(Intro)

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?  I thought not.  Well, to make a long story short, Darth Plagueis was a dark lord of the Sith who was so powerful that he could actually use the Force to influence midichlorians to prolong someone's life indefinitely or even create new life from nothing.  

Now, we're of course not the ones to say whether or not that's actually possible and even if it was, we certainly wouldn't want to be the ones to teach you how to do it.  The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some, including us here at Journey to the Microcosmos, consider to be unnatural.  But what we can teach you is more about midichlorians, those powerful little beings that hold the secrets of the Force.

Midichlorians are sentient, microscopic organisms that reside inside each and every living cell of your body, and it's believed they originated at the wellspring of life, a mystical world located in the center of the galaxy.  Over thousands of years, we have come to depend on midichlorians, just as they have come to depend on us.  We have developed a symbiotic relationship.  We are two life-forms living together.  

Well, actually, we are way more than just two life-forms.  A person's midichlorian count is determined not by the number of midichlorians in their body, but by the number of midichlorians per cell in their body.  The average person's midichlorian count is around 2500, which means they have about 2500 midichlorians packed into each one of the trillions of cells in their body.  If you're curious about your own midichlorian count, the easiest way to figure that out is with a simple blood test.  For most people, though, knowing their midichlorian count isn't all that important.  You can lead just as healthy a life with a count of 1500 as you can with a count of 7000.  Personally, I'm at about 3700 for those of who might be wondering.

When you start to get to counts closer to 10,000, well, that's when things start to become interesting.  You see, the higher your midichlorian count is, the more likely you are to be able to connect with the Force, the energy field created by all living things.  A field that surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the whole frickin' galaxy together, and for those people with midichlorian counts around 10,000, the chances of being able to harness and use the Force are so high that if their skills are discovered at a young enough age, they have a good chance of being trained to become a Jedi.

In fact, all of the samples we're looking at today come from the collections stored in the archives of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.  This sample here was taken from Jedi Master Bolla Ropal when he was just three years old and it shows that he had a midichlorian count of just over 11,000, putting him somewhere around Jedi Master Plo Koon, but far below that of Anakin Skywalker, who has a count of well over 20,000.  

Now, obviously, not all of us get to be Jedi and you shouldn't feel like Bantha fodder if your midichlorian count is lower than average.  People with lower midichlorian counts have been known to be force sensitive in the past, even if it's not quite as common, but looking at the bigger picture, we must remember that without midichlorians, life could not exist and without them, we would have no knowledge of the Force at all.  The midichlorians are continually speaking to us, telling us the will of the Force and with time, you can also learn to quiet your mind and hear them speaking to you.

In those moments, when I'm trying to sit back and quiet my mind, I always find it helpful to reflect on the words of the great Jedi Master Qui-Gon-Jin, "Your focus determines your reality."  Thank you for coming on this journey with us as we explore the unseen world that surrounds us and may the Force be with you.

(Credits)

Also, thank you to all of our Patrons on Patreon.  All of these people who let us, you know, do this on April 1st when maybe we all need a bit of relaxation and distraction.  If you'd like to see more from our Jedi Master of microscopes, James Weiss, check out @jam_and_germs on Instagram and if you would like to follow us deeper into the galaxy that lies just beneath our sight, you can go to youtube.com/microcosmos.