Is Immortal Life Possible?
Life is already immortal. We lament our mortality, while each of us is merely an expression of the phenomenon of life that began billions of years ago and may continue for trillions of years.
We do not know exactly when life began on Earth, but the oldest confirmed traces date back 3.7 billion years. It was then that the self-sustaining, never-ending, and incredibly complex chemical reaction we call life began. Every time organisms reproduce, this reaction spreads to new clusters of matter. They are insignificant as long as the whole phenomenon persists.
We see this in eusocial organisms like ants and termites. They sacrifice their lives so that the colony may continue. Similarly, a human being is a colonial organism consisting of more than 30 trillion cells. Many of them die or even sacrifice themselves daily in the fight against pathogens or for other reasons. Not all are connected to form continuous tissues. Some crawl within us, as if they have their own simple minds.
Our consciousness is not aware of these sacrifices. It evolved to keep the entire colony of cells alive at all costs. Our behavior has become too complicated due to our very complex nervous system, and our instincts were no longer sufficient to ensure our survival until we started families and bore children. This is the trick: we now mourn our mortality, but in the grand scheme of things, individuals do not matter. Female praying mantises or some spiders sometimes devour males after obtaining their genetic code necessary for procreation.
All organisms on our planet are related, and we do not have an agreed definition of a species. This concept was created for human convenience. There are many examples of fertile offspring from organisms that are quite distantly related.
Life on Earth is interconnected in many ways. In school, we learn about mutualism, symbionts, and parasites, but on the scale of the entire planet, all multicellular organisms need oxygen to survive. Humans can survive without this gas for less than two minutes before irreversible brain damage occurs. Photosynthetic organisms produce oxygen, and we are entirely dependent on them. We also cannot yet produce food from inanimate matter.
Individual cellular organisms may die, but the immortality of life will only end when all its forms that have appeared on our planet cease to exist. As long as a single cell survives, the phenomenon of life endures. This phenomenon has existed for about 4 billion years. If one cell escapes the death of our Sun, which will swell, become a red giant in its advanced age, engulf and destroy the Earth, this complex chemical reaction will continue.
Humans may use technology to spread life to other systems. Even when we are no longer here, its immortality may then last for trillions or even quadrillions of years.
The question was: Is immortal life possible?
