Why We Die
I heard a report the other day about the toll that malaria is taking on the third world: sub-Saharan Africa, in particular. It kills a million people a year, and sickens around four hundred million more.
I had no idea malaria was still such a huge issue. It’s not a first-world disease, so the big drug companies don’t pay much attention to it. There’s a lesson here about the wisdom of ceding drug research and production to the cutthroat vessels of pure capitalism. We need filthy-rich angels like Bill Gates (I can’t believe I’m using the words “angel” and “Bill” and “Gates” in the same sentence) to dump gads of money into the cause to raise it out of obscurity and back into the public eye.
But the stark contrast between the landscape of illness in sub-Saharan Africa and places like the US also brings up another question: what, exactly, do we gain by killing the diseases that keep killing us?
Malaria isn’t much of an issue anymore, not in the United States. Nor is consumption, or bubonic plague, or polio, or many of those early killers that have fallen victim to the field of medicine. But every disease we defeat seems to open a doorway to the next one. For every polio, there’s a cancer. For every malaria, there’s an Alzheimer’s. And waiting behind all of these is the simplest, most inevitable killer of all: mortality.
Which got me thinking about old age, and mortality, and senescence. Why, exactly, do we die? We’re basically a bunch of reproducing cells. As long as we keep feeding them, they should keep making perfect new versions of themselves. Why don’t they?
I can think of a couple of reasons:
The infrastructure just fails. Underneath the skein of constantly regenerating cells, there’s some crappy base foundation that doesn’t regenerate, that simply ages, and falters, and dies. We’re beautiful machines built on faulty hardware; or
It’s an evil plot hatched by genes. Richard Dawkin’s book The Blind Watchmaker makes the argument that the dominant lifeform on the planet is not us, but rather our genes. We’re just the visible manifestation of a genetic war that’s been going on for billions of years. We’re complex ordnance devised by tiny twisted strands of DNA. Our mission is to survive long enough to procreate and spread ourselves and our genetic overlords across as much of the planet as possible, and then die. Immortality would be a disaster for genes. They need us to spawn and die, spawn and die, so that they can mutate and adapt and make better and better flesh-bots. So if we manage to survive for too long, they kill us. It’s planned obsolescence in its most brutal form; or
It’s just another disease: the first disease. It infected life soon after life appeared on earth, at the amoeba stage, and has plagued us ever since, passed down from species to species, generation to generation. It’s been obscured and preempted by other maladies over the eons, more efficient killers that have also proved to be more susceptible to our healer’s efforts. Death has been with us so long that we accept its inevitability without question. But it’s just another illness. It can be cured.
This last possibility is especially intriguing. What if we do eventually recognize it as a disease, and make it go away? What if Pfizer starts selling anti-death pills?
What’s waiting for us on the other side of mortality?
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