Do you ever wonder why we need to sleep? Think about the great potential if we wouldn't stop our live every day for several hours. Sleep is like being temporarily dead. Out of order for a big amount of our live.
I can't argue with the sense of sleep. Our body needs sleep, no question. So please don't take this to look for a way to stop sleeping. We are not build to go without sleep. People that sleep more, are generally more calm, intelligent and healthier, than people that are forced to go with the minimum amount of sleep. My argument here is, that evolution made a mistake, apparently.
If you sleep an average of 8 hours a day, that means at the age of 80 you have wasted ~26.6 years of your precious life.
26.6 years of time. If I think about how my time plan for everyday is, and I have almost never spare time left, this is a whole life. I answer myself, why the body didn't evolve differently to bear the permanent awakening. It's not logical. If you sleep you are very vulnerable. At the beginning of mankind this was a critical factor. And more, in that time you can't be productive to do necessary things to survive. Today, these problems are not as big as they were before. We have nice and warm bed, relatively secure, in a more or less protected area. In the beginning of mankind it was not. Dangerous animals, other humans that threaten the existence, and the run for every hour to get food to survive at day.
Does every creature on earth needs to sleep?
Almost everything that lives need sleep. Even insects were monitored and found to have sleeping cycles where only extreme triggers provoke them to awake. Mammals generally sleep. However, some kind of animals, like a Giraffe, only needs 30 minutes of sleep over day in small portions, while some bats sleep about 20 hours a day.
According to Animal Planet, it's not scientifically clear why organism need to sleep at all, despite everyone knows the effects if you don't sleep enough.
It remains a mystery why humans need to waste so many time doing nothing and being vulnerable and inactive. Would you rather stay awake if there was no need to sleep at all in the future?
I would. But I'll guess after some time even then, I wished the day would have 48 hours or more.