If there are two predictable things about life, the first one is that it will struggle to survive. Since Earth’s early beginning as a hot mess of toxic fumes and unforgiving rock where the first cell emerged amid a flash of light and perhaps a pinch of divine intervention, life has clung stubbornly, like a child clasping on to his mother’s leg, to the blue and green mass we zero-legged, two-legged, four-legged, eight-legged, and so on, creatures call home.

The second and last predictable thing about life is that it will always end, despite its struggle and stubbornness. Whether with the fiery jaws of death burning up the steel grey giants and black skies we have grown accustomed to or with the last shaky exhale of a species too weak from several millennia of constant battle to prevent its disappearance, life will end.

Built into the lockboxes of the cells that contain the secrets that give me brown eyes and you blond hair, nature devised a mechanism that entwines up the two traits of life–to struggle and to end–in a beautiful, seamless dance of cell suicide. It’s an ugly phrase to describe this process and its name, apoptosis, derived from the Greek word for “falling off”, is no better, for how can the act of sacrificing oneself to reach the inevitable end for the greater struggle, the struggle for life, be described with our range of vocabulary? The process is simple and elegant: a cell recognizes its deformity, its viruses and mutations, and commits the fatal act of destroying its code for life. In its last moments, the cell sends out a distress signal, a save-yourself-and-leave-me-here type of call, to have its existence eradicated for the good of life, for the good of the struggle, and for the good of death.

 It is easy to believe in a God when looking at the perfection of nature: how our arms and the leaves on the trees share the same veins and how the incalculable respiration of a cell mimics the breathing of this very planet. Things, the smallest and the largest reactions, tend to work out this way: perfectly and simplistically. Thus, the wondrous sacrificial dance of a single malignant cell can be generalized to all different-legged inhabitants of this planet.

The imprints we see in the tireless, age-old stone are the only remnants of our brethren that laid down their weary heads, so that we can crawl along this path lined with tears and bones. 60 million years ago the reptiles that once roamed the world became the vestigial appendages of life, hampering its ability to struggle forward. Life yearned for change and they were too large, too outdated to survive the transition. In the cold, dark months that followed a tremendous explosion, only their hardier cousins emerged unscathed from the obliteration.

The aforementioned creatures struggled for almost 200 million years before they came to their eventual demise. We, on the other hand, are not so unfortunate as them. Our struggle only began a few hundred thousand years ago and our final dance is nearing. However, our species is divided between the gas-guzzling, plastic-using, and toxins-dumping models of society and the miscreants and troublemakers who insist on prolonging our life. Half of the world is upholding their end of nature's bargain–accepting, and even quickening their own death–while the other half is selfishly struggling for its fleshy, two-legged archetype of life to prevail. Consequently, we are in a static game tug of war where both types are equally unlikely to relinquish control.

To the naive fellows in baggy white coats and the bearded ones clothed in burlap and hemp, end your useless resistance. Your fight is based on foolish notions. You struggle for life, yet only seem to hamper its advances in your attempts to adapt useless, necrotic tissue into a functioning, relevant organ. Follow the lead of my apathetic comrades: wrap your plastic packaging carrying a plastic toy in more plastic, leave behind the last nine phones to buy a new one, or dump chemical wastes into the river and perhaps the two-headed fishies will bite. Just do your part in our last-ditch effort to save life by destroying ourselves. When the garbage piles get so high and the toxic fumes so nauseating that they interfere with our cushy positions on our rusty lawn chairs and front row seats to the most spectacular event since the mushroom cloud that rose above the desert, simply relocate to higher ground. Or Mars. That could work.