Why You Are Alive: ATP, Life, and Energy

You are perched on a precarious precipice between life and death right now. There is a tremendous amount of activity going on inside of you, even if you probably can't feel it. And this action is unstoppable.

Imagine yourself as a slinky that is traveling upward while falling down an escalator; the escalator represents the rules of physics that are pushing you forward, and the falling section represents the self-replicating processes of your cells. Being alive means constantly moving forward but never arriving somewhere. The escalator's peak is the point at which there is no more falling conceivable and you are permanently dead.