4 ms·
Is cancer just an inevitable threshold one must reach on long enough timeline, due to entropy?
by platz 9y ago
Is cancer just an inevitable threshold one must reach on long enough timeline, due to entropy?
- tbrownaw 9y agoGiven sufficient time, everything becomes inevitable.
- platz 9y agoonly in a closed/ergodic environment.
- gnulinux 9y agoWhat does "everything" mean in this sentence? Even things that are not allowed by the "model" of the universe?
- d6de964 9y agoThe universe was created from nothingness, so yes.
- whatshisface 9y agoEverything can tunnel, so on the scale of "truly silly times," the particles in your body might someday get back together for a reunion.
- brownbat 9y agoIncluding closed loops?
- Thriptic 9y agoYes, basically. Cancer is at heart localized evolution, and there are many, many pathways which can provide survival or reproductive advantages to cells or tissue if they become dysfunctional.
- lkrubner 9y agoEntropy never comes into it because we are not talking about a closed system. So long as a creature can eat food, or synthesize it from the sun's rays, they are an open system taking in substances that give it fresh energy. You could model this a few ways. You could say a creature exports its entropy by eating food, or you could say, more accurately, that the entropy was created when the energy was stored in chemical form in whatever substances the creature eats. If there was some ultimate limit on the ability of creatures to communicate information forward then the aging process would apply to the entire species, to life itself, rather than to individual organisms. You can think of yourself as an organism that was created a few years ago by your mother and father, but as a chemical process, you are 4 billion years old, give or take a few hundred million years. There has not been a single second, in the last 4 billion years, when the chemical reaction that is you was not working to propagate itself forward. If entropy applied to you, then surely you would not have lasted 4 billion years?
- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y agoI'm not a doctor, but I believe cancer is what we call it when cells that evade apoptosis proliferate to reach a critical mass. They metasttisize when they are able to survive a journey through the blood or lymph systems to invade other foreign tissues for food. I don't believe it's necessarily due to entropy but the process by which cellular division takes place involves a copying of the host cell's DNA and that copying process is not 100% perfect. It is remarkalably accurate, but given enough time, even with all the systems in place to mitigate and repair errors, they will occur. Most will simply cause that mutated cell to die but it's similar to the 100 monkeys on 100 typewriters at scale. Eventually an error will occur that makes a cell immune from apoptosis.