Dying is available in many varieties. There’s the dying of an enormous multicellular system – which is to say, the range that tends to preoccupy us most. On a smaller scale, there’s the dying of a single cell, which happens unceremoniously at each second, each round and inside us. On an intergalactic scale, there’s the so-called ‘warmth dying’ that the majority physicists imagine would be the final destiny of the Universe. And there are definitely many different varieties in between.
On this brief video from the YouTube channel Journey to the Microcosmos, the US author and YouTuber Hank Inexperienced argues that what unites all these types of dying is a transition to a state of equilibrium. Centred on microscopic footage of 1 small microbe throughout its last moments, the brief makes for an intriguing and surprisingly shifting reflection on life, dying and the imprecise boundaries between these two states.