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Thank you so very much for your outstanding essay-post, dearest sister in Christ!

Senescence is an interesting subject and makes for a fascinating sidebar.

Strictly speaking, age is the consequence of geometry - every "thing" travels a worldline in space/time. Moreover, the amount of time elapsed during the existence of a thing in space/time is relative. To a photon traveling at the speed of light, no time elapses (null path.) To a mortal human here on earth, his elapsed time might be 85 years. The tortoise would have a much longer elapsed time. The single cell organism, longer still.

But senescence (aging) of a cell or body is another matter directly related to successful communication of biological messages - e.g. the message to die now (apoptosis, programmed cell death), the antiapoptotic message (p35 gene), etc.

At post 440, js1138 raises another issue:

I don't want to step all over the thread with unwanted side issues, but when entropy is brought into a discussion of living things, there is an implication that things die because information is lost or degraded over time.

Again, information [successful communication] is the reduction of uncertainty [Shannon entropy] in the receiver [or molecular machine] as it goes from a before state to an after state. It is the action, not the message.

I suspect you are wondering if things die because the message [DNA or RNA] is lost or degraded over time, i.e. thermodynamic entropy.

Information [successful communication] is not physical. It is not subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

However the individual elements involved in information [successful communications] may indeed be physical - and if so, they are most certainly subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

The elements of the Shannon model are message, sender, encoding, channel, noise, decoding and receiver. When the communication is complete, the receiver has moved from one state of uncertainty [Shannon entropy] to another. Or to put it another way, he or it is informed. In the molecular machine, that is when the thermodynamic tab is paid by heat dissipating into the local environment.

It is possible for the sender's message to be altered (for good or ill) by noise (e.g. virus RNA). This is a primary pathway of genetic mutations.

But damages can also occur in the actual channel (e.g. prions introduced) which would either make the communication attempt unsuccessful or otherwise affect the received message, i.e. making it not the same as the message which was sent.

All such things could affect the lifespan of the organism. And they could also affect its senescence.

[[Information [successful communication] is not physical. It is not subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.]]

[[It is the action, not the message.]]

Good point- I wondre though if it is the info containers that die, or if both do? I suppose both would, or one - the container woudl die, and the info woudl just dissappear or cease to exist

I persoanlyl woudl liek to explore scenescene a bit more if JS and you and others might be up to a brief explanation of organisms that are able to ‘self-replenish’ to avoid death for a long time. If ya’ll rather not, that’s ok too- just think it’s fascinating- firts I’ve ever heard of it really.