Why do we age and how do biologically immortal organisms combat the aging process?
In: Biology
Long story short, telomeres. You’re body has a little counter on it’s cells that counts the number of divisions it’s had. Once that hard counter runs out, the cell stops splitting and just as quickly your vitality goes with it. Your body heals more slowly, breaks more easily, the ability to add muscle goes down, if your body was a car it would have just passed the manufacturer warranty date. If nothing else gets your first, eventually your body just won’t have the juice to keep itself going.
How to fight it is a totally different matter, biologically immortal creatures go about it one of two ways. The first is to trick their cells into thinking they’re newly reborn, basically towards the end of their life they metamorphisize back into a younger version, simple organisms tend to do this. This method isn’t really workable for humans, unless you want to be reborn a baby with no functional memory of your past life. Immortal, yes, but not how you want it.
The other way is to slow the whole process way way down, if your cells split once every second, make them split once every 10 seconds instead. Lobsters owe their longevity to this method, but again not really workable for humans. All this would do is make us take forever to age, which may at first seem good, but that wouldn’t jive with how our bodies work, we would work out and take 10 times longer to heal after, get cut and it will take months to heal. People would look and act like teenagers but would get weird cancers that only really happen from long exposure, but since our cells aren’t replacing themselves as quickly the same cell would be exposed for longer.
For better or worse, both natural and pre-natural death has proven to be the exact catalyst for change that life needed to evolve. If one organism never died, it would compete against it’s offspring for resources. If it never died, it couldn’t evolve and be much more vulnerable to the unexpected. I suspect if we ever do discover functional immortality it won’t be biological, but technological.
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