I’ma Live Forever
Despite the inescapable truth that I will die
Despite the knowledge and awareness of the final barrier, death, I still think we can outlive our present lives.
Names such as Charlie Munger, Prof. Hassan Saidi, and Karl Popper show that one can live even when the physical form is absent. Energy sustains living organisms, and energy is present when we recall vivid moments we had with those who passed away.
My mother was a strong example when she had to witness the silent passing of her mother. She had gone to prepare supper and when it was ready, she went to wake her. Silent in her chair, the usual chair she sat in while praying the rosary, sometimes in silence, sometimes in slumber.
That night, she lay still. Growing cold. I can’t imagine how it must have felt. She passed away in silence, in peace, in her comfortable seat. I once sat on that seat. It was the most comfortable one in the sitting room. Now I wish nobody ever sits on it.
Anyone who sits in it tarnishes the image I have of her. With her walking staff leaning by the armchair, stories would continue late into the night, while some of us enjoyed the movie interpretations of DJ Afro.
She will live forever in our minds.
Today’s post, however, talks about another living entity that has the potential to live forever. Their ingenuity would have been helpful at the time of my grandmother’s passing. But we don’t know how to speak to them.
I do wish I had scientist and engineer friends
I speak about the friends who live beyond the nascent capabilities of our naked eyes.
Some of our eyes are propped by glasses since physiology left us with subpar vision. Still, we cannot see the budding lifeforms right underneath our noses.
In his classic song, King Kaka muses:
Hamuamini spider webs zikishikana zinaweza funga simba?
Translated, he reminds us that the weak silk spider webs when well-connected and integrated can hold down a lion. Within the phrase lies ingenuity. Spiders have spinneret organs capable of making silk, one among the very many of nature’s marvels.
I wish I had such an engineer friend. But Spider-Man only exists in the Marvel Universe. Not our 13.8 billion universe.
Spiders can create parachutes with their webs and float from one island to another. E. O. Wilson beautifully chronicles how they survived one of the worst volcanic eruptions because of this simple ability.
With our sophisticated technology, we study engineering for a couple of years but have to build large machines to create silk. For a spider, it only has to exist. Alive. Just like silkworms. Fascinating.
If that doesn’t amaze you, then you haven’t met a spider that can live its entire life underwater, without gills. The diving bell spider creates their oxygen tanks, from a single bubble, reinforced by their webs, and let nature’s forces do the rest once they get underwater. They can then siphon oxygen from the tank to breathe underwater.
But we can see spiders. Spiders too have a finite life. They can live on air and under the sea but they cannot potentially live forever. Furthermore, I mentioned the entities that live right underneath our noses. Unless you have a peculiar interest in having eight-legged freaks crawling on your skin, they too don’t live right under our noses.
I do not move like a regular Joe
These are bacteria.
They barely move. Those that do move in spiral motions, like the ones that cause syphilis. They move because of the whip-like motions of their whips — flagella.
Lynn Margulis has studied these entities all her life. She had a bold idea about the emergence of eukaryotes, that is, you and I. It hinges on the mergers of microscopic entities.
The regular Joe moves by walking. Bacteria move by whipping. But not all of them move. Some lay still. When there is hardly enough food, bacteria can stay for millions of years without reproducing. Here in lies the idea of living forever.
They did not attend colleges for several years and gain certifications validating their titles as engineers or scientists. They just developed these capabilities.
Consider this thought experiment. Humans have existed for around 200,000 years. Bacteria can avoid reproduction for millions of years. Picture a planet with these two life forms are the only ones existent — bacteria and humans.
In the same world, we have developed the technology that allows us to see bacteria at their microscopic scale. For as long as we have existed, we have never seen bacteria reproduce. Yet, we cite reproduction as a property attributable to life forms.
Their goal, however, as echoed by the theory of Organismal Selection, is to avoid annihilation. Reproduction in the face of scarcity is a means of annihilating oneself. Bacteria thus avoid reproducing if need be, the same process we append to living creatures.
If they continue to live in this way for millions of years, without reproducing, yet humans have only existed for 200, 000 years, how would we confidently say that reproduction is a vital component of life?
Bacteria are not the regular Joes. They can live forever, potentially, as long as there are no universally catastrophic disasters. Organisms can only do one thing, and that is to avoid annihilation. Our small creatures have done that for long enough for us to call them top-tier scientists and engineers.
I do not wish for a regular life
Here’s an example of a regular life that you might relate to:
Wake up when your alarm rings. Snooze twice or thrice. Rush to the bathroom and bathe. Hopefully, you get to work by 7:68 am, which is still earlier than 8:08 am.
Bacteria have no such life. They have no boss. They have no salaries. They are not on social media, and neither do they seek your likes or shares. They do not have such recognition, and yet, they sustain our ecosystems.
They will continue to do so long after you’re gone.
They do not understand our concept of love, yet they give like they have known it all their lives. In a language foreign to ours, they chime:
I’ma live, I’ma live forever
It’s difficult to say if it is unconditional love, because you create conditions for such bacteria to survive.
Some bacteria have lived inside animals for such a long time, they would go extinct if the animals were to become extinct.
What is that if not the most proper way of living the vow — till death do us part?
I do not wish for no regular life
I did not marry a regular wife— Killer Mike
It is not a regular kind of life. It is not a regular kind of merger, even though it is common among human beings.
Occasionally, an aberrant group emerges and causes suffering. Outbreaks of plagues, cholera and pneumonia infections. Even in such moments, these creatures still tell us that they will live forever, even when we are suffering.
These outlier groups highlight unstable relationships between hosts and tenants, between humans and bacteria. When you’re at your worst, you are likely to cough very often. The tell-tale feature of someone infected with tuberculosis is wet coughs. Sometimes bloody.
This is a mechanism for the bacteria to move from one entity to another. Basically, they say you can die but I need to get onto the next one. They are on a mission to live forever.
More accurately, however, is they are on a mission to avoid death.
They don’t make ’em like this
After bacteria have found solutions to problems that torment post-docs in various institutes, it becomes evident that nature doesn’t make organisms as intelligent as bacteria.
Back in high school, we would classify organisms as highly complex or higher entities and simple organisms or lesser entities. Nick Lane, one of the most lucid and prolific scientific writers we are blessed to have, mentions how interesting it is that multicellularity has occurred only once.
From it emerged creatures as interesting as the Latimeria species, the living fossils and as savage as the stegodyphus dumicola, the spiders whose children feed off their mothers until they die. The subtle yet important caveat is bacteria have maintained their simplicity for billions of years.
They have lived forever in their structure and habits. They have avoided annihilation for this long. I would be remiss if I were to call myself more intelligent than the bacterium. David Deustch, however, might be of a different opinion.
My stance only shows how we know very little. The simple organisms know so much. They display it in their execution, in the same way that knowledge is evident in the application.
What I’m trying to say …
Humans also try to avoid annihilation. For the Christians, it is through the belief in life after death through baptism or faith in the lord Jesus.
For the Greeks of yore, it was through creating ideas that would outlive them, evident from the works of Plato, Zeno and Archimedes.
But for bacteria, they don’t have the pleasure of writing their history on paper. But their lives are inextricably linked with ours. We cannot claim to have completely understood humanity if we don’t understand microbiology.
Such small and simple things matter.
As for the bacteria, they are the small things that potentially live forever.
I am humbled to have known them.
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