Is part of a public education reminding a child of her mortality?
And if so, would the task fall upon the biology teacher?

It's not a trivial matter. For all the posturing by folks at the national level about our record college enrollment rates, almost a third of graduating high school senior do not go. Many of those that do go are going to juice up their resumes more than their minds.

Would teaching mortality produce a more thoughtful citizenry?

***

All of this, whatever this this is, cannot last for any individual. The oldest known bacteria survived 250 million years, the oldest plant a mere 43,000 years. We tend to think of ourselves as special, a gift (or curse) of our consciousness.

The oldest animal? Maybe the clam--a quahog made it for 405 years. Alas, it was killed by the same scientists who marked its age.

Oldest conscious animal?

A 211 year old bowhead whale leads the list, roaming this Earth since John Adams was President, finally felled by an Inuit.

And good westerners that we are, we oooh and awwww at the record, imagining a life triple life span we have, again forgetting that we truly only live in moments.

How many Saturdays do you have left in a lifetime?


Would folks behave differently if they accepted mortality, accepted limits? Would we be braver? Would we spend hours inside manipulating artificial universes? Would we accept the culture we have?

***

We are all, in a sense, immortal, or at least as immortal as life on Earth. We all share ancestors. We all come from single celled organisms that continues the spark of life for billions of years, long enough for consciousness to develop.

Or maybe consciousness has been around much longer than we know. Bacteria talk to each other.




Dying, I suspect, is a big deal. It doesn't require a whole lot of practice, and just about every one of us will manage to accomplish it whether or not we have graduate degrees, but still, for each of us, it's the end of a universe (at least among the empiricists).

To be fair, I'm a bit warped. I grew up Oirish Catholic, I practiced medicine in the inner city when poor kids were doing their best to die from AIDS before the middle class even heard of it, and I've lost enough people to accept that maybe, just maybe, this death thing is permanent.

***

We relegate death to religion, and otherwise make it taboo. But we all face it.

Biology is literally the study of life--and life is defined by death, the ultimate limit for those of us who pretend to be conscious. A culture that recognizes limits has a chance to be sustainable.

A chance.

Just a chance. Which is more than we have now.....

The skull is from wikipedia, credited to Bernard Bill5
I've watched a lot of people die, most of them young--you will, too.

Ain't Bonnie Bassler wonderful?