What is the biological reason for why things die?
- Thread starter Guttural Engagement
- Start date
Recommended Videos
I just think that your body just cant handle working anymore, example as most old people need help walking in some way.
as for another thing "5 reasons why immortality is worse than death - Cracked.com"
i found it interesting, but not Fully true
as for another thing "5 reasons why immortality is worse than death - Cracked.com"
i found it interesting, but not Fully true
The real main reason is that nothing lasts forever. We may last a pretty short amount of time, but once you think about it, we last longer than we should. How long would our body last dead? 2-3 years at most (except for bones). But how long do we usually live, 60-100 years. That is a pretty big difference. In the end the amount of time we have alive is pretty generous since our body is constantly regenerating. It just won't last forever. Imperfections in our DNA, problems with cells, disease, they all cause our deaths. On the positive side, you have an answer.Guttural Engagement said:
I see what you mean in the first paragraph, which is true, however Aubrey de Grey, I assure you, is not going to go the way of nuclear fusion (which If Im not mistaken, a device is in the process of being made in Europe or something, and is aimed at actually being tested in 2018, however it may not be nuclear fusion, and something else that sounds similar)meece said:
I didn't read the full discussion, but it could possibly be due to loss of telomeres in the DNA of the cells, but I'm not sure. For those who don't know, telomeres are long stretches of short repeating segments of 'junk' DNA in certain parts of the chromosomes, and over time, due to the nature of DNA replication, we lose the ends of these telomeres. Eventually, if the cells don't posess telomerase enzymes which can add length to the telomeres, the loss of DNA bases could eventually cut into the sequence for a gene, causing that gene to become unfunctional, which could eventually lead to death of the cell, depending on the gene and cell in question. Mass death of similar cell types (ie. brain, heart, etc) could lead to death.
Also things we eat can lead to adverse affects, like cholesterol can make plaques in the arteries and such, putting more strain on the heart to pump the blood, eventually causing it to overwork itself and die.
There's lots of specific reasons why the body dies depending on how a person dies.
Also things we eat can lead to adverse affects, like cholesterol can make plaques in the arteries and such, putting more strain on the heart to pump the blood, eventually causing it to overwork itself and die.
There's lots of specific reasons why the body dies depending on how a person dies.
To do my usual thing of posting without reading much ... though in this case not because I haven't time, but because I don't want my mind to be poisoned by all the wierdo suggestions that appeared simply in the first few replies, let alone the rest of it.
OP: you're close with the photo ageing idea, but on the wrong lines all the same. What of all those lifeforms that life where there is literally no light?
However, radiation can be an issue, and the mere act of living itself. Life processes are slightly chaotic (working on the molecular scale, there's a lot of brownian motion; proteins fold largely by flailing around until they lock into the lowest-energy state) and inherently entropic (it's an act of moving molecules about by expending energy, and turning high-energy compounds into low-energy ones, at the base of it all). Ionising radiation comes in and harms various parts. Deleterious chemicals build up. Stuff gets damaged and has to be replaced, but because of the possibility of cancer (which would overwhelm your body and kill you), the need to keep evolving in a changing environment (otherwise, environmental risks would kill you), and the sheer overload that would be caused by producing endless offspring without ever getting rid of the parents (which itself would cause death by starvation and overcrowding), natural selection has lead to limited lifespans.
The most basic of the life limiting processes is telomeric shortening of DNA. Your genetic material, and that of most organisms (except maybe single-cells that divide by binary fission, have loops of DNA and are far more susceptible to being killed by various factors rather than having a pampered immortality) has chains of junk code at each end of its several-million-basepair main sequences. When the cell divides, e.g. to replace damaged or worn parts of the body, including damage to the DNA itself (repairable during replication if it's not too far gone), the process shears off one of the pieces of this junk code. The reasons for such are not entirely clear, except as a means to make sure you croak. Said telomeres, or at least a tiny sliver of them, seem necessary to start the replication process, not least because if they're not there, you end up losing more important parts of your genetic material. So, on encountering missing telomeres, the replication process stops. Bam, no more new cells. You enter senecence (aka severe old age) and eventually die from the essential parts of your various organs accruing exponentially more damage that cannot be fixed, which sooner or later means your life processes cannot successfully continue; your heart and mind are sufficiently poisoned or starved of oxygen and nutrients that they cannot operate, and everything else stops because of it.
