Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Hanslanda]

It was a late night drunk question anyways.

[Kagus]

Hypermammals!

Question. At what point would a living organism be considered dead if it possesses no CNS?

A living organism without a central nervous system is considered dead when it reaches the point that it literally can't even.

[Egan_BW]

Once it becomes unable to regulate its internal environment, I suppose.

[hops]

Pretty much when it stops living.

As much as we like to pretend otherwise, we don't really have the best grasp of what living and dead count as. We've got definitely living, definitely dead, and a grey area in between where it's "Huh, maybe it can recover?"

Things die when they are killed.

[Hanslanda]

Just realized I was asking how we'd know when a plant type organism died. Derp.

[Kagus]

Just realized I was asking how we'd know when a plant type organism died. Derp.

To be fair, this is sometimes a lot harder than outward appearances would indicate.

[Egan_BW]

Cut an animal in half; yeah it's probably dead. Cut a plant in half and suddenly you have two perfectly healthy plants. Because plants are bullshit.

[Rolan7]

Now I'm thinking about the story of Solomon and the stolen baby, and imagining how it would go down differently in my sentient carnifern run of Sim Earth.

[Kagus]

Cut an animal in half; yeah it's probably dead. Cut a plant in half and suddenly you have two perfectly healthy plants. Because plants are bullshit.

Stick always win.

[Hanslanda]

Okay, but seriously how do they determine the moment of a plant's death? Is there not one? Plants just die gradually?

[Maximum Spin]

Okay, but seriously how do they determine the moment of a plant's death? Is there not one? Plants just die gradually?

Everything dies gradually.

[Hanslanda]

Yes but the cessation of brain activity is typically considered the point of death for humans and animals. Like, brain death is true death. Is there a such point for plants?

[Maximum Spin]

Yes but the cessation of brain activity is typically considered the point of death for humans and animals. Like, brain death is true death. Is there a such point for plants?

That's really just an arbitrary medical choice, though. So no, there's no such point for plants, mostly because we don't have plant EMTs.

[Trekkin]

Yes but the cessation of brain activity is typically considered the point of death for humans and animals. Like, brain death is true death. Is there a such point for plants?

I don't think I'll surprise anyone by saying that plants are very different from animals; in the broadest and most pedantically vulnerable terms, they outsource fewer metabolic processes to specialized tissues, which is part of why they can be cut in half and grafted together and so forth. With few exceptions, plants retain the capacity to grow almost anything out of almost anything else, conditions permitting.

There really isn't a single point at which we can say that a plant, as an organism, is undergoing the kind of systemic collapse we see in animal death, largely because plants don't really do systemic collapse where losing organs dooms other organs and the chain continues until all the otherwise living tissue is doomed to starve/asphyxiate/drown in its own waste products.

[scriver]

This is why vegans are superior to the rest of you