Hypography Science Forums: From: Do You Think Law Of Conservation Has Limitations ? - Hypography Science Forums

I think both Rade and lawcat make good points.

It’s important to distinguish between the passing of genes between generations of sexually reproducing organisms and ones that perpetuate themselves by cell division, such as Amoeba and Chaos. Genetically, the species Ameoba proteus can be considered many instances of a single individual, for all practical purposes immortal – though by human standards, a very boring individual.

However, as lawcat notes, these immortal organisms can be killed. It’s practically impossible for us humans to kill A proteus, as this would require sterilizing the entire planet, but in a few billion years, our gradually warming sun is predicted to do just this, ending all but possibly the most extremophile life on Earth, and possibly even disintegrating the Earth. Unless A proteus has hitched a ride elsewhere before then, that will be the end of it. Or disease might kill it long before – A proteus’s genome is amazingly disease resistant, but it is a single genome, so if some pathogen can infect and kill it, it could kill all of it.

I think we’ve failed so far to focus on the key peculiarity in this thread: URAIN’s conflation of the idea of immortality of the soul, a non-scientific, religious idea, and the law of conservation of mass-energy, a modern physics extension of the classical physics laws of conservation of mass and energy. “Spiritual life” isn’t defined in the simple mechanical way that physics defines mass-energy, so IMHO it’s not useful to conflate the ideas. Biological life – metabolism, genetics, etc. – is, in principle if not entirely practically, explainable via physics, but likewise is not equitable with spiritual life.

So, all due respect to folk like URAIN and Frank Tipler, I don’t think “the physics of immortality” is a very useful scientific subject, though with sufficiently careful scientific circumspection, it’s can be a fascinating philosophical one.