Tamas Simon, A short story of Life and Death

Kanji Symbol for Life and Death
(source: pinterest)
no copyright infringement

Prin moartea noastră păstrăm tânără lumea 

(Nicolae Iorga în Gândirea, 1931)

Tamas Simon has published this wonderful essay on Facebook (Exploring the World of Yuval Noah Harari):

Doesn't science start with observation?
What I'm observing in the world, not sure about the universe but certainly here on Earth is that the entire system from the tiniest components is set up to self organize and create life. An electron wants to find a proton. A Hydrogen atom wants to find another Hydrogen atom and form a molecule. A molecule wants to make bonds and form other larger chemicals. Life - and I think consciousness too - emerges.
As if coming alive and maintaining life was a built-in incentive.
I don't think we have a good model that explains why or how this works.
Death then is a contradiction. Why is life in global so important and life of the individual so insignificant?
I tend to think about zebras. The entire zebra herd just keeps running all the time, the "great migration". Why? To keep life of the species going? Why is that so important?
If a zebra gets eaten by a lion, it suffers and then vanishes. Nobody will remember that zebra, nobody will know its name, its thoughts and feelings or that it ever existed. How does this make sense?
Humans die too and our situation is not that much better than the zebra's. Our children and at best our grand children still remember us after we die... and then?
It also doesn't make sense.
I think people have always felt this dissonance. That's why our imagination created the "afterlife", heaven and hell, eternal soul, reincarnation, all that. But we didn't have the means to change it. We have accepted it but deep down - certainly at the individual's level we have always fought it.
So - here comes my story - what if this is just temporary? What if death is the bootloader of life?
Maybe in the beginning of development resources were scarce, individuals had to die to give up their share. The only way progress could happen was through evolution. The neocortex and learning is a fairly new thing. What if death was a necessary evil, a painful trade-off that was needed to get here. Even human progress itself was a huge price to pay.
But, if we solve death... everything suddenly makes sense. The pieces of the puzzle fall into place.
We already have the technology to grow cultured meat and stop butchering animals for food. That's a first step, isn't it?
We are also researching longevity, how to add 10-20 years to the expected life span.
Up until now aging, getting older implied getting closer to the end of our life, going forward we can push out the end date. And if every year we spend living we can add more than a year to the end, then we reach longevity escape velocity; we become amortal. (not immortal, we can still get into an accident...)
When we look back is has always been about life. When figure ourselves out it will always be about life.

(no copyright infringement intended)

(Yuval Noah Harari)