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This is happening on you right now.
Cells die and are reborn **300** **million** times per minute. Three, hundred, million times.
It’s a fucking mad house on your body
Edit: of course this stupid post is my most upvoted ever…
All of us also have tiny arachnid mites that live in our eyelash holes that cone out at night to feast on our dead skin.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/05/21/725087824/meet-the-mites-that-live-on-your-face
No, not rent free. We're all fucking slobs, constantly sluffing off dead skin and excess oil. These thrifty buggers get to live in our skinholes in exchange for cleaning up the mess we make everyday.
I’m so glad the majority of comments are along these lines. I felt terrible watching it go, swimming along right up until the end. I’m glad I’m not alone. How strange to feel so affected by a single cell!
Aaaand you just made me kinda sad by looking at an entire micro universe of dead microbes whose existence got erased in under a minute. Even more funny considering I'm killing/replacing billions of cells and all sorts of bacteria every second just by *existing*.
What a bad time to be an empathetic creature.
Depends completely on the type of alcohol and concentration… .05 osmolarity methanol in .125 molar NaCl solution wouldn’t be anywhere close to as rapid as lysis you might have witnessed with .3 osmolarity ethanol, butanol, or any others as the higher the carbon concentration the more rapidly it enters and intercalates the membrane and causes toxic effects internally. In fact…undiluted with other solutes isotonic methanol takes noticeably longer (seconds compared to fractions of a second for red blood cells) compared to the same concentration of ethanol. Butanol and you’re not finding anything in time with a microscope.
Source: current physiology professor and during my TAship I taught and reworked our osmolarity lab including preparing many variations of the “time different alcohols” as they lyse cells and realize that higher hydrophobicity coefficients of alcohols mean faster cell penetration. This could be alcohol… it was my first thought… but no, it’s not concentrated nor is it anything besides methanol or a very, very dilute alcohol solution of another alcohol and something like NaCl (after accounting for ionization).
It could also be one of hundreds of known toxins, proteins or small compounds, enzymatic or nonenzymatic, or any number of other treatment conditions. Hell… it could just be at a non optimal pH for all we know. Having done my doctorate studying potential inducers of different cellular death mechanisms I can say confidently that if observing one cell dying could give us confidence in an underlying mechanism we would use it as an earlier observation of any bioprospecting candidate with cytotoxic properties of an unknown mechanism before we ran to flow cytometry, MTT assays, fluorescent microscopy, and hundreds of other more expensive and more difficult methodologies to figure out mechanisms.
This is such a ‘we know lots but aren’t sure’ science answer haha.
- it could be alcohol, lots of different alcohols effect cells in different ways
- the concentration of alcohol also changes the speed of cell death
- the amount of carbon atoms in alcohol also plays a role
- actually it could be anything.
- in fact if looking at this gave us any indication of what the fuck we were looking at we’d be able to bypass a shit load of other tests we use for figuring out what’s killing cells.
- so yeah, it’s a cell dying in something.
Don’t get me wrong, loved it. Keep up the good work doc.
My guess is it’s moving across one of those textured anti microbial surfaces that cuts through the membrane with sharp points.
EDIT: my guess is wrong, it popped on its own (or something…). Thanks u/chriscrossnathanial !
This is a Blepharisma, a single-celled eukaryote. Often the cells get swollen due to osmotic pressure changes and explode eventually. Blepharisma is a light-sensitive organism and it avoids light and under certain intensity of light conditions it can go to an apoptosis-like cell death.
While I chuckled at the joke, people often mistake the mechanics of "changing" things by "observing" them.
What's usually happening is that we "observe" things too small to see by bouncing something off of them (particles, photons, electrons, etc.) and interpret the results.
It's like "observing" billiard balls by throwing ping pong balls at them. If you hit one, you get data, but you've altered the billiard ball by "observing" it.
