There are a handful of mechanisms that break down over time, and they are both well documented and no new one has been found in somewhat the last 45 years!

Some people like to split some of them up in two, but the base SIX reasons we age are as follows:

Cell loss/tissue atrophy
Cancerous cells
Mitochondrial mutations
Intracellular aggregates
Extracellular aggregates
Senescent cells

See for example the book Ending Aging by the worlds most renowned bio gerontologist or the SENS foundation.

Fun fact, active research into how to fix them is ongoing research and seems to advance quite well towards simple and cheap treatments. Not fast enough of course but we might be on the cusp of neglible senescence as they call it...

[–] yoissy@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I think you means negligible senescence. Unless you're trying to say we are close to growing old irresponsibly

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 hours ago

Ha ha fixed

[–] ns1@feddit.uk 0 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks very much for this response! Good information for people like me who are interested to read more.

I think the point I was trying to make is that there are multiple reasons instead of one, and none of them are simple or easy. Understanding how those six things happen is subtly different to asking why they happen, which might be why we've got such a range of comments here and why the scientists in the article couldn't agree on their answer.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 10 hours ago

The downstream problems are complex and hard to understand (like being old and fragile, or having diverse shortcomings), the base problems not so much actually. Not the simplest things to fix but nothing outlandish either.

And the first mediocre treatments might give us some extra healthy years, and during that time, potentially other and better treatments will be created, adding more years to our lives, and so on. For the curious, the theory is called LEV, Longevity Escape Velocity, and it's possible that many of us might catch it.