Does the amount of energy you expend over time technically make you “older” because your atoms are moving more than someone who moves less?

Question

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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Answer 1

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*.