No Life Without Death

We take life for granted and expect it to last forever.
Well, life as a whole will be there for quite a long time, but our individual life is a lot shorter though!

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash

After we are born we become aware of being conscious and alive, of being an individual. This happens seamlessly. We take possession of our individuality and typically don't want to let go. Why must we die? We seem to have less issues with the fact that we were born seemingly out of nowhere.

At the same time as we're having issues with death, we go to sleep every night relinquishing our conscious state and wake up in the morning as if sleep was never there. If we were to silently cease to be alive while sleeping the last conscious thoughts would have been those just before falling asleep.

We find it very difficult to accept that we'll return to nowhere at some stage. Not to mention that we switch off at night while asleep and find it only normal to wake up in the morning (or earlier). We want eternity in one form or another. Aren't we strange creatures?

Before you get struck by anxiety, let me say that we are part of something magnificent.
Life started more than 4 billions years ago and it is still going! It started very simple and took its time to create complexity. But it never stopped. Life does not do shutdown and reboot. The best it can do in that regard is hibernate (creatures that can survive in space). In that respect we are direct descendants of the start of life billions of years ago.

Whenever a new child is conceived it grows from a living cell provided by mum. The olympic flame of life is being passed on. But think about it, it was passed on by every ancestral mother before her, and by the species out of which homo sapiens evolved, all the way up to the first single cells. Isn’t that magnificent?

For life to evolve and to create species that evolve it needs death. It needs to be able to grow what works and and let die off what doesn't work. So we are born and so we die. The same principle is executed in our body. While we see ourselves continuously there while alive there is a continuous cycle of new cells replacing the old ones.

And now have a look around. All life around you is related to you. (We are not aware of life having started more than once.) And then you may say: why all this killing? Well, life is a pyramid. As part of its evolution life created species that serve as food to others. We couldn’t exist if there weren’t other species around. We need to eat other life in order to live. It is teamwork of the highest quality. There is no vegetarian escape.

In fact it even gets better: we think of ourselves as a individuals, all human. Forget about it. There are about as many bacteria in our body as human cells and we wouldn't be very healthy without them. Evolution drives life to explore what can achieved and we are one of those achievements. And there is one big support team helping us. We help to push evolution further as part of this continously recycling multitude of life.

I find the contrast so striking when I look at the pictures from the mars rovers: there isn't a living cell around (as far as we know). On earth it is the opposite, anywhere you look there is life. Be it high up are low down.

We are currently experiencing the consequences of the expansion of our activities on earth - global warming. Nothing unusual, the earth has gone through quite a few of these transitions before be it due to the abundance a particular species or a natular disaster. Don't worry about life, it is not the Earth that has to mind. It is us. If we manage to wipe ourselves out then life will come up with new species and continue on its path of evolution.

All this nothwithstanding, as conscious individuals we find it difficult to come to terms with our finitude, with pain and illness, with the luck of the draw of how our individual live turns out to be, with our place in the totality of life around us.