On The Destruction Of Species: An Examination Of The Darwinian Necessity Of Death

According to the Population Reference Bureau, about 106 Billion human beings have walked the surface of the Earth till date. Even with a minuscule portion of those people alive at any given moment in history, our planet is perpetually hard-pressed for resources; imagine the debacle were those people inhabiting the world at the same time. A 1700% increase in the population density of the world, less space, more poverty, more hunger, more disease, all the problems of the world compounded by scale.

Fortunately, the natural inevitability of death rescues us from ever inhabiting such a dystopian universe. Death, hence is an integral cog in the mechanism of life as we know it. It is often looked upon as an ominous event and feared due to our limited knowledge of it; yet if we look at it from an objective point of view, there is nothing more wondrous or benevolent.

Death, in essence is the progenitor of natural selection. It takes the majority of the population of thin coated dogs migrating to Alaska to die of cold for the ones with the genetic aberration of thick coats to survive and breed. Similarly, death enables the process of evolution among the plethora of species inhabiting the Earth and the apparent tautology of death being the means with which "Life" as a whole continues to prosper, turns out to be true.

Approximately 57 million people die each year, which rules out to about a 155,000 deaths each day. Thus, the probability of any one of us dying any given day comes out to be 38,000 to one, which seems to be quite improbable, but it is a heck of a lot more probable than the billion to one odds we fought as sperms to come to life. My point being that any one of us can easily cease to exist tomorrow, therefore we must not fear death as the ultimate end of all we know, but embrace it and accept its inevitability so that we live each day as if it were our last, for chances are, it might be!