98: Chapter 98: Animals can sense death, but humans cannot.

"???"

"Wait, did I hear that wrong?"

"Artificially programmed aging, that's a bit terrifying!"

"This is a direction I didn't expect."

"So it's not a natural law, but someone programmed it for us?"

"Damn, a materialist warrior is feeling seriously uneasy!"

In the teacher's office at the library in Yangcheng.

Biology teacher Chen Min had just wanted to say that today's livestream was not bad, and at least Jiang Zhe wasn't spouting nonsense.

Unexpectedly, Jiang Zhe's words made him jump up abruptly, pointing at the big screen and accusing: "Nonsense! Aging is a natural law, the end of the order of all things, the depletion of energy, and a necessary manifestation of entropy!"

"Every life has a cycle; this is logic written into the basic rules of the universe. How did it suddenly become [artificially programmed]?"

Saying this, he looked at Zhang Yu and the other students with an angry face: "Are you sure you should be watching this kind of livestream? Can this kind of livestream help you improve your studies?"

"Are you sure this isn't leading you astray and onto the wrong path?"

Zhang Yu and the others were left speechless by Chen Min's accusations; they thought it was quite good, but they didn't dare to refute him.

Meanwhile, the physics teacher Gao Yuliang on the side also said with a confused look: "He's already in front of over three million people. Saying it like that, can he bring it back around?"

On the other side, in the suburbs of Kyoto, inside Qingfeng Temple,

Zheng Ming was stunned for a full two and a half seconds, then let out a sneer: "Artificially programmed? That's hilarious. He might as well just say that the immortals wrote the Book of Life and Death."

"This is the first time I've seen something so ridiculous. He really is doing whatever he wants."

Doctor Zhou Ming on the side also couldn't help but look shocked: "It's truly shocking. His angle is far too risky. If he can't produce reasonable inferences and evidence next, all the credibility he built up before will collapse in an instant."

Celestial Master Zhang opened his eyes, staring intently at Jiang Zhe on the big screen, wondering what he was thinking.

In the scene, inside the living room.

The previously impassioned Xiao Yu instantly cooled down, her expression gradually becoming stunned: "Ah, ar, ar, artificially programmed?"

"Big Brother, that's impossible, right?"

"Who, who could program something like this?"

"Impossible?" Jiang Zhe couldn't help but curl his lips: "Let me ask you a question."

"Xiao Yu, if you were the boss of an electronics company, would you design your product to be perfect, fast, sturdy, and durable? Would you make a device with a long-lasting battery that wouldn't need replacing for decades?"

"Of course not!" Xiao Yu blurted out, "How else would the company make money? How would the products iterate?"

"If I were the boss, I would definitely leave some places that could be optimized but aren't, letting the electronic device gradually fail to keep up with market software after a few years, and then start phasing it out; only then would users buy... new... ones..."

As she spoke, Xiao Yu lowered her beautiful eyes, her expression freezing; she seemed to realize what her big brother meant.

But this feeling... was a bit shocking. Once she accepted her big brother's explanation, a sense of helplessness and the struggle of being trapped came rushing over her.

Once these words were spoken, the netizens immediately sat up straight, holding their breath, realizing the meaning behind the words... it was somewhat self-evident!

"So now!" Jiang Zhe nodded and asked: "Do you think that in this human body, there are designs that could be optimized but haven't been, or even some defects intentionally left behind?"

"How could..." Xiao Yu subconsciously wanted to refute, but the information she had checked during the day... the inverted retina, the circuitous recurrent laryngeal nerve, the inevitable tendency toward cancer—it was like countless fragments of information colliding in her mind, telling her that these were all defects!

Biological evolution told her that humans evolved from fish, but her intuition told her... was that really all there was to it?

She opened her mouth but didn't say a word in the end. In the livestream room, the netizens also fell into a brief silence.

Not just her, even the experts knew clearly that there were, and there were many, many of them!

At this moment, on screen, Jiang Zhe looked at the stunned Xiao Yu: "It seems you have the answer in your heart."

