this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2026
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100%. When my wife asks me this question, I always ask...."are you sure you want to know?".
Once it was the astronomical odds of reincarnation if bacteria was a factor when reincarnating. The math just isn't there and your odds of coming back as a human would be older than the universe.
She rarely asks me this ever now lol.
It's a quick reset, though. You'll get back to human eventually unless you end up as one of those immortal trees or something.
I mean, being a tree isn't that bad
It is in this boomer run, fuck the environment world.
Unless you’re a Bradford Pear. 🤮
Imagine rolling tardigrade.
I hope after this I’m always born as anything but a human.
Whoops, now I'm a fungal colony / gestalt consciousness... untill the planet I'm on gets killed by its star?
Is that how you... achieve, or totally avoid samsara?
Task failed successfully?
If a single celled organism successfully divides, is it dead? Wouldn't a single cell eventually grow into a colony of clones, copying itself indefinitely until some random mutation or outside force prevents it from reproducing? Where would it be considered appropriate for us to consider a single celled organism dead?
When it dies. Clones are individuals, with individual rights that are the same as any other individual. #clonerights #clonesarepeopletoo #justpassionateforafriend
If cells never died the universe would be nothing but solid amoeba.
That would imply that bacteria have souls which means that I'm committing genocide each time I'm cleaning my toilet. I always assumed that you could only reincarnate into creatures complex enough to actually have sentience.
Edit: Also a fun fact is that if you count all human beings that have ever lived in the entire human history it would still not be close enough to the number of bacteria that live in or on a single human being (roughly 117 billion humans compared to around 20 to 30 trillion bacteria).
Isn't there a sect that kinda believes exactly this?
Jainism believes this. Their monks carry little brooms around to sweep ahead of them so they won't crush any insects by stepping on them.
Well if what your reincarnated as dependent on how good of a person you are these odds make sense if you look at humanity as a hole
being "good" is relative considering humans destroyed most of the ecosystem
Two things:
First, mathematically, It's sort of a moot concern. Reincarnation comes with the framework that lives are the universe experiencing itself. So There's no "loss" in going between species as "you" will actually incarnate as everything and everyone once in non-linear time on the backend making "time" immaterial. I am you and you are me. We are all one existence. So you have time.
Second, that reincarnation frameworks usually also include a structure where it's not random what you reincarnate as next time around. Karma doesn't usually boot people back down to bacterium right after human. It's usually more of a leveling up in order to experience deeper and more meaningful lifetimes. But YMMV.
That sounds extraordinarily arbitrary. Who decides what counts as a "level up"? Does that mean if you start as a bacteria you're stuck like that for a few thousand or million cycles? How would you earn enough karma points to level up from being a bacteria? What counts as "deeper and more meaningful lifetimes" if you are a bacteria?
Well, you do, ultimately. Remember, you're talking about a system where there is agency between lifetimes as well. I'm not familiar enough with non-human karmic mechanics to definitively tell you, but in most systems it's that you a "burning off" the karma of being en evil asshole by being demoted from human to less sentient lifeforms. So sending Hitler or Cecil Rhodes or Andrew Jackson would then indeed spend 40,000 lifetimes being killed over and over again before getting back in the running to have a central nervous system.
Exactly and the math doesn't give this theory a chance really, unless humans create the sentience. Coming back as "anything" would now include the bacteria and whatever else from other planets. Which even doubled, you would have to wait until entire universes recycle.
Does "waiting" have any meaning in this metaphysics? Arguably not.
Apologies, I totally missed the most essential part of this all:
Depends on the definition of "soul". Too small a vessel and stuff.