(or 2!) Dying of old age, can you actually DIE because of the body being worn out, or is it always a disease or such? I read that if we cure every disease, we would live hundreds of years.

Question

Title! I don’t get it. Isn’t my finger getting worn from just being used for too long? Or will it eventually get worse because of something else?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Your body is like a giant photocopier. All of your cells copy themselves, and then die. Then the new copies copy *themselves* and die. The cycle repeats for your entire life.

If you’ve ever copied a copy, you know that you lose a little bit of clarity every time. The image gets fainter and has more blurry, and there’s a chance of errors (like slightly tilting a page, or a piece of lint that snuck in) that just get repeated down the line. Cells are just like that. As they copy, they lose a little bit of their usefulness. Old bodies are like faint, worn out copies of themselves. When poor copies of things like cardiac muscle, arteries, or organs hit a certain point, the cells just cannot function well enough to keep the organism (you) alive.

People who die of “old age” usually die of heart failure or aneurysm. Even if there was zero viruses, bacteria, or diseases, we would still be old. Our copies would still fail. It’s by design.