fungi. 

regarding biochemistry, "everything is water". meaning, in its basal state, all biochemistry existed in an aqueous medium, water soluble, polar. therefore, if cells wanted to enact meaningful change, they'd need a mechanism that was different - that was water insoluble. therefore, fats/water insoluble compounds became the 'key' to biology - these are the molecules that can bind to receptors, cross cell membranes, activate proteins. plants use terpenoids (unsaturated hydrocarbons) to interact with biology in a wide array of ways - cell sgnaling, deterring predacors, etc. 

hydrocarbons - these were so important to both life, and later to human society. we talked about their impact on biochemistry. all realms of life were excited to discover hydrocarbons and exploit them to no end. when human society discovered them, we did the same thing - distilling and separating wood and coal into all sorts of composing parts, heating them up to create new parts, mixing things together to get new parts still. using them in every industry from construction to medicine. human society exploited hydrocarbons hardcore. hydrocarbons were the key that allowed humans to fully exploit the field of synthetic chemistry and all it could be. 

petroleum (aka crude oil, from plankton) is basically the same composition as resin (from plants eg coal).