Death

{{sources}}
[[File:CathedralOfTrier Skeleton.JPG|upright|165px|thumb|I'll be seeing you!<br>[[File:Frederic Chopin - Marche funèbre.ogg]]]]
{{philosophy}}
{{hatnote|Not to be confused with the first-ever death metal band appropriately named {{wpl|Death (metal band)|Death}}}}
{{cquote|Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.<br>
It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.|||[[Epicurus]]<ref>[http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html Letter to Menoeceus]</ref>}}
{{cquote| And I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There's no reason for it, you've gotta go sometime.||| Gerry O’Driscoll talking to Pink Floyd “The Great Gig in the Sky” <ref> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XwY1ll2TPAA&pp=ygUfZ3JlYXQgZ2lnIGluIHRoZSBza3kgcGluayBmbG95ZA%3D%3D </ref>}}

'''Death''' is the end of [[life]] and is conceptually easier to understand than [[life]]. Everything that is not alive is dead, even if it never lived to begin with, like a piece of [[quartz]]. We measure [[life]] with thermodynamics, defining it as decreasing internal [[entropy]] while increasing it externally. Death is when the same physical and chemical processes carry on but increase entropy both internally and externally.

One well-known theory equates "the wages of [[sin]]" with death ({{bible|John|3|16}}), but other ways of achieving death exist.

==In humans==
Death is a complicated subject for humans since we are subject to death at any time. And it is not so much a singular event, but like the [[When does life begin?|beginning of life]], is a sequence of events best described as a process rather than a single occurrence. For the [[reductionism|sake of pragmatism]], treating it as an event remains useful. Various conventions have existed to make a legal or medical decision regarding whether a person has "died."

This topic is crucial because doctors (and lawyers) need to know how to define death: when is it okay to stop trying to save someone's life, when can the organs be harvested for transplants, and when is it safe to say that someone has killed or been killed, and so on. Thus, death is a point where certain things stop happening.

Everyone who reads this article is very likely to die before 100, and is almost certain to die before 120. Anyways, we all are going to die. Resistance is futile.

===Clinical death===
Before heart-lung machines were available, the persistence of a pulse was the main factor when considering whether someone was alive or not. If someone's heart stops beating, their cells lose access to oxygen and nutrients carried in the blood, and they can't get up and walk. Neurons in the brain will begin to starve after ten seconds of oxygen deprivation, leading to loss of consciousness. Circulatory arrest exceeding 3 minutes may cause irreversible brain damage. This window corresponds to the time cells exhaust their ATP when unsustained, as Phagocytes can no longer work. Unable to clean up rogue enzymes and destroy decomposers, the body starts decaying after minutes.

"Clinical death" refers to the absence of a pulse. Notably, while clinical death often leads to brain death, it is ''not'' the same thing. Stories of people "coming back from the dead" or "being dead for three minutes" come from being ''clinically'' dead but not suffering irreversible brain failure. Tales of [[near-death experience]]s (NDEs) are always good for a book deal or a stint on [[Coast to Coast AM]]. The universality of the experiences across cultures suggests a biological explanation, like perhaps the reaction of any human brain to mortal trauma.

Unless there is some active intervention by modern medical technology, the entire process described below is an inevitable consequence of clinical death. In other words, if your heart stops, you ''will'' turn to mush.

===Brain death===
More recently, [[brain]] death has become a more relevant landmark. Although it depends on the presence or absence of brain activity, it can be difficult to assess, as an EEG will not necessarily show low levels. Although a lack of a pulse is a good indication that someone isn't going to make it, their consciousness may still work, if only for a few minutes. Brain death occurs when the brain is starved of oxygen, usually ''after'' the heart stops beating. Unlike the heart, though, brain death is currently irreversible. This definition can prove very controversial in cases where it's the other way around. Consciousness can fail perpetually, but the rest of the body can persist due to unconscious processes, known as {{wpl|persistent vegetative state||.}} Such was the case with [[Terri Schiavo]], who unfortunately got tossed around like a political football. Various political [[conservatism|conservative]]s tried to score points with [[fundamentalism|fundamentalist]] [[Christian]]s.

===Cellular death===
The whole idea of defining "death" becomes more complicated by ''cellular'' death. Even if someone's heart stops and their brain ceases to function, the chemical and biological processes inside each [[cell]] will go on. They will continue respiring, producing proteins, and replicating until they run out of energy in the form of food and oxygen. Cells are not intelligent or aware (even if the organism they form ''is''), so they don't know that they're part of someone who has died. You could theoretically clone a pig from fresh sausages because many of the cells inside them are still alive (think about ''that'' next time you buy a string from the butcher's!).

