Its use as a preservative I think (salted meat, pickling, etc). I did a bit more digging, and at first the metaphor fell apart, but then it turned out to be even better than I had realized!
First problem is that almost all cellular life maintains the same salinity - fish, whales, us, microbes of the sea and freshwater - we're all holding ourselves at 300 mOsm/L. But the ocean is ~3x higher than that, 1000 mOsm/L. So saltwater is more stressful to sea life than I realized, it's just that they all have mechanisms for excreting lots of salt all the time.
The real magic trick is that the saltiness of the ocean has varied over geologic time. And I guess there's evidence in lots of different directions, but it sure seems like maybe all membranous life is maintaining a fishbowl not just of the ocean of their time, but the ocean of billions of years ago.
I love the salt posts. I prompted GPT-5 with “memento salis” and got back the story of Sodom and Lot’s wife, which is tangentially related to your cosmopolitan threads https://chatgpt.com/share/68c50edb-f4a4-8008-960e-2d8654af980d
Hmm that’s a connection I hadn’t thought of. Salt as a symbol of permanence. Wonder why it represented that to ancients. Not obvious.
Its use as a preservative I think (salted meat, pickling, etc). I did a bit more digging, and at first the metaphor fell apart, but then it turned out to be even better than I had realized!
First problem is that almost all cellular life maintains the same salinity - fish, whales, us, microbes of the sea and freshwater - we're all holding ourselves at 300 mOsm/L. But the ocean is ~3x higher than that, 1000 mOsm/L. So saltwater is more stressful to sea life than I realized, it's just that they all have mechanisms for excreting lots of salt all the time.
The real magic trick is that the saltiness of the ocean has varied over geologic time. And I guess there's evidence in lots of different directions, but it sure seems like maybe all membranous life is maintaining a fishbowl not just of the ocean of their time, but the ocean of billions of years ago.
Ah yes I keep forgetting salt was the og preservation technology. Now we just think of pickled foods as a flavor and texture element.