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How to solve problems Solving Aging
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Current views on Aging
Status: Draft Epistemic status: Weak This is a rough attempt at trying to make sense of why we age.
Observations:
- Aging (the increase in mortality and vitality of an organism [like humans] over time) is:
- Observed in some, but not all species
- Varies significantly across species, and somewhat within a species
- Is either:
- Exponential (humans)
- These species have a consistent maximum lifespan, without exceptions
- Non-existent
- ?
- Negative (Trees)
- These species have power law distributed offspring (most kids come from a few individuals)
- Aging organisms go through three phases
- Growth (cell to “gerostate alpha” or your prime years)
- High fertility and vitality
- Rapid Aging
- Aged individuals have
- More
- Mortality
- Frailty
- Experience
- Disease
- Less
- Fertility
- Strength
- Cognitive function
- Social bonds
- Height
- Injury recovery
- Same
- ?
- Eye color?
- Variance across species is high, and even species very genetically similar
There are a few things immediately obvious, from this
- Aged individuals are worse at biological repair, and therefore have more internal damage
- There must be more than pure damage: if there is just a larger accumulation, we would see a wider variance in lifespan within a species, and a lower variance across species.
This leads me to the following hypothesis:
The Planned Obsolescence Theory of Aging
- Aging is a dynamic property species control to optimize survival
- They do this by slightly reducing their own repair rate (probably at the bioelectrical or transcriptomic level)
If you had fine control over the rate at which you repair a system you can engineer a stochastic but predictable lifespan into any system.