why do humans die?

Answer 1

I wouldn't want to be immortal would you?

Answer 2

Since this question is posted to the biology section, we can just ignore philosophical reasons for why this may be true. We can also ignore the obvious reasons why humans die: getting into accidents, crime-related reasons, etc.

Humans are animals and thus living beings like everything else and all living beings are more or less destined to die. So in a strict, biological sense, most organisms are meant to die due to aging or something like it. So why do organisms age?
Again, speaking strictly biologically, the purpose of an organisms' life is to reproduce and carry on genes to the next generation. If your reproductive abilities decline, there is no biological reason you should continue to live if you are wasting resources that could go towards others that are living. However, you may continue to live if you are providing assistance to others so that they can be more reproductively successful (this is known as altruism and normally the person you try and help is related to you so that they at least carry on some genes like yours).
Humans are not the only organisms that show the physical signs of aging. Fruit flies do too. But what all "aging" things have in common (among some other things), is that there has been oxidative damage. By that I mean damage by what chemist call free radicals which literally eat away at cells. So, the body of the organism (or the organs or whatever), gradually deteriorates over time. Also, as another poster has suggested, there is the concept of telomere shortening. Telomeres are extra pieces of DNA that are tacked on at the ends to protect the part of the DNA that actually codes for important genes. What are telomeres protecting the coding DNA from? Well, in DNA replication (when DNA is copied for new cells) it requires a thing called a primer which is made out of RNA. The primer is sort of like the start of a zipper, with out it, you couldn't start making DNA. The funny thing is that the enzyme that is used to make the new DNA strand can only add on to one end so when the primer (which is not DNA) is removed from that end, that's it, the DNA that the primer was attached to cannot be replicated and thus is not passed onto the next cell. And so, with each replication, we loose a bit of DNA and that is thought to be one reason why we age.
Aging, as we all know, can lead to an increase chance of death.
Let's talk evolution now. A lot of disease causing-organisms have evolved to take advantage of humans and of course disease is a cause for death. Also, humans that are suspectable to dying because of disease are likely being selected against because they are not reproductively fit (a product of natural selection). Again, remember that humans in the rough sense are just animals. The difference is that as humans we can add philosophical twists to everything and of course, our ability to "feel" things and make choices based on morals sets us appart from any other living being. However, this does not excuse us from the forces of nature.

Answer 3

If everyone who was born, lived for all eternity, can you imagine all the manic and chaos we will have on the street. No one will have enough space to move around freely. Some believe that life is a test, others believe it is God seeing how much of a good person you are, some believe that life is about free will. The Christian story 'Adam and Eve' say that becaus ehtey ate from the tree with all the tasty fruit on, which was forbidden by God, made him furious and he put a curse on all humans not to live for eternity. Even though they apologized, he accepted but he still did not lift the punishment.

You have to believe your own judgement you put forward on why people die, some people have different views on why they die, and thats fine. I personally think, when you die, you are reborn in a different body, or you go to heaven and are sent back down again to be reborn.

Answer 4

Scientists are still trying to answer that question. Some believe that it is a gene that naturally causes humans to "expire" after a certain date, others believe humans just wear out. The most accepted belief is that humans just get worn out after a while- cells lose their ability to regenerate.

Think of a building: it starts out great, beautiful, and well-built. Whenever it gets a single scratch, the town pays to get it fixed. But eventually, they don't have any more money to pay for it. They will just have to let the building remain, still wonderful, but slowly falling into disrepair. Eventually the building is so old that it just crumbles down.

Like Robert Frost once said, nothing gold can stay.

Answer 5

Apart from illnesses and accidents:
Because each time a cell divide its DNA chain looses some of the last useless pairs. Thus its "tail" will become shorter.
When the available pairs are over the cell will not reproduce correctly and will degenerate or die.
With less cells, all tissues will deteriorate, until the life in our body is unsustainable.
By the way, the lenght of such "useless" DNA tail determines the typical possible life span of all animals species.

Answer 6

Greetings. think about it. humans multiply normally at a steady rate of double the population every 50 years. do the math. if people did not die then they would be extinct in short time. But people do die. biggest causes after disease? religion and government are the biggest killers of people we have. and our president is adding refusal of medical care for children to that list to prove the government deserves its place in that list of why people die. And of course our organs fail after time, but not that many people die of old age. so many ways to die and so few to live.

Answer 7

That yet to be solved mystery lies deep within the vaults of genetics. All we know is, we are dying from the second we're born into the world....and our minds, personalities and bodies all mature with age as the years go on.....journeying on through puberty, adulthood, parenthood and middle age: we see we're changing and aging.

One day, our youth becomes faded fond memories as we face the shock of seeing our wrinkled skin, graying hair...and look back on the pictures when we were young; struck how the two seem like different people.

Like any machine, our human bodies wear down with years time and eventually will cease to function....and we cease to exist with it.

Answer 8

Basically biological Life as well as other systems in the Universe degrade with time.
The Human body also degrades with time. The Human body needs sustenance to stay warm and alive.The Immune sytem also degrades and the body succombs to desease and at one point can no longer support biological life.

Now in order to Understand death ,it is necessary to Undersdand what is LIFE.

Science has no answer as to what is inside a man's soul that makes him tick.

Hence to find an explanation we neeed to refer to Our Creator's Word which is outlined in the Book of the Holy Bible.

Answer 9

same as everything....it is a biological balance of the universe. Whether it be nature, or animal or human. We all die and return back to the earth that we grew from.

Answer 10

People are living things like plants and animals once they get old they die. And if they die early it's because it's they're time. Like plants why some of them dies before they grow bigger or have fruits? Like animals they die young because someone wants to kill it, but sometimes they also dies because they're old.

Answer 11

Because we're very complex living organisms. We're genetically programmed to have a limited life. We can regenerate ourselves just so much, while we interact with the environment, absorb nutrients and environmental toxins, and incur stress, which depress or overtax our immune systems, predispose us to genetic mutations, make us disposed to disease, etc. All these factors contribute to changes in our organism, which eventually wear down and out.