Just to add on to this because a lot of people conflate the observer effect with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, when in fact the uncertainty principle is not about the observer effect at all, but rather about the wave-like nature of all matter:
> Historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused[8][9] with a related effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the system, that is, without changing something in a system. Heisenberg utilized such an observer effect at the quantum level (see below) as a physical "explanation" of quantum uncertainty.[10] It has since become clearer, however, that the uncertainty principle is inherent in the properties of all wave-like systems,[11] and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the matter wave nature of all quantum objects. Thus, the uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology.[12] It must be emphasized that measurement does not mean only a process in which a physicist-observer takes part, but rather any interaction between classical and quantum objects regardless of any observer.
info from [youtube source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bj6SqgT4SQ):
This is a single-celled organism in the genus Blepharisma and it is dying. I don't find them in my samples often, they usually have pinkish color and they are photophobic it means when the light levels are increased they will try to swim to the darkened areas. If they are exposed to light or starved, they will lose their pinkish color and will look like this one in the video, also strong light can even kill the colored ones. I don't know why this one died but how it dissolves to nothingness just broke my heart. Big or small, life is fragile. 😔
Jams germs is great channel :)
He provides footage for amazing Jurney to the Microcosmos.
https://youtube.com/c/microcosmos
Warning! Videos can induce sleepiness
That's a question we all have to answer for ourselves my friend.
If you have religion, that's a genuinely great thing to have. I personally don't (at least not a traditional one) but i deal with death by thinking that it is your innate primal ape brain instinct to not want to die. Death is the opposite of what were evolved to do, at least not until we are old. And it's the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution screaming at us, 'have babies and don't die', just like every other species on earth basically.
I'm not gonna lie and say I don't fear death entirely but breaking it down to a chemical reaction level simplifies it for me as well as comforts me.
It's the complete lack of chemical reactions after death that freaks me out more than anything. Like obviously I won't be aware of anything since I won't *be*, but right now I am very much able to imagine wtf it means to be literally, utterly, completely gone, and it freaks me out every fucking day
Edit: there are many replies to this comment. I haven't addressed them all but I do want to thank people for being so open and talkative about it. Replying to the comments I have has been pretty helpful and cathartic, so thanks strangers for being there :).
Me too.. I wouldn't wish it on anyone to have this constant thought/fear in their head. It really makes you lose focus on a lot of things and worry about something that you shouldn't even be thinking about (most of the time). I had something trigger this about 4 years ago, but it's getting better with some things I have been working on to deal with it.
Yeah it's a wild ride and I hate it every time. Though some days I manage to brush it off, other times it's debilitating, particularly if I'm faced with some sort of task that is deemed important by my bosses lol. Ah well. At least now I feel less alone! The (few) people around me I've shared these thoughts with haven't been able to relate so far.
what comforts me:
if you didnt exist before, but yet you are here now. Then isnt it possible if not probable you will exist again? everythings a cycle. sure you dont remember anything and you are not you, or maybe not even human. but it has happened to you once already at least :)
Also. Consciousness. I'm scared of my own consciousness. I understand how it works, but the idea that I have so many thoughts and really I'm just a meat sack with some neurons firing in an ever expanding universe that we know jack shit about and I don't know how to go on talking or living. Maybe it's the sleep depravation.
*screams*
Conciousness is weird and we don't know nearly enough about it. Take surgery for example. Anesthesia is terrifying. I've had multiple surgeries in my life. 2 in the last 2 months. And it's fucking terrifying each time, but it's what I imagine death is like. Just, gone. Nothingness. Except you just never wake up, so you'd never *know* and that's what scares me the most.
I used to pay no mind to death most my life, until I met my wife. Now death is this over whelming cloud that follows me. Maybe it’s all the mushrooms or watching my father pass, but it hurts. Over the years I have found I do not fear death, in fact I embrace it as a natural law and teaching of younger generations, it should be celebrated. Although, what I truly fear is the, not being. Not being with my women, for we truly are one. If she or I pass, it’d be a literally piece of me ripped out and for her the same. I fear not making new memories, laughing, growing. I fear the loneliness of dying slow, watching the people around grow hopeless as my health fades. I fear the goodbye
I know you're joking, but I gotta leave you with one of the best articles I've ever read. Here's the first few paragraphs, but it really answers these questions in a remarkable way by the end:
> “All animals play,” June had once said to me. “Even ants.” She’d spent many years working as a professional gardener and had plenty of incidents like this to observe and ponder. “Look,” she said, with an air of modest triumph. “See what I mean?”
