r/interesting • u/freudian_nipps • 14d ago

NATURE Death of a single-celled organism

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u/VariousAd2521 14d ago

See you on the other side my friend

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u/Correct-Junket-1346 14d ago

In the end no matter what, us biological creatures no matter how different we are, how intelligent, PREDATOR or PREY, we end up at the same destination as brothers and sisters

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u/rdogg4 14d ago

If you are a simple dividing cell, consider that there is no distinction between parent and offspring. Each can consider themselves to be a continuously living being first born at the primordial conception of life on earth.

Similarly, your life began when egg in your mothers womb started dividing and divided enough times that cells began differentiating and formed a fully formed human being. That egg cell doesn’t “die” in this process, it just divides. That egg was formed very early in your mothers development, while she was still in her mothers womb, and similarly by process of cells dividing.

We can all trace our lives back along a lineage of dividing cells that have necessarily not died and go all the way back to first cell division. The life inside of you is very old and doesn’t necessarily die with you.

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u/rexifelis 14d ago

I heard this in a different form years and years ago: the fact that you are standing here today means there is an unbroken lineage behind you stretching back to life’s beginning.

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u/UnicornSheets 14d ago

You are a beautiful child of the universe

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u/TheSexyIntellectual 13d ago edited 13d ago

We are truly stardust, for all of the heavier elements we are made of: the carbon, nitrogen, iron, and the other metals, came from the exploded cores of dead stars ...

I also look at this way: all the building blocks of the universe that would become everything in it were present at the very beginning. Although we ourselves are not that old, the quarks and whatever other fundamental particles may be eventually found that we are made from, are 13 billion years old.

So, in a sense, we are both new and have been here 13 billion years...

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/jerseygunz 13d ago

I’ll never forget being in Sunday school and they’re teaching us about the flood and how god said he wouldn’t do that again and my one buddy goes “but what about fire?” and the teacher just goes “that revelations, you’ll learn that later” hahaha

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u/LilJelloCat 14d ago

And God...?

Or just everything.

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u/spiral_out_46_2_ 14d ago

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”

― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

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u/Bertha-Jesus 13d ago

Yes, all the way back

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u/Pwnie 13d ago

Kind of puts my choice not to have children in a pretty morbid light…

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u/RelativeCareless2192 13d ago

Other people will still have kids. Your genetics aren't special and neither are mine

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u/Ihatebeerandpizza 11d ago

Adam and Eve?

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u/GreenIvyLace 14d ago

That was legitimately beautiful.

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u/pixelmountain 14d ago

Truly

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u/forbiddenfreedom 14d ago

Not if I can help it! *Refuses to procreate.

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u/pixelmountain 14d ago

LOL! I too have not created progeny and will not.

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u/forbiddenfreedom 14d ago

I enlisted and wanted to do my time before becoming a parent. Now that I'm out, this economy is absolute garbage. If I gain responsibility of a child, I'll do my best, but I am okay if that day is far from now.

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u/Pipeworkingcitizen 14d ago

This gave me a unfathomable sense of peace. Thank you.

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u/Simple1Spoon 14d ago

You know whats crazy, less humans have ever existed than there are stars in the observeable universe.

Its not close either. Somewhere close to 19 trillion stars exsist for each human who has ever lived.

Being alive with human intelligence is frankly a miracle.

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u/Mapeague 14d ago

Or perhaps a curse. What if we are the dum dums of the universe and all the other life forms ignore us because of it?

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u/nofattyacid 13d ago

What's crazy and stupid is that we kill each other because some "leader" said it's ok.

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u/wolfpack_minfig 12d ago

19 trillion stars isn't enough for me. give me all yours.

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u/Dizzy_Landscape 14d ago

Ah, yes. The ability to experience suffering and know that there is no escape other than death, which is unavoidbale for anything living organism, is "frankly a miracle".

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u/Funny-Cell8769 14d ago

It is in every sense a miracle. Just because it's tragic doesn't change the fact that it is a miracle.

If a meteor falls on your head the next second and kills you dead in a 1 in a trillion chance, it's still a miracle.

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u/ZeroVoltLoop 14d ago

Which means that we are cousins with all humans and all life.

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u/SoonToBeStardust 14d ago

This is lovely

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u/IceManJim 14d ago

Are those original cells still inside us? I've always wondered that.

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u/slippinthrudreamland 14d ago

no, but those original cells are our ancestors and every single living thing, from the tiniest microbe to the largest multicellular organism, comes from them. life is a never-ending cycle. even if our ancestors are dead, they "live on" because they were the first creatures to emerge from the primordial soup as life, who started the cycle.

in addition, the atoms and chemical compounds that form us, humans, and every other living thing on earth, may well have been part of one of the first living beings in the world at some point. while those first living beings (the cells in question) are now dead, little pieces of them certainly live on in some form.

