>>34131018Not to burst your bubble but you are incorrect, at least in regards to humans.
Each pregnancy effectively ages the woman at a range between six months or two years, despite the fact they look younger when actually pregnant.
This is because her body goes into cellular overdrive in order to produce baby.
She makes more cells and her existing cells in organs grow larger.
Disregarding the stress on the organs themselves due to increased workload, both of these things reduce the size of your telomeres, which are almost literally death clocks for your dna.
If you can imagine a shoelace as your dna, a telomere is the little plastic cap on the end that protects it from fraying.
Each time a cell divides, those caps get shorter, because the copying process isnt precise and a little bit gets shaved off each time.
Your telomeres dont contain any instructions, so it's okay to lose a bit of it.
When your telomeres get short enough, it triggers what is essentially an alarm and that particular strand of dna will no longer replicate so as to prevent weird shit from happening to it's child cells due to dna decay.
When this DOESNT happen and the cell keeps dividing anyway, you get cancer.
Those 'old; cells still function as intended aside from replicating, but the fact they can no longer reproduce is what ultimately leads to a lot of problems with aging such as lower healing factor, cateracts etc.
A large focus on the problem of aging is figuring out a way to artificially lengthen your telomeres, and they are actually the reason lobster are technically immortal, they produce an enzyme which constantly fixes the little bits which are shaved off every time its cells replicate.
Most vertebrates do that during embreyo stages, but the lobster is unique in that it produces it for it's entire life, and the only reason they die at all is because moulting their old shell requires an expotentially larger amount of energy.
TLDR: Get a magic solution for telomeres, get immortality.