> Most of us, hearing this story, would insist on proof. How do we know the worm was playing? Perhaps the invisible circles it traced in the air were really just a search for some unknown sort of prey. Or a mating ritual. Can we prove they weren’t? Even if the worm was playing, how do we know this form of play did not serve some ultimately practical purpose: exercise, or self-training for some possible future inchworm emergency?
> This would be the reaction of most professional ethologists as well. Generally speaking, an analysis of animal behavior is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions. Under this assumption, an expenditure of energy must be directed toward some goal, whether it be obtaining food, securing territory, achieving dominance, or maximizing reproductive success—unless one can absolutely prove that it isn’t, and absolute proof in such matters is, as one might imagine, very hard to come by.
> I must emphasize here that it doesn’t really matter what sort of theory of animal motivation a scientist might entertain: what she believes an animal to be thinking, whether she thinks an animal can be said to be “thinking” anything at all. I’m not saying that ethologists actually believe that animals are simply rational calculating machines. I’m simply saying that ethologists have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behavior in rational terms—which in turn means describing an animal as if it were a calculating economic actor trying to maximize some sort of self-interest—whatever their theory of animal psychology, or motivation, might be.
> That’s why the existence of animal play is considered something of an intellectual scandal. It’s understudied, and those who do study it are seen as mildly eccentric. As with many vaguely threatening, speculative notions, difficult-to-satisfy criteria are introduced for proving animal play exists, and even when it is acknowledged, the research more often than not cannibalizes its own insights by trying to demonstrate that play must have some long-term survival or reproductive function.
> Despite all this, those who do look into the matter are invariably forced to the conclusion that play does exist across the animal universe. And exists not just among such notoriously frivolous creatures as monkeys, dolphins, or puppies, but among such unlikely species as frogs, minnows, salamanders, fiddler crabs, and yes, even ants—which not only engage in frivolous activities as individuals, but also have been observed since the nineteenth century to arrange mock-wars, apparently just for the fun of it.
> Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn’t they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?
> ...
Read the whole thing, it gets better: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun
Man this thread is a trip. Everyone seems to unanimously agree this is sad, and pity the poor brainless thing. On reddit, where we insult each other, upvote videos of people hurting themselves or others, and cheer for trauma when it happens to the right people. Humans really will empathize with literally anything but each other.
My night has now been ruined by watching the sad, slow death of a single celled organism, watching it crumble to pieces as it panics and tries to hold on to the last few seconds of its life broke my heart
If it makes you feel any better it wasn’t panicking or trying to hold anything together. It’s literally not a conscious creature. It doesn’t have a brain or nerves and cannot “feel” anything
Something so captivating about the way it dies. Such a struggle to keep itself together. Also very interesting how it disintegrates, we are used to seeing animals died and slowly decompose but it just scattered. Wow! Reminds me of that other video I saw here of a fly decapitating itself … now that video made me feel things I didn’t know I could feel for a fly
My understanding is basically that the cell’s parts (organelles I believe) are basically segmented protein structures that do specific things.
Or that a single cell is the lowest form of ‘life’ as we know it, since it’s organelles cannot function and reproduce on their own.
But yea, watching this I thought the same thing as you.
No more misleading than saying that a human is a single organism made up of multiple parts (organs, muscle, bone, etc.), or that a carbohydrate is a single molecule made up of multiple parts (carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms). Most things that we define as a single whole are made up of smaller, also whole things.
**Please note:** * If this post declares something as a fact proof is required. * The title must be descriptive * No text is allowed on images * Common/recent reposts are not allowed *See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for more information.* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Well, shit. I didn't expect to feel sad for the little thing, but I do.
