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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

Half-serious, half-joking, but I think that procreation and death are nature's way using the "have you tried turning it off and on again?" approach to evolving multicellular life. It's probably the most cost-efficient, all things considered.

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Well yeah - if you 'compress' an organism down to a single cell, then it has far less entropy, far fewer degrees of freedom in which to go wrong, and a much more pass/fail manner of doing so. Changes are much more likely to cause a 'checksum failure' and terminate the offspring early before it's used a lot of resources rather than allow mutant offspring to grow. Things like cancer, where a small group of cells decides to go off the script, are trivially eliminated.

>"Things like cancer, where a small group of cells decides to go off the script, are trivially eliminated."

And viruses and parasites, probably a very hard problem to crack otherwise. Reboot from a fresh image.

Now that you mention it: many viruses stay with you your entire life once you have been infected by them, and are simply continuously suppressed by your immune system.

Yea, could be. Maybe there is research out here to support that. But you don't really have to be a researcher to realize birth, aging and death are fundamental pillars of all life since a few billion years back. It is human nature to try and live forever, granted. But it was always hubris, and will forever be.

Fundamental pillars of all life except for things that don't die?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence

That some extreme outliers exist, doesn't change the fundamental fact. And the idea that you can somehow graft parts of the DNA of aspen groves, hydra or similar into humans to make them live longer is grotesque (to me, I should add. I accept that I might be a relative lone voice in the science-optimistic desert here)

With enough study, we could conceivably engineer better cells. If we can then implant those cells into our tissues, then we could slowly replace all the 'faulty' cells in our body with the immortal version 2.

Most cost-efficient for what purpose?

Increase entropy.

No one has the purpose of increasing entropy.

And you're not the person I was asking anyway.

For change and adaptation to new contexts. Unless you know of a way to turn an elephant into a fly and back. I mean that literally.

For battling decay. It can be easier to grow a new body from a single cell, than to keep patching up a running one.

A desire for immortality is the individual point of view. In the big picture of things, there is little to no selection pressure for immortality. There is plenty of selection pressure for adaptation and change, and death and rebirth are effective tools for that.

> For battling decay. It can be easier to grow a new body from a single cell, than to keep patching up a running one.

And we do the same in IT. Sometimes the old system has piled on so many hotfixes and customizations that in order to upgrade, you can only build up a new system next to it and transfer your data to it. Then you shutdown the new system. That's procreation, learning, and death.

That's my line of thought too: look closely and see indirect empirical evidence of this happening in all kinds of other systems. Life is no different.

> A desire for immortality is the individual point of view. In the big picture of things, there is little to no selection pressure for immortality. There is plenty of selection pressure for adaptation and change, and death and rebirth are effective tools for that.

Yes there is... an individual that does not age will have many more offspring than one that does.

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