Someone at work brought this up and my head almost exploded because it sounds like total BS. They said if a sedentary mother gave birth to a baby who grew up to become an extreme athlete (ultra marathon runner/someone who just never stopped moving their whole life), technically the baby is “atomically” older because more energy has passed through them. Is this just malarkey?
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There is no such thing as being “atomically” older and age has nothing to do with the amount of energy “passed through” a person.
This is like saying a 5 foot person is taller than a 6 foot person because the 5 foot person does lots of jumping jacks.
That’s a bunch of malarkey on several levels.
You can’t even really consider a person as one thing on an “atomic” level. You are constantly gaining and losing atoms in your body so that just about none of the atoms in your body are the ones that were there when you were born. The atoms in your body are ancient. They are older than Earth. The hydrogen atoms in your body are as old as the universe. A good portion of them have probably been through the bodies of other people more than a few times.
Atoms don’t really have “memory” of what they’ve been through. Two carbon-12 atoms will be intentional, no matter what they’ve been through.
Not on any kind of noticeable scale. You just can’t move fast enough to dilate time by any huge degree, especially in comparison to things like the speed at which the Earth moves through space. You might be able to gain or lose a hundred-quintillionth of a second or so, though even that much is very unlikely, and notably, it’s far, far smaller than we can currently even measure. Certainly the active child will never catch up to their mother just through mundane physical activity. You need to be going at a significant fraction of *c* before these effects start to become noticeable, and we just *don’t*.
That’s not how age works.
Humans reckon age as elapsed time since a specific event, be it birth, the beginning of the universe, the last anniversary of something, etc. Age has nothing to do with energy levels.
Maybe your coworker is thinking the amount of vibrations in the atoms of your body increases as you are more energetic, which means the atoms “travel” further, which… Somehow relates to age? But then things like temperature come into play since the human body regulates it’s temp, so even being energetic over a short period isn’t going to offset the difference in sheer biological age.. I don’t even know what your coworker is trying to say.
The whole thing is probably derived from a very poor understanding of science.
You get older because your cells reproduce over and over and start to lose talomeres and suffer DNA damage. Over time this makes the cells less and less perfect until they can no longer sustain their function.
Well the way your colleague put it is totally irrelevant, however there is some merit to the overall idea that energy throughput accelrates aging. Nothing to do with single atoms or whatever though.
There is evidence (https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdf/S1550-4131(11)00264-6.pdf) that the more energy that you use, the faster you age. That is to say ***food*** energy from your diet. Why? Nothing to do with ‘atomically older’ or such nonsense. The more food you eat, the faster your metabolism, and the faster the products of metabolism create free radicals/ Reactive Oxygen Species, which are molecules which catalyze all kinds of negative reactions with your body chemistry, including damaging your DNA. These effects compound over time, making you age faster than if you were free from free radicals.
Yes it is malarkey and you should avoid this person when it comes to any advice. Atoms don’t move more just because the larger whole they are part of is moving. Secondly, exercise keeps you younger. If you live long enough, rue the day you can no longer run, then the day you can no longer walk. Visit a nursing home. Do any of those folks look like they’re getting younger? This is one of those things that is considered ‘Not Even Wrong.’
Its hard to say. We comprehend the concept of our time on earth as a beginning and an end. Thats the scale we measure, “age,” by in terms of hours/days/years. We assign our existence to a number. But we exist on many levels.
The rate at which our cells divide and are destroyed has the potential to, “speed up,” the biological symptoms of what we understand as aging.
but if our concept of time (as we know it) is flawed, then we’d technically only be able to categorize our existence into terms of energy & speed.
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