Dirt Phase

I heard a story the other day, the claim on the news was that there is this jellyfish that is immortal! I thought, "Wow, that must be tough to verify!" How does one verify if one is immortal? But then again, that isn't the point for today...

In reading the story online, I found out that this jelly fish goes through many stages of life, but when it gets to the end, it just cycles back. So, young, middle, old, then young again. Based on this, the scientists claim that this jellyfish is immortal. Shocking, I know! Hard to believe that they were that logically incorrect and still made the news!

What does immortal mean? Everything changes. Take you for example, today you know things that you didn't yesterday and you probably forgot things that you knew yesterday. If we expand that out for a few decades, at what point are you not you? General Semantics answers this question - something I blogged about a long time ago. You are not you. Every time you change anything, you have changed - an old you has died and a new you born with someone else's memories. Every second is a rebirth! So, am I saying every second should be your birthday? Yes, yes I am.

"But," you might be thinking "the story of the jellyfish is different! They mean that it is the same continuous life form! Sure, there are differences, but it is the same." Actually, it isn't the same. When it is young again, what did it lose? It has changed, its chemicals are different, its memories are different... Is a butterfly the same as a larva? Is a hamburger the same as a cow?

Throwing all that I believe away, we can celebrate the scientists' discovery of immortal life! If this creature goes through many phases and yet we consider it to be the same creature, just with different memories and different chemicals and some of its old chemicals have been used by other creatures, then I am proud to announce that I just discovered that humans are immortal!

That's right, you read it here first, Humans Are Immortal! They start as babies, go through young adult, adult, old age, then the newly announced dirt phase. During the dirt phase, there is some memory loss and loss of functionality, but so again, the matter that made up this "dirt phase human" goes back into the system and a new human is born!

I can not wait for the science to be able to track me back through my past "lives". Some day, I hope to recover all of my lost memories, something that the jellyfish can not do. So, I guess we humans are even more immortal than the jellyfish, or at least we will be some day. And since we are immortal, today is the same as a million years, so I can wait.

The Edward