Can we stop aging by moving the Sun near the Earth?

[K.I.L.E.R]

Einstein's Theory of Relativity suggests that mass is the biggest influence of time. The time outside the Earth differs from the time on the Earth, and that is why the GPS satellites need to be synchronized on Earth from a control center.

If we moved a mass as large as the Sun's mass close to the Earth, could we in fact alter time on Earth? Could we extend our lifespans?

 

[itsmydamnation]

time is relative, so no.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

time is relative, so no.

I don't understand. If gravity influences time, the surely sticking a gravitational giant next to me would change the time around me? Mind you, I'm getting all of this off some documentary I saw a week ago.

 

[Bludd]

Nothing of that matters. How do you propose we move the biggest mass in the solar system closer to Earth? Do you realise how huge the Sun actually is? And what will happen to the climate on Earth and the other planets?

 

[Arwin]

Einstein's Theory of Relativity suggests that mass is the biggest influence of time. The time outside the Earth differs from the time on the Earth, and that is why the GPS satellites need to be synchronized on Earth from a control center.

If we moved a mass as large as the Sun's mass close to the Earth, could we in fact alter time on Earth? Could we extend our lifespans?

I think it would rather shorten our lifespans, for obvious reasons.

However, don't ever believe that you can alter the flow of time. Time measures movement relative to other movement. It is a measurement device only, not a physical quantity its own right.

Remember this, and you'll see that a lot of complex questions turn out to have simple answers.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I don't understand. If gravity influences time, the surely sticking a gravitational giant next to me would change the time around me? Mind you, I'm getting all of this off some documentary I saw a week ago.

It would to an external observer (until you got crushed), but not to you. Your time might appear to slow down to someone in the next solar system, but to you it would be the same.

Rather than trying to shift stars or planets about, you'd be better off accelerating to near light speed. A year would still be a year for you, but when you got back, many years would have passed to the people on earth who hadn't accelerated to light speed. Time slows down for you, but only relative to outside observers, not to you. For you it's still the same. That's why it's called relativity, because everything is relative to everything else, not absolute.

There's probably lots of stuff about this in Wikipedia.

 

[Grall]

Could we extend our lifespans?

As others have already pointed out, the answer is "no", but even if we could, the price we'd pay for our longer lives would be every movement of our very building blocks (atomic and subatomic particles) taking place slower. The net result would be the same.

Our hearts would not suddenly be able to beat more than the approx. 4.5 billion or whatever heartbeats that's the average for a human life just because we managed to slow down time. Our biological systems would remain unchanged, so we'd still age and die at what would appear to us to be the same rate as now.

 

[zed]

Perception of time is not fixed.
eg say u live 80 years, the halfway point of your life is not 40years (but pulling a figure out of my ass, closer to 25)

 

[MfA]

http://comicjk.com/comic.php/256

 

[pjbliverpool]

Perception of time is not fixed.
eg say u live 80 years, the halfway point of your life is not 40years (but pulling a figure out of my ass, closer to 25)

Huh? I sure as hell hope not! I'm 29 and still consider to have considerably more than half of my life ahead of me!

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Huh? I sure as hell hope not! I'm 29 and still consider to have considerably more than half of my life ahead of me!

Well each year seems to go faster and faster to me. I'll turn 30 in january and I feel like it was yesterday when I was 20, but really long time since I was 10.

 

[Sxotty]

Well each year seems to go faster and faster to me. I'll turn 30 in january and I feel like it was yesterday when I was 20, but really long time since I was 10.

THis is true, the remedy is to do lots of different things. When you were 10 you did all kinds of crap and learned new things about a wide variety of topics and activities. As people get older they generally get in habits, get jobs, and so forth that make it so there is less variety in their life's and thus life speeds up. (This is all IMO obviously )

 

[Mize]

1. gravity will slow time relative to that not within that gravity so you wouldn't perceive yourself living any longer - only the aliens would.

2. time seems to "go faster" as we age because each year is a smaller proportion of the time we have already lived. At five years of age a year is 20% of all the time we've ever known. At fifty it's 2%.

 

[Freak'n Big Panda]

THis is true, the remedy is to do lots of different things. When you were 10 you did all kinds of crap and learned new things about a wide variety of topics and activities. As people get older they generally get in habits, get jobs, and so forth that make it so there is less variety in their life's and thus life speeds up. (This is all IMO obviously )

Yeah i've noticed that we only seem to register the passage of time when we're learning something

 

[pjbliverpool]

Well each year seems to go faster and faster to me. I'll turn 30 in january and I feel like it was yesterday when I was 20, but really long time since I was 10.

I tend to measure it in what I've done and what I've got left to do. All I've really done so far is complete my education, start my career and buy a house. That seems much less than what I've got left to do, i.e. get married, have kids, watch them grow up, work another 30 years (!) in my career and then enjoy a good 20 years of retirement hopefully.

 

[AlNom]

It's been awhile since I've read up on cellular biology, but wasn't the theory for the aging problem related to the telomeres not being 100% replicated during cell division?

 

[zed]

Remember being 7 years old out with your mates on a saturday, the days would last forever, fishing, building a hut etc

I thought the commonly accepted reason why time get shorter the older u get is

We can only say if something is fast/tall/heavy whatever (quantify things) if we say how it relates to something else

Now when you're 5 years old a month is 1.66% of your life, but when youre 30 a month is 0.27% of your life.
i.e. The yardstick has changed length
A scary thought

 

[Arwin]

It's been awhile since I've read up on cellular biology, but wasn't the theory for the aging problem related to the telomeres not being 100% replicated during cell division?

Yes if I remember correctly, they get shorter each time, and when that buffer is used up, you won't last long as replicating cells will have to work with incomplete blueprints.

An interesting recent discovery is that boys get the length of their telomeres not just from their dads, but from the age of their dads - the older your father was when you were conceived, the longer the telomeres. In that respect my son is better off than I am, as I was ten years older than my dad when he was 'created'. (Though a famous writer here conceived a son when he was 65 ... - telomeres are likely not going to be his problem!)

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Get married, have kids, watch them grow up.

But they'll grow so fast!

All I've really done so far is complete my education, start my career and buy a house.

You don't give yourself enough credit for beating all those 100 or so millions wannabe yourselves in the race from balls to the egg :smile:

 

[3dilettante]

It's been awhile since I've read up on cellular biology, but wasn't the theory for the aging problem related to the telomeres not being 100% replicated during cell division?

That is one factor that apparently has a significant input, but it is not the only posited mechanism.
Comparative studies of other organisms do show examples where longer telomeres or better maintenance of them do pay off: tortoises and long-lived reptiles are an example and cancer cells often have rampant production of enzymes that rebuild them (whether that is a cause or effect of what makes them so long lived, I don't know).

Significant extensions of lifespan are possible with other manipulations, at least for creatures like mice, nematodes, and fruit flies.

Caloric restriction, selective deletion of certain genes, better genetic upkeep, proteins that help mitochondria repair themselves, are other ways to get long-lived animals.

It's probably a multi-stage question with differing thresholds.
Perhaps removing in-built restrictions allows a creature to reach the age where telomeres become a problem, and perhaps alleviating the threshold for telomeres just leaves time for other things like mitochondrial degradation and accumulating mutations to come to the fore.