Why Do We Die ??

[182024]

If i could choose my death, it would be peacefull and while im asleep, i think there is something quite scary in the idea of slowly and painfully dying.

 

I think sometimes there doesnt HAVE to be a reason why something happens, it just does.

[Harleyman]

I thought I would start a happy thread joke

 

On a serious note why? Everything seems to have a friggin expiry date. Can't genetics find a cure for ageing & we all live forever Or am I just being floaty asking this Q?

 

You die to make room for others coming along. The earth can only sustain and support so much of the two legged species

[Bannon2010]

what a stupid question

[MadnBad]

I thought I would start a happy thread joke

 

On a serious note why? Everything seems to have a friggin expiry date. Can't genetics find a cure for ageing & we all live forever Or am I just being floaty asking this Q?

 

Everything wears out eventually from mountains to microbes even the sun.

It's just a matter of how good your genes are , but you'll wear out eventually and since we can't yet fit good quality spare parts kicking the bucket is inevitable.

[bizzle]

what a stupid question

 

Too you maybe however to others not & the proof is in the response I have had.

 

Thanks for your input, appreciate it, not

[bizzle]

Everything wears out eventually from mountains to microbes even the sun.

It's just a matter of how good your genes are , but you'll wear out eventually and since we can't yet fit good quality spare parts kicking the bucket is inevitable.

 

Thanks MadnBad..I guess it has something to do with the fear of the unknown.

[bizzle]

Alot of people frightened of dying. I could not care less if i dropped dead typing this now. If i had the choice and was to come back would like to return as a part of the female body next time

 

I bet you would

[MadnBad]

Thanks MadnBad..I guess it has something to do with the fear of the unknown.

 

I wouldn't fear it if i were you i like to think of it the same way Peter Pan does "to die would be a great adventure" and one we embark on regardless of our own will.

I should add that to the favourite quote section.

[bizzle]

I wouldn't fear it if i were you i like to think of it the same way Peter Pan does "to die would be a great adventure" and one we embark on regardless of our own will.I should add that to the favourite quote section.

 

I had never thought of death like that more the reverse Goodness knows why?

 

I like that way of thinking you have mentioned.

 

Thanks again

[medusa]

For all of the advances in rates of survival for all sorts of diseases and in overall lifespan of people that have been made in parts of the world over the last 100 years, what has not been advancing at the same rate and appears to have remained completely constant is the rate at which our bodies seem to wear out and at which age we begin to struggle health wise, meaning that whilst 50 years ago someone would die at 70 after 5-10 years of declining health, these days someone born now may be expected to die 10 years later, but the onset of morbidity is at approximately the same age so they are likely to have 20 years or more of noticeable decline of health before death.

 

We wear out, or more specifically bits of us wear out. Arthritic changes can normally be spotted on x-rays of almost everybody from their mid 30s onwards, which may be many years before the person themselves notices the effects of these changes, but the changes are there never the less.

 

Organs which start off being vastly overengineered, like lungs, gradually amass micro-scarring from our life encounters and this eventually starts to add up, just like the damage to kidney function from our blood pushing through the glomeruli for all the years we are alive starts to reduce the organ's capacity for work.

 

If you put this together with our tissues' ability to heal slowing down then eventually the rate of damage overtakes the rate of repair and we get chronically ill.

 

I used to have an ongoing debate with a couple of my GPs (when I worked as a medical rep) which was about what humans would die of when the medical profession had cured heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer etc. The answer, after many months of research on population studies and the like, was that there is no way that scientists can work out a cure for every illness because once one thing is reduced with medication or lifestyle changes, that seems to be compensated for by a rise in other things.

 

So, less people die of the consequences of high blood pressure because we treat high blood pressure, but that then results in more people surviving long enough to acquire the cancers which have always been a feature of old age.

 

There's an interesting correlation with animals here. As we've got better at caring for our cats and dogs and providing their dietary needs and medical needs, we've started to see the onset of the same sorts of diseases of old age that we have seen in humans for hundreds of years- dementia, cancers of old age, organ failure through ongoing decline rather than specific disease, limiting conditions like blindness and deafness and the like.

 

It appears that each species has a point to which they function really well, but after that age 'old age' takes over and at present there seems to be little that medical science can do about it.

 

The reason and cause for this apparent 'sell by date' is something which has been debated for decades in the scientific community. Potential reasons for ageing include natural killer cells, death genes and chain end length errors on DNA, but as with most science, every smart idea is a hypothesis rather than a fact.