r/interesting 16d ago

NATURE Death of a single-celled organism

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u/rdogg4 16d 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 16d 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/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/jerseygunz 16d 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