this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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Atoms must arrange themselves in a particular way to become a cell. A cell knows how to make copies of itself, but sometimes mistakes can happen. Like a game of telephone, the cell at the end of the line only knows how to make a copy of itself, not how to make a copy of the original cell it came from. The mistakes gradually accumulate over time, which causes improperly formed cells to accumulate over time and give the appearance of "aging".
In theory, aging is a condition that is surmountable. There are jellyfish that are swimming in the ocean right now that are functionally immortal. They create perfect copies of their DNA every single time, and can repair damage to cells without leaving a trace of the original injury. If we could figure out the processes that allow them to do this, it could be applied to the human genome as well.
Part of the problem is telomerase being lost. The downside is that it's a cancer prevention mechanism, so messing with it (by adding more) is bad news.
And yet everyone seems to age the same. Funny how those "mistakes" never turn me into a whale or a plant, I surmise it's a bit more complex than that.
That’s…not how it works. If I kept copying a car, using the previous one as a stencil, I’d eventually end up with something that mostly resembles a car but ultimately doesn’t work properly. Eventually, it would fail to function at all but at a glance it would look more or less the same. At no point would it ever resemble a motorcycle and by the time such a mistake would happen I would have stopped even trying long before that or, to go back to cells, the body would have died because too many things weren’t working correctly to live long enough to turn into a different animal entirely.
I think that's accounted for under mutations and cancer and such. You theoretically could mutate into a whale but the probability of your cells making specific enough mistakes for that to happen is so astronomically small that it's essentially zero.
Of course it's more complex than my overly simplistic explanation, but I don't want to bore you with details when you could achieve the same result by cracking open a biology textbook. I wouldn't really wish that on anybody right now, honestly. Not how I would want to kick off twenty-twenty-six.
To circle around back to the main point, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Aging should be studied more. There are breakthroughs in medicine just waiting to be discovered that could not just extend our lives, but also extend the portions of our lives where we are healthy and fit enough to enjoy doing things, rather than wasting away in nursing homes and hospice beds.