Death And Immortality
This is one of those Sunday nights when I feel special. I mean how often does a guy on dialysis get to go to other planets and talk to gods while cleaning the crap out of his room. I am only 55 which means in real years I am still a child. In real time we live for about 1000 years and reach puberty at about 70 years old. But then there is a slight problem, in this less than real world we die at about that age. We never get much beyond puberty. Some people manage to get a lot done in this 70 odd years. Some are able to pile it up higher and deeper. I spend a lot of time dreaming about what I am going to do when I grow up. Unfortunately I don’t think I will live that long. My kidneys have failed and my body is something of a wreck.
On the other hand there is no reason why we should die. Sound crazy? You bet. I am repeating some stuff I learned when I lived in a spiritual community back in the seventies. It was exactly what I had been seeking as a child. When I was seven or eight I was a really good Catholic. I went to church and prayed and believed, but then in sixth or seventh grade while walking home from Religious school I had an experience that made me decide that maybe the Catholic version of god wasn’t right. I found my dog run over on the side of the road dying. I figured if the Catholic god couldn’t watch my dog, when I was in their religious school, then that god wasn’t for me. Then I went on a seemingly life long adventure to find out what the truth was. I took acid, and saw the psychedelic god. I studied Marxism and Gnosticism and lived in a spiritual community for seven years and then I became a punk rocker and an anarchist. I tried being a family guy. I became a hot shot salesman and then a drug addict. I went to India and France. I studied with the Hare Krishna’s and I spent a lot of time working at a regular job as a regular guy and now I find myself disabled. Even though it has been a long and bumpy ride, its been too short and I haven’t had time to even write my book.
So what about it? Do we have to die? I guess the flesh wears out too fast. It is subject to harsh radiation in the world as it is now. This is no garden of eden.
This is the Wikipedia version of Death
“Death is the termination of the biological functions that define a living organism. The word refers both to a particular process and to the condition that results thereby. The nature of the latter has been for millennia a central concern of the world’s religious traditions and of philosophical enquiry. Belief in some kind of afterlife or rebirth has been a central aspect of many religious traditions. Since contemporary science has yet to identify the origin and nature of consciousness, any view about the existence or otherwise of consciousness after death remains speculative.
Phenomena which commonly bring about death include predation, malnutrition, accidents resulting in terminal injury, and disease. Death of an entire species is known as extinction. Human activity has increased the number of extinctions in recent times, one cause, for example, being the destruction of ecosystems as a consequence of the spread of industrial technology.
Almost all animals fortunate enough to survive hazards to their existence eventually die from senescence. Rare and remarkable exceptions include the hydra and the jellyfish turritopsis nutricula, both thought to be, in effect, immortal. Causes of death in humans as a result of intentional activity include suicide, homicide and war. From all causes, roughly 150,000 people die around the world each day.
Physiological death is now seen as less an event than a process: conditions once considered indicative of death are now reversible. Where in the process a dividing line is drawn between life and death depends on factors beyond the presence or absence of vital signs. In general, clinical death is neither necessary nor sufficient for a determination of legal death. A patient with working heart and lungs determined to be brain dead can be pronounced legally dead without clinical death occurring. Precise medical definition of death, in other words, becomes more problematic, paradoxically, as scientific knowledge and medicine advance.”
Certain jellyfish are immortal. Cool.
This is Wikipedia on Immortal Jellyfish.
“Turritopsis nutricula or immortal jellyfish is a hydrozoan whose medusa, or jellyfish, form can revert to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known case of a metazoan capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation. Cell transdifferentiation is when the jellyfish “alters the differentiated state of the cell and transforms it into a new cell. In this process the medusa of the immortal jellyfish is transformed into the polyps of a new polyp colony. First, the umbrella reverts itself and then the tentacles and mesoglea get resorbed. The reverted medusa then attaches itself to the substrate by the end that had been at the opposite end of the umbrella and starts giving rise to new polyps to form the new colony. Theoretically, this process can go on infinitely, effectively rendering the jellyfish biologically immortal, although in nature, most Turritopsis, like other medusae, are likely to succumb to predation or disease in the plankton stage, without reverting to the polyp form. It’s one of the longest-living organisms in the world, However, no single specimen has been observed for any extended period, and it is impossible to estimate the age of a specimen.”
The answer seems to be to revert to a sexually immature state after doing your reproductive duty. Pre-pubescence forever!!
Tags: Human Death, Immortal Jellyfish