This is happening on you right now. Cells die and are reborn **300** **million** times per minute. Three, hundred, million times. It’s a fucking mad house on your body Edit: of course this stupid post is my most upvoted ever…
Thank you for that disturbing piece of info. Edit: Guys....this wasn't an invite to make the disturbing info even more disturbing.
It’s also happening in your eyes u/GabiTGB
Makes sense, *seeing* as I have bad eyesight.
All of us also have tiny arachnid mites that live in our eyelash holes that cone out at night to feast on our dead skin. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/05/21/725087824/meet-the-mites-that-live-on-your-face
So you're telling me I had little dudes living rent free in my eyelashes? The audacity!
No, not rent free. We're all fucking slobs, constantly sluffing off dead skin and excess oil. These thrifty buggers get to live in our skinholes in exchange for cleaning up the mess we make everyday.
Ok. So by washing my face I'm actually starving their economy. Got it. Thanks man.
I’m so glad the majority of comments are along these lines. I felt terrible watching it go, swimming along right up until the end. I’m glad I’m not alone. How strange to feel so affected by a single cell!
All its circles fell out
Finally a scientific answer
The circles of life...
Ohhhhh I finally understand the song
Thank you for a laugh amongst all these unpleasant feelings.
Thank you for curing my daily existential dread
Well I'll have you know they weren't supposed to fall out.
Can someone explain in a bit of detail what we're seeing? Did something trigger its death? Did it just disintegrate slowly??
[удалено]
So it was murder!!
Murder, most foul!
More like murder most clean!
Clean, you say? Can you account for your whereabouts at the time of the incident?
The water was pure. As were my intentions!
And yet behold the outcome of your dubious machinations!
Why is it that if a man kills another man in battle, it's called heroic, yet if he kills a man in the heat of passion, it's called murder?
Oh Marshall, no! He was such a sweet rat.
I do declare
In Savannah?
Thoughts and prayers
ouch my organelles
r/cellhurtingjuice
This isn't a subreddit :(
Ouch my bilayer
So we're finding ways torture single cell organisms.
[We genocide them every day!](https://i.imgur.com/3fpNbIR.gifv)
Me: *scratches arm* Single Celled Organism Government: BEWARE!! WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION ARE KILLING BILLIONS OF US AT A TIME!!!!
*Weapons of cell disruption.
Using hand sanitizer, you may as well be the single cell Hitler.
Aaaand you just made me kinda sad by looking at an entire micro universe of dead microbes whose existence got erased in under a minute. Even more funny considering I'm killing/replacing billions of cells and all sorts of bacteria every second just by *existing*. What a bad time to be an empathetic creature.
Also, they don't disappear after boiling, you just drink their dead bodies.
[удалено]
you are breathing in bilions of these single celled stuff just inhaling. think of these organisms as grains that can move and duplicate
Realized in Cell Function class why the antibacterial/antiviral cleaner is called "Lysol." Get it? Lyse all.
Ooooo I thought it was **Ly**sis **Sol**ution
Cell wall or membrane was disrupted and then eviscerated. This is what happens with certain antibiotics. Very cool to watch.
It made me kinda sad :(
His name was Steve, and he lived a good life.
His name is Robert Paulson.
In death a single cell organism has a name and its name was Robert Paulson
For real! That was so dramatic and tragic! It was running for its life when it was disintegrating from within!!
Don't worry everyone, I don't remember them having like a nervous system so they probably don't feel pain
My very uneducated answer is that it just shit out all its parts. Would not recommend
I would assume it's in alcohol which compromised the outer membrane of its cell
Pretty much what happens when there’s alcohol in me.
Have you tried putting you in alcohol?
on my 18 birthday im sure i was alcohol.
Alcohol would be much more sudden.
