Death

Death!! how we fear death! the all time fav boon of all demons is "I want to conquer death!" BTW demons etc came into picture cause of this nice blog "http://ammastales.com/", Mythological stories, just like how Dr Bappa would have told us. Talking of Dr Bappa, His death I think affected me most on the whole, I took upon myself some kind of guilt that I didnt do anything for him, more specifically I didnt get anything for him from my first salary and he just died. :-( . Burden of that is heavy :( Anyway, thats not what I had in mind when i wanted to talk about death.

If u look at the world objectively, from a scientific perspective, like I do all the time :-> :->...

Why do we die? What all can die? What does it mean when u say something died?

There are two types of death - Death by breaking- this happens to non living things as well as living ones. when something in machine goes so wrong that it can no longer function. This can happen by accident.

Another death is death by Aging or by wear and tear. You can say that this also happens to living as well as non living. but there is a difference. Animals( and all living things) have an inbuilt mechanism to fix wear and tear. We are self repairing machines. We have the capability to fix ourselves, to regenerate ourselves but in-spite of that.. we still age. There is a clock going on inside of living beings which makes people age and die. ( Simply called as "Life cycle" :D )

Dont u see? the Wear and Tear and Aging is by design!!!! Sneaky creator of ours, has installed tiny little time bombs in us meant to go off after certain time so that we inevitably die. :-(

I went about thinking why? why would he ( ;-) god is man, if he was a woman the world would have been a nicer place) want us to die? Couldn't he stop at childhood, youth - stop.?

This death by design is more apparent in some species- The annual plants used to annoy me most, I plant them in June, they flower in august, they dry up and die in December!!! Next June the seeds grow back again, I am happy, but there are 1000;s of plantlings. Out of the thousand plantlings, how many survive? 10? 20?

Creator is using Death as integral part of his design at every stage of life -

To select out the best of the lot, that death is not by aging BTW, but it is still by design. The number of offspring in any species is always much much more than required. designed for very high infant mortality. survival of the fittest.

He uses death to weed out things which have stayed for long enough also, even if you are good, u survived, u still have a dead line, u have to go and make way for new.

"Change" is the key word looks like, Death( and Birth by corollary ) is designed to promote evolution, if all species only died accidentally, they would reproduce far far less. So? They would be less capable to adapt to changes in the environment no? now u have animal life cycles ranging from 2 years to say 150 ( tortoise) So if the environment gradually changed over a period of thousand years, enough variety is produced in the offspring in mean time and natural selection has scope in the 10-12 generations which have gone by, to build a species which is more adapted to the new changes.

With out death, Life on earth would probably have been wiped out by now?

Death and birth is more adaptive model for a volatile ecosystem. In a planet where nothing changes, life probably lives for ever and reproduces by choice.

If one day we device a way to not die, we replace all parts of our selves , what do u think will be the consequence? one for sure we wont reproduce anymore. How long do u think one would like to continue living if we could live for ever? initially people would get tired and bored pretty soon say 200 years or so, then once people get used to the idea.. they would live for ever. No death. Evolution and adaptation would happen then at the higher level and not at the genetic level.

Now genes live for ever, the organism dies, the species morphs.

if we( humans) became immortal, organism would live forever, organism itself would morph, in effect evolution would still happen. species may also evolve, different people may choose different ways of living for ever. and Genes? Organism would control the genes rather than vice versa.

we would have so much control on the whole process that we could then do away with the time bombs and life cycles..

There are different ways of looking at death too, the individual cells in our body are dieing all the time, we dont consider ourselves dead until the whole unit stops working right? similarly may be we can consider the whole species as the organism and the individual plant for ex as a cell. so unless the plant species gets extinct, you can say the organism lives?

if you consider earth as an organism and we - each species as a cell? then until life is there on earth, earth is living. the different species are like different cells in the body, the extinction of a species does not matter as long as earth works..

Hmmm, God has designed death, he has also designed the fear of death, It is inevitable, but u fight it all your life. .. Its a game for him. God - Definitely male! ;-)

Note: I donot believe in a creator per say, but it is very convenient concept to use to understand how the world developed. Mind accepts and understands things easily when I say creator made it like that, than if I say, it happened like this out of chance.