In the wild, it's to stop populations being out-of-hand. In civilisation, it's just a bit cruel. Though, it's not like our population isn't already out of hand, so it's kind of lucky we don't usually make it past 100 spins round the sun.
This holds for pretty much any multicellular organism of any complexity, though some never get the chance to experience this because their lifecycles have developed to such a bizarre degree that they end up dying sooner anyway. For example, squid and salmon that die as part of the very reproductive process. In the species' favour, however, as it can both nourish the young, and draw attention away from them (predators eat the dead adults instead)... and there are a GREAT many young from each adult.
Single cells, well... arguably they never "really" die, as they just split into two (or more, with yeast!) daughter cells. The mother sort-of ceases to exist, and simultaneously sort-of lives on in two seperate bodies. Any bacterium of a certain species alive today, that was also alive millenia ago, is conceivably part of that original one, even though billions of its clones may have been created, grown fresh cytoplasm and DNA from raw materials collected from the environment, and died off through starvation, chemical (or indeed radiation, whether solar or otherwise) exposure, dessication/over-watering, being eaten, burnt, etc.
tl;dr - Because you touch yourself at night and god hates you
OP: you're close with the photo ageing idea, but on the wrong lines all the same. What of all those lifeforms that life where there is literally no light?
However, radiation can be an issue, and the mere act of living itself. Life processes are slightly chaotic (working on the molecular scale, there's a lot of brownian motion; proteins fold largely by flailing around until they lock into the lowest-energy state) and inherently entropic (it's an act of moving molecules about by expending energy, and turning high-energy compounds into low-energy ones, at the base of it all). Ionising radiation comes in and harms various parts. Deleterious chemicals build up. Stuff gets damaged and has to be replaced, but because of the possibility of cancer (which would overwhelm your body and kill you), the need to keep evolving in a changing environment (otherwise, environmental risks would kill you), and the sheer overload that would be caused by producing endless offspring without ever getting rid of the parents (which itself would cause death by starvation and overcrowding), natural selection has lead to limited lifespans.
The most basic of the life limiting processes is telomeric shortening of DNA. Your genetic material, and that of most organisms (except maybe single-cells that divide by binary fission, have loops of DNA and are far more susceptible to being killed by various factors rather than having a pampered immortality) has chains of junk code at each end of its several-million-basepair main sequences. When the cell divides, e.g. to replace damaged or worn parts of the body, including damage to the DNA itself (repairable during replication if it's not too far gone), the process shears off one of the pieces of this junk code. The reasons for such are not entirely clear, except as a means to make sure you croak. Said telomeres, or at least a tiny sliver of them, seem necessary to start the replication process, not least because if they're not there, you end up losing more important parts of your genetic material. So, on encountering missing telomeres, the replication process stops. Bam, no more new cells. You enter senecence (aka severe old age) and eventually die from the essential parts of your various organs accruing exponentially more damage that cannot be fixed, which sooner or later means your life processes cannot successfully continue; your heart and mind are sufficiently poisoned or starved of oxygen and nutrients that they cannot operate, and everything else stops because of it.
In the wild, it's to stop populations being out-of-hand. In civilisation, it's just a bit cruel. Though, it's not like our population isn't already out of hand, so it's kind of lucky we don't usually make it past 100 spins round the sun.
This holds for pretty much any multicellular organism of any complexity, though some never get the chance to experience this because their lifecycles have developed to such a bizarre degree that they end up dying sooner anyway. For example, squid and salmon that die as part of the very reproductive process. In the species' favour, however, as it can both nourish the young, and draw attention away from them (predators eat the dead adults instead)... and there are a GREAT many young from each adult.
Single cells, well... arguably they never "really" die, as they just split into two (or more, with yeast!) daughter cells. The mother sort-of ceases to exist, and simultaneously sort-of lives on in two seperate bodies. Any bacterium of a certain species alive today, that was also alive millenia ago, is conceivably part of that original one, even though billions of its clones may have been created, grown fresh cytoplasm and DNA from raw materials collected from the environment, and died off through starvation, chemical (or indeed radiation, whether solar or otherwise) exposure, dessication/over-watering, being eaten, burnt, etc.
tl;dr - Because you touch yourself at night and god hates you