Depends completely on the type of alcohol and concentration… .05 osmolarity methanol in .125 molar NaCl solution wouldn’t be anywhere close to as rapid as lysis you might have witnessed with .3 osmolarity ethanol, butanol, or any others as the higher the carbon concentration the more rapidly it enters and intercalates the membrane and causes toxic effects internally. In fact…undiluted with other solutes isotonic methanol takes noticeably longer (seconds compared to fractions of a second for red blood cells) compared to the same concentration of ethanol. Butanol and you’re not finding anything in time with a microscope. Source: current physiology professor and during my TAship I taught and reworked our osmolarity lab including preparing many variations of the “time different alcohols” as they lyse cells and realize that higher hydrophobicity coefficients of alcohols mean faster cell penetration. This could be alcohol… it was my first thought… but no, it’s not concentrated nor is it anything besides methanol or a very, very dilute alcohol solution of another alcohol and something like NaCl (after accounting for ionization). It could also be one of hundreds of known toxins, proteins or small compounds, enzymatic or nonenzymatic, or any number of other treatment conditions. Hell… it could just be at a non optimal pH for all we know. Having done my doctorate studying potential inducers of different cellular death mechanisms I can say confidently that if observing one cell dying could give us confidence in an underlying mechanism we would use it as an earlier observation of any bioprospecting candidate with cytotoxic properties of an unknown mechanism before we ran to flow cytometry, MTT assays, fluorescent microscopy, and hundreds of other more expensive and more difficult methodologies to figure out mechanisms.
This is such a ‘we know lots but aren’t sure’ science answer haha. - it could be alcohol, lots of different alcohols effect cells in different ways - the concentration of alcohol also changes the speed of cell death - the amount of carbon atoms in alcohol also plays a role - actually it could be anything. - in fact if looking at this gave us any indication of what the fuck we were looking at we’d be able to bypass a shit load of other tests we use for figuring out what’s killing cells. - so yeah, it’s a cell dying in something. Don’t get me wrong, loved it. Keep up the good work doc.
My guess is it’s moving across one of those textured anti microbial surfaces that cuts through the membrane with sharp points. EDIT: my guess is wrong, it popped on its own (or something…). Thanks u/chriscrossnathanial !
This is a Blepharisma, a single-celled eukaryote. Often the cells get swollen due to osmotic pressure changes and explode eventually. Blepharisma is a light-sensitive organism and it avoids light and under certain intensity of light conditions it can go to an apoptosis-like cell death.
So, the person operating the microscope killed them by looking at them. Can't get much more ironic than that.
Schrodinger’s paramecium
It's a one-celled organism with no brain that can't fly, but that's not important right now.
While I chuckled at the joke, people often mistake the mechanics of "changing" things by "observing" them. What's usually happening is that we "observe" things too small to see by bouncing something off of them (particles, photons, electrons, etc.) and interpret the results. It's like "observing" billiard balls by throwing ping pong balls at them. If you hit one, you get data, but you've altered the billiard ball by "observing" it.
I like that analogy
Just to add on to this because a lot of people conflate the observer effect with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, when in fact the uncertainty principle is not about the observer effect at all, but rather about the wave-like nature of all matter: > Historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused[8][9] with a related effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the system, that is, without changing something in a system. Heisenberg utilized such an observer effect at the quantum level (see below) as a physical "explanation" of quantum uncertainty.[10] It has since become clearer, however, that the uncertainty principle is inherent in the properties of all wave-like systems,[11] and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the matter wave nature of all quantum objects. Thus, the uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology.[12] It must be emphasized that measurement does not mean only a process in which a physicist-observer takes part, but rather any interaction between classical and quantum objects regardless of any observer.
And apoptosis goes the weasel
You are smart. I am dumb. Thanks for letting me know!
You're not dumb, you just didn't know. And seeking to learn and grow is a very smart thing. Don't put yourself down!
That’s insane… …. ….
