Respectfully: You do. You must. Or if you don't, then life misunderstands itself. For life has adopted this pattern of death in essentially every conceivable domain, every ecological niche. Further, any hypothesised lifeform that has discovered death as unnecessary, they curiously have not arrived here for us to interrogate. The significance of that seems vaguely familiar, but perhaps just Fermi ;)
You don't know me, but I usually air toward speaking humbly about things I suspect I know. Readers are free to decide which perspective is true hubris: my hubris that aligns with all known living systems and their failed aspirations of immortality, or the other hubris that stands alone with cancers and brainless jellies, where death is a failure of all historical life to discover otherwise... that the cleverness of life we laud so much praise on -- the same life which has invented every enchanted bit of protein machinery that runs this whole beautiful mess -- that it has somehow had a blind spot all these millennia, that we humans have seen clear-eyed.
Death is hegemonic for a reason. It's the Chesterton's fence around the whole damn bustling city, that we've never seen what comes from the other side of, if we finally remove it.
Much love here. I don't mean to be dismissive, this is just something I care about deeply and wish to speak firmly on.
> life has adopted this pattern of death in essentially every conceivable domain, every ecological niche
Biological immortality exists [1].
More pointedly, life hasn't "adopted" death, it's a consequence of thermodynamics. Where it can escape it, however, it has tried. From a "Selfish Gene" perspective, our genes aim--to the degree they have aims--to be immortal. Our multicellular bodies are simply easier to replace than repair.
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!
Respectfully: You do. You must. Or if you don't, then life misunderstands itself. For life has adopted this pattern of death in essentially every conceivable domain, every ecological niche. Further, any hypothesised lifeform that has discovered death as unnecessary, they curiously have not arrived here for us to interrogate. The significance of that seems vaguely familiar, but perhaps just Fermi ;)
You don't know me, but I usually air toward speaking humbly about things I suspect I know. Readers are free to decide which perspective is true hubris: my hubris that aligns with all known living systems and their failed aspirations of immortality, or the other hubris that stands alone with cancers and brainless jellies, where death is a failure of all historical life to discover otherwise... that the cleverness of life we laud so much praise on -- the same life which has invented every enchanted bit of protein machinery that runs this whole beautiful mess -- that it has somehow had a blind spot all these millennia, that we humans have seen clear-eyed.
Death is hegemonic for a reason. It's the Chesterton's fence around the whole damn bustling city, that we've never seen what comes from the other side of, if we finally remove it.
Much love here. I don't mean to be dismissive, this is just something I care about deeply and wish to speak firmly on.