3 ms·
I hope not to seem combative, but I'll weigh against your view. Life hasn't "adopted" anything. It's like when people say evolution "chose" an advantageous tra
by bilegeek 2y ago
I hope not to seem combative, but I'll weigh against your view.
Life hasn't "adopted" anything. It's like when people say evolution "chose" an advantageous trait, when in reality it's just a consequence of dead stuff not passing on traits and specimens with those traits having more success at living, and neutral traits surviving just by not immediately killing or ahem rooster-blocking.
Old-age death is merely a mechanical limitation of biological processes (and possibly matter in general if you subscribe to the heat death of the universe.) It enabled rapid evolution, which allowed MUCH more complex life to come about after billions of years, but the fact that life retains death is merely a consequence of how it came about. Probably life that never died would only evolve in response to environmental disasters or predation, slowing changes significantly.
Don't take this to mean there aren't problems with humanity's search for extending life well past our natural biology. There are. But all those problems revolve around society needing death to not stagnate to hell due to evolutionary circumstances shaping our mentality, not the universe demanding it for some grand philosophical reason.
If you see death as something the universe "wants", great! I merely see death as a limitation and a mechanical process for exacting change.
To posit another philosophical quandry: if life can reproduce, can it ever really "die" of old age? We're one branch on a massive chain of reproduction stretching over literally billions of years, so are we really a "different" life-form from the first one? One enormous organism, split up into quintillions of different parts. If you have a child, where do you stop and they begin? Where do your parents stop and you begin? They/you literally came in part from their/your own cells!