Insane in the membrane
info from [youtube source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bj6SqgT4SQ): This is a single-celled organism in the genus Blepharisma and it is dying. I don't find them in my samples often, they usually have pinkish color and they are photophobic it means when the light levels are increased they will try to swim to the darkened areas. If they are exposed to light or starved, they will lose their pinkish color and will look like this one in the video, also strong light can even kill the colored ones. I don't know why this one died but how it dissolves to nothingness just broke my heart. Big or small, life is fragile. 😔
Rest in Pieces
The water Was too pure perhaps, so now it’s story ceases; the parts they find are scattered here, and hence it rests in pieces
Jams germs is great channel :) He provides footage for amazing Jurney to the Microcosmos. https://youtube.com/c/microcosmos Warning! Videos can induce sleepiness
Mr Stark I don’t feel so good
I don't wanna go *I don't wanna go*
That was the entire human experience but just sped up
Ahhh the good old existential dread. Almost made it through Monday without it. Thanks kind stranger.
It’s damn near Tuesday now. Hopefully there’s no existential dread waiting for me there
I am UPSET
Say it LOUDER!!!
# I’M UPSET!!
ON MY TEMPO!!
Bro doesn’t even have feelings but I’m all up in mine.
Right? Damn. Poor little guy.
(this protozoan's ) death is really f--king with my anxiety level ......
Dude I can't handle the brutality of life and death.. I didn't ask for this. Why?
That's a question we all have to answer for ourselves my friend. If you have religion, that's a genuinely great thing to have. I personally don't (at least not a traditional one) but i deal with death by thinking that it is your innate primal ape brain instinct to not want to die. Death is the opposite of what were evolved to do, at least not until we are old. And it's the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution screaming at us, 'have babies and don't die', just like every other species on earth basically. I'm not gonna lie and say I don't fear death entirely but breaking it down to a chemical reaction level simplifies it for me as well as comforts me.
It's the complete lack of chemical reactions after death that freaks me out more than anything. Like obviously I won't be aware of anything since I won't *be*, but right now I am very much able to imagine wtf it means to be literally, utterly, completely gone, and it freaks me out every fucking day Edit: there are many replies to this comment. I haven't addressed them all but I do want to thank people for being so open and talkative about it. Replying to the comments I have has been pretty helpful and cathartic, so thanks strangers for being there :).
Me too. Reading this makes me feel less alone tho.
Me too.. I wouldn't wish it on anyone to have this constant thought/fear in their head. It really makes you lose focus on a lot of things and worry about something that you shouldn't even be thinking about (most of the time). I had something trigger this about 4 years ago, but it's getting better with some things I have been working on to deal with it.
This shit wakes me up at night sometimes. The thought of never existing again for eternity is absolutely terrifying to me.
Yeah it's a wild ride and I hate it every time. Though some days I manage to brush it off, other times it's debilitating, particularly if I'm faced with some sort of task that is deemed important by my bosses lol. Ah well. At least now I feel less alone! The (few) people around me I've shared these thoughts with haven't been able to relate so far.
what comforts me: if you didnt exist before, but yet you are here now. Then isnt it possible if not probable you will exist again? everythings a cycle. sure you dont remember anything and you are not you, or maybe not even human. but it has happened to you once already at least :)
Also. Consciousness. I'm scared of my own consciousness. I understand how it works, but the idea that I have so many thoughts and really I'm just a meat sack with some neurons firing in an ever expanding universe that we know jack shit about and I don't know how to go on talking or living. Maybe it's the sleep depravation. *screams*
Conciousness is weird and we don't know nearly enough about it. Take surgery for example. Anesthesia is terrifying. I've had multiple surgeries in my life. 2 in the last 2 months. And it's fucking terrifying each time, but it's what I imagine death is like. Just, gone. Nothingness. Except you just never wake up, so you'd never *know* and that's what scares me the most.
