jrh555

By resources I wasn't necessarily referring to calories consumed. I was thinking of something like stem cells or some other resource useful for repairing damaged tissues that might be deliberately restricted or "turned off" by the body as part of the process of shutting down overall growth.

The rate of aging seems to be tied to the rate of growth with slower growing organisms also aging more slowly so you might expect GH-deficient mice to live longer if it resulted in a slower rate of growth.

Hopefully turning growth back on for a short period of time would not result in the body actually growing larger in size. With luck, resources made available by new growth would go to repair tissues damaged by aging before initiating new growth.

One idea that I'm surprised I've never seen mentioned is the possibility that life ages in the same way that companies do. New high growth companies often have lots of money to hire new people, buy new equipment, build new office buildings, etc. When revenue eventually levels off or drops, often there are no longer enough resources to support everything that was built up in the growth phase. In older companies you might see a lot of old worn out equipment and infrastructure that is not getting repaired due to lack of resources. This effect can be seen on a larger scale in cities or even nations that experience a slowdown in growth.

What if aging is simply a side effect of the fact that we stop growing at a certain age? It could be that certain key resources needed to fully repair the body are reduced or shut off once growth stops. Aging might even be a kind of negative growth.

It's interesting that the effects of aging don't start showing up until after we stop growing. Also, the rate at which different forms of life age seems to be related to the growth rate. Some types of turtle can live to be over 200 years old but take 50 years to grow to full size.

I'd be curious to see if there is any research into aging along these lines. If aging is related to growth, perhaps an anti-aging treatment could be as simple as finding a way to restart growth for short periods of time to generate the additional resources needed to repair damaged tissue. I have heard of human growth hormone being used as an anti-aging treatment though something tells me there would be more involved than just one hormone.

One thing that may save utilities for a while is the rise of the electric car. There will be a need for charging stations to charge these cars when away from home and solar may not be practical in all locations. This could be especially true in cities where there may not be enough room for all the solar panels needed. Electrified roads that charge up cars as they drive on them would be even better and would be a natural extension of existing utility services. If utilities were smart they would focus on helping to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.

I just checked my app and the numbers for both monthly and daily actives appear to be about an order of magnitude too high. They are close if you just divide by 10 though. Maybe this is the case for all the apps? The rankings look like they could be right.