"If these seemingly scattered defects were pieced together, they might not point to [human evolution being imperfect], but rather to another fundamental difference—the most essential difference between us and all other living creatures."

"A fundamental difference?" Xiao Yu's beautiful eyes turned, "What do you mean? Aren't we the same as most living creatures, except for being a bit smarter?"

"Well, our body organs are about the same, but the thinking of animals and the thinking of humans are completely different. Even the smartest dolphin, the dolphin claimed to be smarter than humans, its thinking is still different from that of humans." Jiang Zhe shook his head gently, "Almost all life on Earth lives in a natural closed loop; they take from the environment and eventually return to the environment."

"As the name suggests: creatures in the natural world all accept that life and death are part of a cycle, and life serves this natural cycle."

"But we humans are different. In our subconscious, we do not accept [death], and we have even been fighting against [death] from ancient times to the present. This is the fundamental difference from animals."

Qin Shi Huang, Emperor Taizong of Tang, all kinds of emperors, big and small, wanted to live forever... This is [fighting against death] carved into our genes! Why? Because there is too much we want to do, but our lifespans are too short!

"Why is it like this?" Xiao Yu pondered for a moment, "Anyway, in the end, doesn't everyone die? Why do humans fight against [death]?"

"That's because..." Jiang Zhe's gaze gradually sharpened, "From the moment we are born, we are forcibly installed with a linear time perception system and a death countdown timer, constantly reminding us humans: [You are old, you are dying soon, do you have money to raise the next generation? Your son hasn't had children yet, your son hasn't completed his task...] and so on."

Xiao Yu looked surprised: A linear time perception system?

"Xiao Yu, now look at elephants; they walk alone to the elephant graveyard at the end of their lives, old wolves quietly leave the pack and never return—they perceive death, but have no fear, only calm acceptance."

"Now look at humans again?" Jiang Zhe's voice became a bit softer, "We don't know when we will die; every physical examination report, every sudden attack of angina, or even a runaway car—death for us humans is always a sudden accident. Many people in the world think they can live to old age, but in fact, they don't; most will die in accidents along the way."

"More importantly," Jiang Zhe raised a finger with a serious expression, "We start to worry about it decades before death arrives."

"At twenty, we worry about thirty; at thirty, we fear forty... At our healthiest and strongest age, we psychologically overdraw the pain of future aging and future death."

"This overdrawn anxiety doesn't need to exist in the natural world, because these emotions are of no help to survival!"

"Besides this, humans have been endowed with a desire for the abstract concept of [infinity], yet we are locked in a [finite] shell."

"Animals do not desire these things; they do not desire immortality; they only accept that death is part of nature's cycle."

"We humans create religions to pursue the afterlife, develop medicine to fight aging, and freeze our bodies to wait for resurrection."

"Our human civilization, to some extent—is all resisting that fear of [death] written into our genes."

At this moment, even the night outside the window was quiet. Xiao Yu and the netizens, listening to these thought-provoking words, instead became calm and composed. They found it hard to describe what this feeling was!

Having said this, Jiang Zhe changed the subject. "Therefore, aging might not be a manifestation of natural laws in humans at all."

"It is a carefully designed psychological mechanism—the purpose is not to eliminate individuals, but to create an eternal positive and negative force field in individual consciousness—on one side is the human love for life, and on the other is the human's clear cognition of and fear of death."

"Animals can calmly accept death, so they live in the cycle."

"Humans fear death and do not want to live in the cycle; that is why we humans build civilization, create art, and explore the starry sky."

Saying this, he looked at Xiao Yu with a calm gaze: "Xiao Yu!"

"If aging is programmed, then the purpose of the programmer is perhaps very clear—it is not to let us humans live well and then die quietly."

"But to make us, because we know we will die, and know how many years later we will die, live crazily."

"Working crazily to exchange for more material to sustain life, crazily doing many crazy [infinite] things in a limited time."

"This is inherently an act against heaven; why do humans want to fight against nature, against death, against all things, and why are humans... so out of place with all the creatures on Earth?"

"Is it just because we possess wisdom... is it that simple?"

"Xiao Yu, now, you should have realized something!"