However, a many-celled organism is an [[emergence|emergent]] entity arising from when cells join together and organize into tissues and organs to function together. Multi-cellular entities die when the cells fail to coordinate because the brain fails to monitor the entity's actions (brain death) or nutrients go astray (clinical death). 

An issue with [[pro-life|people]] who claim life begins at a cellular stage as an argument against [[abortion]] or [[birth control]] emerges here. To avoid [[special pleading]], they should also conclude it would ''end'' at the cellular stage despite the infeasibility of tracking every last decomposing cell. ''No one'' says that "death" happens at cellular death.{{cn|joke}}

===Chemical death===
Although not a "death" by any sensible definition, it is best to cover the final step. The ''shape'' of a body will still exist after death and often beyond even cellular death, although it may not look too good. At a chemical level, the previously living body stops resisting entropy and comes to equilibrium with the environment. Usually, this occurs through the influence of other still-living organisms via decomposition. Even the greatest hair-splitters in the world wouldn't want to push back the "point" of death further than this. It's not even clear how death ''is'' at any point after everything once in the body is scrambled out of existence from decomposition and erosion.

===Information-theoretic death===
Coined by people discussing [[cryonics]], this concept describes brain annihilation so complete that no hypothetical technology could fix it, no matter ''how'' advanced it is. Due to how chemical death works, we can infer that the former implies the latter once it spreads to the whole body (barring infinitesimally improbable time travel). As even brain death remains irreversible, this concept lacks current practical uses.

==Immortality==
[[Immortality]] is the ability to never die. It currently remains hypothetical, and any real immortal being would eventually still have to deal with end-of-universe scenarios like the {{wpl|heat death of the universe||,}} {{wpl|Big Crunch||,}} {{wpl|proton decay||,}} etc. Immortality is common in [[religion]]s; most [[god]]s are believed immortal, and most religions promise [[heaven|eternal paradise]] or [[hell|torment]].

So far the endeavor to fight against aging and death in humans has always been a losing battle, and this may still be the case in the future.

===Afterlife===
''See our [[afterlife|main article]] on this subject.''

An afterlife is a speculative concept that one's [[soul|disembodied consciousness]] will [[magic]]ally leave the body ''post mortem''. In the [[Good old days | Good Old Days]], it became trendy to worry about death - meaning the quality of one's putative afterlife. (Religious establishments fostered and played on such fears.) In depraved [[secular]] modern times, the average punter has transferred concerns about death to fixating on popular-media portrayals of [[murder]].

===Biological===
One of the more immediately relevant obstacles to immortality is aging. Individual cells can only reproduce so many times before they accrue so much damage that they commit suicide via programmed cell death. This phenomenon appeared in animals as a "safety mechanism," lest some of those [[mutation]]s make the cell [[cancer]]ous.<ref>[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12591734/ Predominant suppression of apoptosome by inhibitor of apoptosis protein in non-small cell lung cancer H460 cells: therapeutic effect of a novel polyarginine-conjugated Smac peptide]</ref>

As stated at the beginning of the article, single-celled creatures and plants often reproduce asexually, making "immortality" difficult to define for them. Is the growth of aspen trees "immortal" if nothing happens to them?

Biological immortality is immunity to aging; one's likelihood of dying doesn't change no matter how old one is. However, it does not imply a chance of 0%. You can still get eaten, starved, asphyxiated, exploded, or otherwise killed. "Immortality" is not synonymous with "invulnerability." It just means things won't break down as you age.

Biologically immortal creatures include:
*'''Hydra''', a genus of simple fresh-water animals possessing radial symmetry. All cells continually dividing allows defects and toxins to dilute among daughter cells. How hydrae keep their telomeres from shortening from replication is unknown.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20141103011551/https://biochem.uci.edu/steele/PDFs/Hydra_senescence_paper.pdf Mortality patterns suggest lack of senescence
in Hydra]</ref>
*'''''Turritopsis nutricula''''', a 1/5-inch-long species of jellyfish that uses a process called '''transdifferentiation''' to replenish cells after [[sexual reproduction]]. As such, the life cycle of the '''immortal jellyfish''' goes from egg to planula (larval stage of stinging animals) to a polyp (sessile creature rooted to a substrate) to medusa (jellyfish), then back to a polyp, back to medusa, ''et cetera'', ''ad infinitum''. This cycle can potentially repeat indefinitely, rendering it biologically immortal. Unfortunately, the immortal jellyfish is zooplankton ("plankton" simply referring to any marine life that can't move against the current) and gets eaten a lot. The species originated in the Caribbean Sea but has since become cosmopolitan.
*Both sexual and asexual '''planarian flatworms''' (class '''''Turbellaria''''') appear to live indefinitely and have "apparently limitless [telomere] regenerative capacity fueled by a population of highly proliferative adult stem cells."<ref>[https://pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1118885109 Telomere maintenance and telomerase activity are differentially regulated in asexual and sexual worms]</ref> A planarian can regenerate from as little as 1/279th of the original.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20150906200911/https://nsf.gov/news/newsletter/aug_06/index.jsp New Wi-Fi Network Brings Eye Care to Thousands in India]</ref> ''Science!''

