Ending Aging

Ending Aging describes how the process of aging is like a disease and therefore, treatable, by outlining the seven primary ways in which we age and possible antidotes to all of them, plus a glimpse into the future of potentially indefinite human life.

The most common way to deal with a disease is to prescribe medication for it. Have a headache? Take a pill. Have heart problems? Take a pill. Itchy feet? Take a pill.

The problem with medication is obvious: You never get to know what caused the problem in the first place, and can therefore never really fix it. You’re just treating symptoms.

Another, slightly better idea is to prevent getting sick in the first place. But you can only do that if you know what causes the disease. With aging however, that’s impossible, because there is a plethora of contributing factors, so it becomes hard to pinpoint which ones you personally should address.

How to fight against aging then? The answer is to repair the damage that has been done until you first start treating aging.

For example, if a 40-year-old is expected to live to be 80, and you cut his aging speed in half with preemptive measures, his remaining life span doubles from 40 to 80, and he can live up to 120. But if you jump in when he’s 40 and repair all the damage up to that point, he might now only have the damage of a 20 year old – but can continue that treatment for the rest of his life. As long as he keeps repairing prior damages, he can keep extending his life span, maybe up to twice his expected age, and might live to be 160.

You might have heard a thing or two about free radicals. Usually, all of the outermost electrons of an atom pair up in twos, which makes them stable. These are the lines you see around the letters in chemical formulas (like here). However, some reactions can cause an electron on the outer shell of its atom to end up by itself – which makes it a free radical. Free radicals are highly reactive. They’re very unstable, so they’re dying to react with something and team up with another electron. So much in fact, that they’ll tear apart close-by molecules, just to react, often setting off a chain reaction. Therefore, free radicals are troublemakers in your body, and they don’t just come in from the outside. Many of them are produced in your mitochondria (the so-called power plants of your cells, which deliver energy to all cells), and can lead to a change in your mitochondrial DNA. These mutations accelerate aging, so it’d be…