This first bit is a reprint from 2021, but if you’ve seen that before, scroll down, because Wait! there’s more.
Original Post from 2021
By far the most popular thing I have ever done in the roughly ten years I’ve been writing for the public is an 800-word script for an educational animation on the TED-Ed website. Since it was posted in 2014, it has been viewed nearly 4 million times 5 million times.
That popularity is clearly the result of my good fortune to work with Anton Bogaty, an animator whose thirty-five other TED-Ed videos range from hundreds of thousands to millions of views. I interviewed him for the fifth anniversary of our work in an online magazine called The Intergalactic Medicine Show. We discussed his career in animation and especially in games of the card and electronic varieties.
Updates from 2023
The reason I’m revisiting this particular piece of media on this particular Monday is that I’m using it as the basis for a member talk at my Rotary club, which is meeting at 12:30 today, 10/9, at The Terrace inside the Greensboro Coliseum Complex.
By the way, our club is hosting its annual fundraiser, called Boil & Bru, this Friday night at Summerfield Farms. Karen Pollard in the video below was the person who recruited me to Rotary.
As a boost to that event, I include a link to The Sample, a free AI-driven newletter recommendation service.
Some Science of (Im)Mortality
Despite its popularity, I was never quite satisfied with that TED-Ed video. 800 words is not a lot of space to get into tricky concepts like entropy. I’ve had a lot more practice talking about it in the past nine years, though, so I’m eager to give it another shot.
Rack ‘em up
My favorite metaphor for entropy, as it relates to the biological concepts of life and death, is pool. Not the basic multiplication tables,
but the number of ways it is possible to rack 15 billiard balls. It’s called a factorial.
15! = 15 x 14 x 13 x 12 x 11 x 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 1,307,674,368,000
In other words, there are over a trillion ways to do it wrong, and exactly one way to do it right — in ascending numerical order, with the 8 ball in the center. I won’t bore you with all the math (because I don’t really know it), but it’s easy to imagine that the number almost perfect combinations (the 8 is switched with one other ball) is much smaller than the number of combinations that are waaay off (where only one ball is in the right place).
Entropy is not about a magical push towards chaos. There are just more ways to be dead than there are to be alive. It’s certainly possible to rack the balls perfectly. People do it every day. It requires energy to pick the balls up and put them where they should be, rather than waiting for them to accidentally bounce off the rails and roll into place.
The problem is even worse with a deck of 52 cards, and unimaginably more so when you’re thinking about cells and atoms and molecules. There are relatively few ways to be healthy, and sooo many more ways to be sick, or injured, or dead. This is why non-pregnant adults, who are no longer growing, still need to eat — for the energy to continually rearrange their molecules, to reset the rack.
Killer Mutants
One problem with this perpetual repair model is that the machines that do the repair are also subject to breakdown. The individual proteins can be replaced, as long as the instructions for making them are intact. However, every time you divide a cell and copy the DNA, you risk a permanent mistake that corrupts the blueprint. The genes that make the proteins that repair DNA accumulate mutations like any other genes. Collect enough mutations, and you get cancer, or die from some other failure.
The average number of mutations at the end of lifespan across species was around 3200, suggesting there is a critical mass of errors after which a body is unable to function correctly.
The journalistic article linked above is based on this paper by scientist / illustrator Alex Cagan. Though I’m no longer a Twitter user, there is supposedly a Tweetorial here.
At the bottom of that Pocket article above are a half-dozen others on the molecular and cellular mechanism of aging, and how we might hack them to live longer. I’m happy to discuss any of them.
The Cryonic Man
Towards the end of the TED-Ed video I mention the idea of freezing people to preserve them, a la Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, one of my favorite shows as a kid. Anton went with the Star Wars reference instead (Han Solo frozen in metal), but then, he’s younger than me, and probably didn’t have William Conrad’s voice stuck in his head.
What I didn’t go into are the technical problems with freezing large mammals like humans. Temporary cooling works really well for surviving drowning and certain surgeries.
Anna Bagenholme, a 29-year-old skier, fell through ice covering a ravine in Norway.
Her heart stopped for more than three hours and her body temperature dropped to 13.7C (56.7F).
This is the longest and coldest cardiac arrest on record and that she survived at all is nothing short of miraculous.
This case alters the very concept of life and death and reminds us that death itself is not an event but a process. A process that might be manipulated to our advantage.
But cooling is not freezing. Freezing involves the formation of ice crystals, which are pointy and tend to shred delicate cell membranes. That’s why we call it frostbite.
Most of the animals who routinely freeze themselves are small, so they freeze faster and have less time for ice crystals to form, and they also have natural molecules that act like antifreeze, to slow the formation of ice crystals even further. Wood frogs use urea and glucose. Arctic char use special proteins that disrupt crystal formation. Companies like Pfizer are attempting to mimic these processes not for whole bodies, but for smaller organs, trying to keep them alive until they can be transplanted.
Frozen Assets
Ironically, it’s probably not the scientific / technical problems that we will never solve, but the economic problems. How many companies do you know of that last for 500 years? (Pfizer was established in 1849, making it a measly 174 years old.)
A recent study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years . . .
Large companies need a continuous input of more and more management energy simply to remain in existence. The larger the company, the more energy it needs … to survive. In short, large companies spend more time managing themselves than they do managing their clients.
Sound familiar? Corporation does, after all, come from the same Latin root (corpus) as the word corpse. It means body, as in a collection of people (or cells) working together.
We did freeze the embryonic stem cells from our kid’s umbilical cord blood, as a hedge against juvenile leukemia and some other cancers, but those were for use in the relatively short-term future.
The Universe Will Kill You
Let’s assume that we eventually solve all these problems around biological aging. There are still plenty of dangerous things out there. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, pyroclastic flows from volcanoes. Sooner or later you’ll be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and something will happen that nobody can survive, regardless of medical technology.
Certain morbid statisticians have played with this idea, asking how long it would take for 100 immortals to be killed by “unnatural causes.” They created a web simulation, which I have screenshotted below.
It doesn’t include wars, meteor strikes, or any number of other more exotic deaths. It does include “assault by firearm,” but not the more entertaining “assault by sword,” as one might expect from all those episodes of Highlander.
Until next week,
There can be only one.
— The Kurgan
also this video is great!
Okay. Entropy. Can you give me one sentence that just sums it up???? Because it almost doesn't matter how much I read about it. I always lose the thread.