A couple of years ago, there was this information flowing around on the internet that “immortality is mathematically impossible”, and as an average consumer I just accepted it. Today, it randomly clicked me that I should ask why.
Q1: Is this claim even true? Because we already know that immortal jellyfishes exist and they can reverse aging (hopefully I’m not wrong here).
Q2: How does math play a role in this claim? (really curious about this one)
Lastly: I don’t know if i should flair this post as ‘Biology’ or ‘Math’?
In: Mathematics
The only way that statement makes any sense is that it’s simply a re-statement of the idea that mathematics informs the physics of the universe as we understand it, and as best we can tell the universe will eventually end as the universe gets colder and loses energy, and therefore we can conclude that we will also eventually end, making immortality impossible.
But that’s just a fancy way of saying “everything will end one day at some point”, which is hardly a groundbreaking philosophy, seeing as when humans say “immortal” they usually mean not dying of old age on the scale of human existence, not a universal scale.
It’s more physics than maths, but yes. Every process loses energy over time until it just stops.
Entropy wins against everything.
> “immortality is mathematically impossible”,
This is a meaningless statement. There needs to be a clear explanation of what this means.
Math is a language so that statement is equivalent to saying” Immortality is impossible according to the English language”.
Basically, it sounds deep but it says nothing.
You can have an individual organism that just keeps repairing itself or replacing itself, but that all takes energy. Life takes energy, and there’s only a finite amount of usable energy in the universe. Even if the only living thing in the universe were a single immortal jellyfish and the material required for it to sustain itself, it would eventually use up all the energy and it would no longer be alive.
Maybe the statement was about statistics. There’s a small chance that the DNA of a cell gets damaged due to external factors or spontaneously, but living beings have mechanisms to repair or limit the damage, some do better than others, for instance a cancer happens when a cell with damaged DNA doesn’t die and gets out of control.
This means statistically there’s a chance that the DNA of all cells gets damaged around the same time so no matter how good an organism might be at dealing with the damage, it won’t have an opportunity. Of course that chance would be insignificant and this was a very extreme scenario to illustrate the idea, but as long as something like this is possibe then immortality is impossible.
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