The question is this, If every life form on every planet from the day the planet formed that that life would live forever.
I think the key lies in looking at 'life form'.
There's two things at play here, there is 'life', and there is 'form'.
In traditional metaphysics, life is a universal.
At the ontological level, everything that exists has 'life'. Sub-atomic particles identified at CERN, for example, come into being, and pass into non-being. The mayfly lives for a day. Particles can live for nano-seconds. But the energy that underpins them can be likened to the universal, at the material level. Does this level of 'life' ever cease? I would say 'no'. Even at absolute zero, when we posit no activity whatsoever, there is still the potentiality for there to 'be', even if everything prior to that suggests no being-ness at all.
One of the enduring questions then is that it is possible in every given moment that things are, and things are not. That at any given moment, there is a certain amount of 'something' in the cosmos. This amount increases and decreases, but the potentiality to be remains constant. A sub-atomic particle (SAP) has being – it is what it is – an atom is what it is, a man is what it is, a galaxy is what it is, but in a real sense, in that moment, the sub-atomic particle is fully what it is, it is not deficient in the sense that a galaxy has 'more' existence than a SAP, that is purely a quantitative value, not a qualitative value. Put another way, without sub-atomic particles, galaxies could not exist ... so which of the two are more important? Even though a SAP lives momentarily, whilst galaxies endure at near-eternal timescales (from a human pov).
We have a grain of rock, and Mount Everest. Or a 'dead' planet. Is a planet better or more than a grain of rock? Not really, because planets are just accumulations of grains of rock. Is it more alive? Nor really, they both exist. Something is not 'more alive' because it's bigger, or lasts longer. What determines the distinction is the possibility that thing has. A planet, like ours, can become prolific in producing other forms of being, including what we would call 'living' being, or sentient being. Something that is, like a grain of sand is, but it inter-acts with other forms of being and with the cosmos. Bacteria. Organisms. But then sub-atomic particles interact with other particles, so again the distinction blurs.
With sentient being we further determine the idea of consciousness. Still fuzzy. Does a plant consciously turn towards the sun? Does a virus consciously interact with its host? Some would say not. Metal expands with heat. Water freezes or evaporates. Is this a conscious decision? No. It's just what it does.
We're getting to the point ...
Sentience, we're told, infers the capacity to 'feel', to 'perceive', to 'enjoy', to 'suffer'. Sentience suggests self-awareness.
But does that sentience belong to life, or to the particular form.
What I'm working around is that 'life' isn't 'feeling' or 'perceiving' or 'enjoying' or 'suffering' ... it's just living. all that other stuff is ephemeral, and belongs to the form. Life strives to the fullness of its form, whatever that form happens to be. What that form is, really doesn't matter. Ebola viruses don't suffer a crisis of conscience as they destroy their host.
Lets just look at man in the time we have been here on this planet first. How many unique souls have been born since the beginning of time.
Ah ... souls ... now we're talking about certain qualities. Qualities that belong to the form. I would suggest 'soul' and 'sentience' are synonymous. We used to think that only humans had souls. Why, I'm not sure, as the word in Hebrew Scripture is used of any living thing, not just humans. The Scholastics believed that what sets human nature apart from animal nature is rationality. The capacity to think and feel ... but now we know that animals grieve, and that animals 'think'. Animals have souls. I would go so far to say that even plants, bacteria, etc., have 'simple' souls, but they have life, they are living organisms, even if they can't work a rubik's cube or contemplate they mysteries of the universe ... and the question of life.
What am I getting at?
Planet 'X' is a dead planet because it's too far, or too close, to a sun. Too much radiation, or not enough. We exist in what astronomers call 'the goldilocks position' because we're neither too close nor too far, but just right.
Having said that, organic life, oxygen-based life is still, for all that, a fluke. The emergence of oxygen was the result of an 'event' that was effectively an 'extinction event' as far as the prior condition goes, as everything changed radically thereafter. Life will go on, but not the same as before. (That there was no life to be extinguished is debatable, or maybe not). There have been five such extinction events in the last 500 million years. There could be another one tomorrow. An asteroid. A pandemic. Global warming might well be an extinction event we've cooked up (excuse the pun) all by ourselves.
But life will not mourn our passing. We would, if there was someone to survive. If there's a sentient species on another planet watching us, or maybe arriving by 'interstellar overdrive' a week after the event, or simply looking at the remains of a blown galaxy that is now millions of years in their past, they might say, 'That's tough', but life won't.
There are 7.125 billion people on the planet today but what if a disaster struck this world and an object or asteroid from above, a nuclear war or any other world killing events happened.
That's the nature of the Cosmos. Professor James Laycock, who proposed the Gaia hypothesis, reckons the current path of global warming will result in about an 80% extinction before it works itself out ...
What if the life forms that arise form the ashes are not the same as those people that died those many years ago and they can not become themselves inside of these new life forms?
Now you're talking about the transmission of a particular self-identification ... I don't think that happens. I think 'reincarnation' means 'life goes on', not that this particular form goes on.
My dada (and I leave that second 'a' in as a freudian slip), as Catholic as you can get, chose the place he wanted to be buried. Birds were singing in the trees. Green fields stretched away (probably a housing estate now). Horses were running in a nearby field. The soil was verdant and fertile. That's where he wanted to lie. His soul he left in the hands of God. But his body would return to the good earth, and nourish it.
Where am I going with this contemplation ...
Consider:
A child sits digging in the sand by the sea. She's 'in her own little world', happy as can be, and she's singing a song. Five seconds later, she's gone. A tsunami, or organ failure, or a passing asteroid ... doesn't matter ... she was singing a song ... it was the song of the universe,
it was life.
And now ... it's gone.
The thing about a song, is that it's a narrative, in the moment, in time and in space. It will be forever part of the stock of the universe. That song will have altered the fabric of space and time. The song goes on. To quote Vonnegut: So it goes ...
Mourn her passing, but celebrate her life. Don't give way to maudlin sentimentality or fear.
In any moment, in every moment, we are living the question you pose. You don't need to look back across the millennia, across celestial distances, across units of astronomical time, the moment is now. Somewhere, right now, a kiddie is singing a song ... right here, as my mate Wil would say, is where the rubber hits the road.
Live life, and celebrate, because that's what true love is. That's what God is. The celebration of life, for life's own sake.
That is the Mystery of the Trinity: Nor for my sake, but Thine.
Live now. Everything else, as a wise friend once said, is toothpaste.
Oh, and like ET said, 'Be good.'
End of lesson.
