Aging may be a program, not a breakdown

It's probably a bit of both.

Maintaining order and fighting entropy is hard, but also planned obsolescence is a good thing for systemic resilience.

You have to regularly clear out the old for at least two reasons...

a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised. "We can't build that anymore. We don't know how." A factory that builds things that last too long eventually goes out of business.

b) prevent old things from monopolizing resources due to more time to compound interest. Otherwise, you end up with Saturn devouring his son.

There are animals that don't "age"[1] so of course it's programmed. There's a balance between how often you want to recombine genetics and how long you want to be able to remember. It seems like a better system would have humans decline differently (i.e. no dementia) but having people grow old is almost certainly beneficial to the species.

[1] Their risk of death does not increase after reaching adulthood. I.e. every year after adulthood has the same risk of unexpected death. Humans and other animals that age have their risks of death climb in "old" age.

I've always thought eternal life would steal from the next generation if resources are scarce. If your reaction times, intelligence, etc are always good, and your experience and memories get better, it just seems like you'd out compete your kids and younger cohorts. All well and good but basically stops genetic turnover that got us to this point.

OTOH, you'd accumulate uncurable disease, injuries, etc as well. Maybe you become a disease resevoir inside your own growing family. Or you pass on as-yet-unknown genetic anomalies that are unhelpful, and you do so forever.

Granted that's a modern take, and in particular a modern rpg-like take. Regardless though getting rid of oldies seems like a reasonable way to move a species forward if natural selection is driving "forward".

I think death has some actual benefits. Yes, some of our comfort with death comes with learning to live with its inevitability, but it has genuinely some upsides. I think they have some to do with being able to change things and institutions, but mostly it centers around our brains and psychology. Our life cycle is connected to how our brain develops and matures, inherently I think.

For example, if you go through some events in your childhood, they may stick with you until your death, as an inevitable part of you. Sure, treatment helps, but probably some memories you can't just erase.

Recycling things into a next generation, with probably better living conditions seems like generally pretty positive thing.

Also, some time you'd probably start to stop learning, not necessarily due to brain aging and neuron death, but simply because of basic architecture of our brain and how information solidifies and it starts to become more difficult to learn new things. We are a little more bored of most things and a lot of mystery and wonder diminishes somewhat.

In biology, there are always many causes, of course.

I wonder if people are familiar with the hypothesis of parasite-driven aging.

Parasites are vastly more prevalent than most people in modern, sanitary, medicated societies realize. Studies show that over half the biomass in a region may be parasitic.

Parasite frequently keep the host alive, but inhibit reproduction. This leaves the host alive, and competing with healthy members of its species for resources, but no capable longer reproducing. It's evolutionary dead weight.

Death is basically "turning it off and on again", just as you would do with a computer, and for very similar reasons. It clears the accumulated parasites and starts fresh.

This would also help explain why death is strongly conserved.

25 years ago I had a spirited discussion with my AP Biology teacher where I posited a similar theory when we were discussing (and running experiments on) genetic mutations. It was "spirited" because she was rather dismissive of the idea, and my (likely overconfident) teenage brain did not understand her response and reasoning. She was otherwise a great teacher.

There's been several articles over these last decades that have covered different iterations of genetic aging, and I think about that discussion every time. I wonder if she's read any of them and also thought about that discussion.

Reminds me of a thought I had about galaxies being instance runs while writing Github actions to build database binaries.

Each galaxy and any planets/life it contains are just artifacts of an "existence run." That's why life feels like a simulation so often (and human history repeats itself): we're inside of an organic (human word) "program" that's trying to perfect itself by running similar, but consistently tweaked "logic" over and over. Things like evolution are just an algorithm embedded in the system.

If the theory discussed in the article is correct, then aging is (in the scope of the above thought) just one program among several that we interpret as existence/life.

Just a daydream but fun to think about.

Previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413305

Aging could very well be a program to deal with the breakdown.

Not surprised. Some sort of optimization program to terminate the aged in order to reduce the maintenance issues for the next generation I suppose..

Any Larry Niven fans nodding along?

You could even say it's an "upgrade Pak."

It’s an accumulation of damage. End of story.

In the end, can aging itself not be cured, and is the only option to prevent the program that causes it? I'm curious

>when he became acutely aware that his grandparents and parents were not going to live forever…Cao turned to science. Finding a way to slow aging became his lifelong goal

Nothing is supposed to persist forever it doesn’t even make sense to try