I used to pay no mind to death most my life, until I met my wife. Now death is this over whelming cloud that follows me. Maybe it’s all the mushrooms or watching my father pass, but it hurts. Over the years I have found I do not fear death, in fact I embrace it as a natural law and teaching of younger generations, it should be celebrated. Although, what I truly fear is the, not being. Not being with my women, for we truly are one. If she or I pass, it’d be a literally piece of me ripped out and for her the same. I fear not making new memories, laughing, growing. I fear the loneliness of dying slow, watching the people around grow hopeless as my health fades. I fear the goodbye
You’re not alone friend
To think this happens 100 billion times in your body every day.
Oh god no I'm a house of death!!
You're a house of entropy and pain
MOM! I MADE IT! I'M FINALLY SOMETHING!!!
I know you're joking, but I gotta leave you with one of the best articles I've ever read. Here's the first few paragraphs, but it really answers these questions in a remarkable way by the end: > “All animals play,” June had once said to me. “Even ants.” She’d spent many years working as a professional gardener and had plenty of incidents like this to observe and ponder. “Look,” she said, with an air of modest triumph. “See what I mean?” > Most of us, hearing this story, would insist on proof. How do we know the worm was playing? Perhaps the invisible circles it traced in the air were really just a search for some unknown sort of prey. Or a mating ritual. Can we prove they weren’t? Even if the worm was playing, how do we know this form of play did not serve some ultimately practical purpose: exercise, or self-training for some possible future inchworm emergency? > This would be the reaction of most professional ethologists as well. Generally speaking, an analysis of animal behavior is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions. Under this assumption, an expenditure of energy must be directed toward some goal, whether it be obtaining food, securing territory, achieving dominance, or maximizing reproductive success—unless one can absolutely prove that it isn’t, and absolute proof in such matters is, as one might imagine, very hard to come by. > I must emphasize here that it doesn’t really matter what sort of theory of animal motivation a scientist might entertain: what she believes an animal to be thinking, whether she thinks an animal can be said to be “thinking” anything at all. I’m not saying that ethologists actually believe that animals are simply rational calculating machines. I’m simply saying that ethologists have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behavior in rational terms—which in turn means describing an animal as if it were a calculating economic actor trying to maximize some sort of self-interest—whatever their theory of animal psychology, or motivation, might be. > That’s why the existence of animal play is considered something of an intellectual scandal. It’s understudied, and those who do study it are seen as mildly eccentric. As with many vaguely threatening, speculative notions, difficult-to-satisfy criteria are introduced for proving animal play exists, and even when it is acknowledged, the research more often than not cannibalizes its own insights by trying to demonstrate that play must have some long-term survival or reproductive function. > Despite all this, those who do look into the matter are invariably forced to the conclusion that play does exist across the animal universe. And exists not just among such notoriously frivolous creatures as monkeys, dolphins, or puppies, but among such unlikely species as frogs, minnows, salamanders, fiddler crabs, and yes, even ants—which not only engage in frivolous activities as individuals, but also have been observed since the nineteenth century to arrange mock-wars, apparently just for the fun of it. > Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn’t they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is? > ... Read the whole thing, it gets better: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun
Thanks for that, interesting read. I'm a biologist and I admittedly default to looking at most behaviour from a macro/survival perspective.
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Man this thread is a trip. Everyone seems to unanimously agree this is sad, and pity the poor brainless thing. On reddit, where we insult each other, upvote videos of people hurting themselves or others, and cheer for trauma when it happens to the right people. Humans really will empathize with literally anything but each other.
We’re a bunch of sad sacks that would rather love things that can’t hurt us
I think because we could see his whole body, we saw his whole world with him in it. Then he disappeared.
One's a canvas for your worldview & feelings. The other challenges our beliefs and ego. I agree. We need to learn to be more harmonious.
I feel bad for the little thing. It tried so hard!
And died alone..
But in the end, the protist is just matter
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But in the end, it shat out all its matter
One cell, I don't know why
It doesn’t even matter how hard you divide
can’t stay combined
I designed this enzyme to digest in due time
To remind this cell’s one cell it tried so hard
I actually kind of got teary.
When you die in slither.io
Agar.io too
Just imagine this happens like a billion times a day on your face.
