A couple of years ago, there was this information flowing around on the internet that “immortality is mathematically impossible”, and as an average consumer I just accepted it. Today, it randomly clicked me that I should ask why.
Q1: Is this claim even true? Because we already know that immortal jellyfishes exist and they can reverse aging (hopefully I’m not wrong here).
Q2: How does math play a role in this claim? (really curious about this one)
Lastly: I don’t know if i should flair this post as ‘Biology’ or ‘Math’?
In: Mathematics
Maybe the statement was about statistics. There’s a small chance that the DNA of a cell gets damaged due to external factors or spontaneously, but living beings have mechanisms to repair or limit the damage, some do better than others, for instance a cancer happens when a cell with damaged DNA doesn’t die and gets out of control.
This means statistically there’s a chance that the DNA of all cells gets damaged around the same time so no matter how good an organism might be at dealing with the damage, it won’t have an opportunity. Of course that chance would be insignificant and this was a very extreme scenario to illustrate the idea, but as long as something like this is possibe then immortality is impossible.
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