The Immortal Lobster

I learned something Quite Interesting from the TV show, QI, this evening.

Lobsters are, in theory, immortal.

I won’t go too deeply into the scientific details. This isn’t because I’m worried you, my dear reader, are too thick to understand them. I’m sure you are absolutely brilliant. It’s because I’m too lazy to look them up, and because I’m worried it might shake my newfound belief in 1000-year-old lobsters.

Lobsters have a special enzyme that repairs their DNA when their cells divide. This means their DNA doesn’t degrade over time which, apparently, is what the boffins think causes us to get a bit wrinkly as we get older and become obsessed with knitting and golf.

The programme also informed me when lobsters shed their exoskeleton, they grow by as much as 50%. They accomplish this feat throughout their life (which, as we’ve established, can be very long indeed).

These two facts have led me to a stunning revelation about how the universe came to be, how it will end, and how it will eventually be reborn.

If a lobster is immortal and it keeps growing forever, inevitably it will grow so huge that no other being is a threat to it. Even now, in the darkest depths of the ocean, there must be lobsters bigger than the biggest submarine. And the thing is, no one has yet figured out how to attach giant claws to a submarine.

Of course, you’re thinking, “But how would a lobster that big keep itself fed? And if it did manage to feed itself, wouldn’t it eventually get so big it wouldn’t fit in the ocean anymore?”

Excellent questions, but we need to remind ourselves that with great age comes great wisdom. By all reports, lobsters don’t start out with a huge amount of wisdom, but by the time a lobster is too big to fit in the Atlantic Ocean, it would have accumulated enough wisdom to make Gandalf look like Donald Trump.

Based on my calculations, a lobster that size would have figured out interstellar space travel long before this, to say nothing of cracking the trivial problem of how to consume any matter to cross its path.

The latter is, fundamentally, just a question of advanced cookery. If Heston Blumenthal can get us to eat leather, surely a millennia-old lobster can figure out what sauce goes best with granite or plutonium.

So now we’ve got a space-travelling lobster as big as a planet that can consume all matter it comes across. I anticipate your question, “But wouldn’t it just collapse into a black hole?”

Perhaps you have forgotten about the exoskeleton? Black holes don’t have exoskeletons. This is why they get all introspective and collapse in on themselves. The exoskeleton keeps the lobster viable even when it becomes as big as a galaxy.

Now this is where it gets really interesting — and where I put all living and dead physicists to shame.

The universe likely began with some kind of Big Bang, and many physicists believe it is still expanding. But the problem that keeps them up at night is entropy. If everything tends to drift apart and break down into component quantum-mechanicky dust, how could it all gather itself back together to kick off another Big Bang?

And this is where the giant, immortal, space-travelling lobster saves us all.

The Lobster eventually becomes so huge it gets to the point where it has consumed all the matter in the universe. At this point, not only is it the biggest and oldest thing in the universe, it is also the wisest thing in the universe. The Lobster can see the writing on the wall. It knows if anything is ever to exist ever again, it must sacrifice itself.

Over the millennia, it has been saving thousands of tins of baked beans just for this moment. Using one of its massive claws (how perfect is nature?), the Lobster opens up each of the tins, slurps them down, and waits for the inevitable explosion.

And Life begins anew.

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This piece was originally published on Medium.com.