Death
Death is the end of life. It is the irreversible cessation of biological functions that sustain a living organism. Death is the inevitable end state for all living things, as nature's tendency to disorder will cause all living systems to degrade and fail through various causes. Eventually, the heat death of the universe is expected to render life impossible anywhere in the universe, effectively making death the eventual end state of the cosmos as a whole. While death is certain for living things, the identification of the moment of death presents certain difficulties. A person may experience clinical death that is nonetheless reversible, resulting in some cases in a near-death experience. Some organisms, such as the immortal jellyfish, are biologically immortal; nonetheless, they can still die from causes other than the effects of aging. While death as an inevitable end state may be achieved through aging, death can occur at any stage of human development, including in infancy. In humans, establishing death of the brain is the most certain metric for evaluating whether an individual has died.
Natural selection of organisms which successfully pass on their genes to the next generation demand that life engages in a struggle for existence against death. Because of this, living things, including humans, normally fear death and have strong instincts to avoid it. For an organism to cause the death of another is called killing, which if done by one human to another is called homicide. Some organisms may kill other organisms, either through herbivory, predation, or parasitism in order to take resources from the bodies of other organisms into their own. Sometimes, organisms will take resources from organisms which have already died, either through scavenging or decomposition. However, despite the widespread instinct to survive, sometimes animals may commit suicide, being intentionally self-caused death, which in humans may be attributed to a variety of risk factors including mental illness. As human beings have evolved the mental faculties to be aware of death, knowledge of death is a central part of the human condition and therefore is universal to human culture. In apprehending death, many cultures and religions have a concept of an afterlife. Relatedly, sometimes people have sought to achieve immortality, or eternal life, such as through cryogenics. In some societies, people may be legally killed as punishment for crimes through capital punishment. The study of death is known as thanatology.
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