===Research===
The metaphorical quest for the holy grail has been in people's minds for at least a few thousand years, not satisfied with merely a promising of spiritual agelessness, it has been attempted by people unscientifically. Many might be familiar with the story of the Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang. On his fifth tour, after a comet had struck, prophecies had informed him that he would die, and after becoming ill he had taken efforts to seek a cure for his mortality, his court alchemists handed him mercury, leading to his death, at least so the story goes.<ref>https://archive.org/details/historyofchina00wrig/page/49/mode/2up</ref> Along the years of history to the present, you can find many other stories of alchemists and magicians that had tried to find their immortality, all across the world. Today, a more empirical approach surfaced to genuinely start asking the questions of how we die in the first place, in a biological sense, and in doing so, maybe even find a way to prevent those mechanisms taking place and prolong our lives.

Today, anti-ageing research is a multi-billion dollar industry.<ref>https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/billionaires-anti-ageing-research/</ref> Very rich people are very serious about solving this using the scientific method, and although you can find an absolute plethora of opportunistic quacks, there is a real body of researchers doing genuine work in that field.<ref>https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/has-first-person-to-live-to-be-150-been-born/</ref><ref>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7366647/</ref><ref>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6883788/</ref> As of today, there is no known 'cure' for growing old, even though it is being worked on, claims to the contrary should probably be met with a dose of scepticism.

Despite all the good news by proponents of radical life extension, there are still good reasons to remain skeptical about whether growing old will be 'cured' or the process of aging will be significantly delayed. In reality, the increment of life expectancy is slowing down, and it is unlikely that the percentage of people living to 100 years old will ever exceed 15% for females and 5% for males without any means to slow aging<ref>{{cite journal |author1=S. Jay Olshansky |last1=Olshansky |first1=S. Jay |last2=Willcox |first2=Bradley J. |last3=Demetrius |first3=Lloyd |last4=Beltrán-Sánchez |first4=Hiram |coauthors=Bradley J. Willcox, Lloyd Demetrius & Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez |title=Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century |journal=Nature Aging |date=2024-11 |volume=4 |issue=11 |pages=1635–1642 |doi=10.1038/s43587-024-00702-3 |url=https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-024-00702-3 |language=en |issn=2662-8465}}</ref>; moreover, despite the impressive developments in computer technology and artificial intelligence in recent decades, the progress of scientific and technological innovation is slowing down in general<ref>{{cite journal |author1=Russell J. Funk |last1=Park |first1=Michael |last2=Leahey |first2=Erin |last3=Funk |first3=Russell J. |coauthors=Michael Park, Erin Leahey |title=Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time |journal=Nature |date=2023-01 |volume=613 |issue=7942 |pages=138–144 |doi=10.1038/s41586-022-05543-x |url=https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x |language=en |issn=1476-4687}}</ref>, especially in medicine, as pointed out by [[Eroom's law]]<ref name="MyUser_Pipeline.corante.com_October_3_2015c">{{cite web | vauthors = [[Derek Lowe|Lowe D]] | url = https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/eroom-s-law | title = Eroom's Law | format = | work = In the Pipeline | date = 8 March 2012 | access-date = 16 October 2015 }}</ref>, and the progression of computer technology has so far failed to translate to medicine, which means we should not realistically expect that there will be big breakthrough in medicine, and thus should not realistically expect that aging will be slowed or cured, therefore we should not expect the demographic trend that the increment of life expectancy is slowing down will be changed by future technological progress.

==See also==
*[[27 Club]]
*[[Capital punishment]]
*[[Deathbed conversion]]
*[[Death clock]]
*[[Death tax]]
*[[Health care rationing]] ("death panel")

==References==
{{reflist|2|80%}}

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Categories: Medicine, Philosophy, Horror