Someone on HN mentioned this paper in another thread about life extension. I find it fascinating that old age can be explained as redundant system breakdown and

Someone on HN mentioned this paper in another thread about life extension. I find it fascinating that old age can be explained as redundant system breakdown and eventually failure. > Reliability theory is a general theory about systems failure. It allows researchers to predict the age-related failure kinetics for a system of given architecture (reliability structure) and given reliability of its components. Reliability theory predicts that even those systems that are entirely composed of non-aging elements (with a constant failure rate) will nevertheless deteriorate (fail more often) with age, if these systems are redundant in irreplaceable elements. Aging, therefore, is a direct consequence of systems redundancy. Reliability theory also predicts the late-life mortality deceleration with subsequent leveling-off, as well as the late-life mortality plateaus, as an inevitable consequence of redundancy exhaustion at extreme old ages. The theory explains why mortality rates increase exponentially with age (the Gompertz law) in many species, by taking into account the initial flaws (defects) in newly formed systems https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11742523 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11742523