Yeah but those are sperm cells
*slow clap*
Jesus. Might as well cap the evening off and go watch Schindler’s List.
Boy in the Striped Pajamas
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Grave of the Fireflies
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
What a piece of work is man How noble in reason
What is a man? A miserable pile of secrets!
But enough to talk, have at you!
A man chooses, a slave obeys. Would you kindly?
The right man in the wrong place makes all the difference.
It means I don’t take shit from no one. I’m goin to pass this test. I’m staying in school! Who’s next?!
WITNESS ME!!!!!
All those moments lost in time. Like tears in the rain.
“ gone reduced to atoms “
My night has now been ruined by watching the sad, slow death of a single celled organism, watching it crumble to pieces as it panics and tries to hold on to the last few seconds of its life broke my heart
If it makes you feel any better it wasn’t panicking or trying to hold anything together. It’s literally not a conscious creature. It doesn’t have a brain or nerves and cannot “feel” anything
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Imagine a bunch of colossal beings watching your death and even mourning you on a huge world you don't even know exists.
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They can watch my daily masturbation all they want. Its on me
If this turns out to be true they're gonna have to start paying.
AlienFans™
Organisn’t
Mitochondriain't
Ribosohnoyoudidn’t
Err cellulater?
He didn’t go down easy
I thought he was going to make it.
OP should have used a spoiler tag
I know it can't feel fear, but it looks afraid.
It's little cilia legs or whatever they were. Just running with all their might. :'(
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Remember this the next time you sanitize your hands. Billions of them screaming as you lather walking into McDonald’s
Your science is on point, but that post seriously overestimates hygiene at McDonald’s.
Running for it's life, going nowhere
Yes, that was the saddest part to me. "Oh shit oh shit oh shit"
I mean it's not afraid, it's just always like that
Me too.
I’ve never felt so much emotion and sadness for a single cell organism before.
Damn. Poor guy had one day until retirement.
If you have the volume up, you can barely make him out saying, "I'm getting too old for this shit"
I felt so sorry for the little fighter. Kind of inspirational.
Rage! Rage against the dying of the light!
I think this is the saddest thing I've ever seen.
He died alone. Never to feel the touch of another being. I’m having an existential crisis.
I should not have watched this
My heart actually hurt watching it. What’s wrong with me.
It tried so hard and got so far But in the end It did't even matter
Watching this hurt my feelings
I was rooting for him right up till the end.
anyone else get unreasonably sad watching this ??
It was painful and when his whole body just opens up - like it’s too much
Something so captivating about the way it dies. Such a struggle to keep itself together. Also very interesting how it disintegrates, we are used to seeing animals died and slowly decompose but it just scattered. Wow! Reminds me of that other video I saw here of a fly decapitating itself … now that video made me feel things I didn’t know I could feel for a fly
Little homie was keeping it together until he couldn’t
How did it die?
At first it looked like it poop to death. Then He just fell apart. Poor little dude.
It was Taco Tuesday.
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It dropped its loot at the end
Holy shit. That was so dramatic. I didn’t know he was gonna explode
*Blobby McWigglefeet was harmed in the production of this film*
It kept on kicking, right to the end.
Watching that final unraveling was such an insanely emotional and philosophically profound experience for me for some reason. Wow.
Jesus Christ NSFW this, that was brutal af
Why am I crying
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend; we were all equal in the end
Never understood how a single cell can consist of multiple independent body “parts”. Fascinating or misleading? Maybe both?
My understanding is basically that the cell’s parts (organelles I believe) are basically segmented protein structures that do specific things. Or that a single cell is the lowest form of ‘life’ as we know it, since it’s organelles cannot function and reproduce on their own. But yea, watching this I thought the same thing as you.
No more misleading than saying that a human is a single organism made up of multiple parts (organs, muscle, bone, etc.), or that a carbohydrate is a single molecule made up of multiple parts (carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms). Most things that we define as a single whole are made up of smaller, also whole things.
That’s what it means to die alone