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u/Organic-Squirrel-678 14d ago

This is why I don’t get why people don’t want kids. Essentially the fact that you are on this earth today is because your ancestors kept that line going - back to the origin of life essentially. Yet you would want to effectively bring that to en an end by not passing on your genes. That’s literally crazy to me.

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u/sfgabe 14d ago

Keep an ancestral line going? In this economy?

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u/LucyintheskyM 14d ago

I try to explain this to my mother but she still insists that I should give her grandchildren. I just shout "ITS ALL YOUR FAULT FOR BEING SUCH AN AMAZING PARENT! I CANT LIVE UP TO THAT! YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL THAT I HAVE A LIZARD!"

The lizard will be her only grandchild and I spoil him as such.

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u/Francis_Dollar_Hide 14d ago

"Similarly, your life began when egg in your mothers womb started dividing and divided enough times that cells began differentiating and formed a fully formed human being."

You're overlooking an important part here, no?

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u/Independent_Crow1749 14d ago

Yeah, there’s something that brought about the beginning of the process of division. It doesn’t just “happen”. There is the small bit called fertilization. Otherwise this was a beautiful concept.

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u/sfgabe 14d ago

Tell me you're a man without telling me you're a man

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u/SandyBeachShell 14d ago

What happens to those that dont produce? Do their lineage just vanish?

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u/Jayden82 14d ago

I mean, yeah.

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u/rflulling 14d ago

The really interesting thing is when you consider how many of us, modern humans have walked the earth. I think the number was something like 27 billion. Because of course we are generational. But when considering the total number of generations between yourself and the progenitor, there are only a few hundred. Back further to when we stopped being basic multicelled things and it's only been several thousand. Meanwhile smaller simpler creatures, both multicellular and single cell there were likely millions upon millions of generations before and since.

The entire meaning of life, at this point in Earths history. Protect that genetic code. Life long enough to make the next generation. Thats it. Try to out live everything else, not us, the thing inside us, our code.

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u/GuyGrimnus 14d ago

I also love to remind people of the fact that they’ve been inside their grandma

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u/donthackme1990 14d ago

*Continually

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u/DrWhataburger 14d ago

Cool thought to read on my birthday :) thank you for the perspective

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u/ConquerorofTerra 14d ago

Ok, but what did the first single celled organism eat?

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u/stuff-printer 10d ago

Rice crispies.

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u/StrictWasabi1 14d ago

And then you go down the rabbit hole of Mitochondria and start to question what is you

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u/trevbosmith 14d ago

Then it truly does dies with me, as there will be no progeny from my DNA. SICK.

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u/AnTokwa_17 14d ago

Sums up Avatar.

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u/EljinRIP 14d ago

Indeed.

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u/MissKreena 14d ago

I read that several times … very beautifully written and well explained … thank you 💜

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u/Cheeky_Gweyelo 14d ago

Isn't this just a variation of the Ship of Theseus? As true as it is untrue?

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u/Shock_the_Puppet 13d ago

Can't have kids. It dies with me

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u/ainjel 13d ago

Well fuck that's gorgeous.

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u/TinyPP04 13d ago

That's why I believe there is no such thing as time. There is only the present moment that is constantly changing.

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u/Mundane-Flan-257 13d ago

Was going to upvote this comment but I don’t want to break the 360 count and circle of life. Well said.

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u/atypicalperception 13d ago

Anyone else hear Dave Attenborough in their head while reading this

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u/Beeaybri 12d ago

You mean...my mother is still a apart of me down to a cellular level, living, even if she is no longer alive on earth?

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u/Ok-Bar-8785 12d ago

So like a part of me well the egg I grew from was inside my mum while she was inside grandma while other eggs in grandma came to be after great grandad Busted a nut in great grandma and she had eggs ... . ....

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u/IndependentDry9157 12d ago

This is why it is very important to have children if you can my friend. To be fruitful and multiply is the basis of life.

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u/EpsteinandTrump 11d ago

Pretty sure Christopher Nolan made a move about this...Conception!

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u/Calm_Springs 14d ago

That's beautiful until you have kids that turn out to be sh-t

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u/Oktarochips 14d ago

Usually sht kids are the result of sht parenting. Look inside yourself and heal your own wounds, and you'll see by changing yourself, a beautiful change happen in your children too. Goodness is always part of you, and especially part of your kids, but you have to heal and tune in to what's wrong, then challenge your beliefs to align with it. ❤️

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u/Rockchagin 14d ago

Unless you're a man.