Planaria the Barbaria

Immortality has been a hot topic for some time, and humanity has done almost everything imaginable to force our feet into its glass slipper over the years. It understandably felt intuitive that all things decayed given the observational tools we had available along the way, so living forever lay partially exposed behind a mortal paywall for much of our philosophical history like the first paragraph of a New Yorker article. Which is to say this: it’s interesting to me how pervasive the longing for immortality has been, and how we’ve always seen it as something we have to die to get.

That longing has branched off in different ways over the course of history, though, and what immortality is exactly has remained a topic of debate. But this morning I fixated a bit on what it is that we mean by death (I’ll keep this short I promise). The common conceptions of death in the Western world are that you either die and nothing happens, or you die and something happens somewhere else via consciousness transfer/relocation/etc. But then I remembered planaria, a type of flatworm we found awhile ago that we’ve since discovered can live forever through cellular self-regeneration. And then I started wondering what if we’re like a planarian (I think that’s singular for planaria but not totally sure).

Take these 2 experiments for instance:

1. So far, a piece of a planaria as small as 1/279th of its total mass can regenerate into a full new one.

2. If you cut the head off a planaria, it not only will grow its head back, it will also grow back its long term memories.

Wild stuff. Growing up I thought about myself as being a soul which had been loaned a body in order to try and pass a metaphysical test and earn a place in endless, other-worldly bliss. Now, I’m not so sure. For instance, bliss historically implies the end of pain, and yet pain is perhaps the most rewarding mechanism I’ve ever encountered. It’s hard to do things well, and the feeling of accomplishment after you push through that is better than anything else I’ve experienced. Failure, too, is sweet in its own strange way if you know you tried as hard as you could at the time. And I’ve also wondered if the reason I’ve sometimes grieved the idea of being alive is because I’ve been worried that the earth is just a container for wasted energy and half-attempts at mattering, as if this life is just a quick arcade game at a gas station before your parents drag you back into the car.

But reading about planaria was helpful for me and calmed me down a bit. The idea that I might just be a little piece of something else that’s growing back was comforting, and the possibility that nothing is really forgotten it just goes into the soil with our bodies and soaks back into the system was too. Who knows, maybe everything we think is out there past the edge of the cosmos is really just here and hard to see. Or maybe there really is a big cosmic bus that picks you up after you die and drives you to the next stop. Either way, tapeworms are wild and I still hope we live forever.