We are getting a little older every day..

It was a great excitement for me to celebrate my birthdays as a child. I couldn't wait for my birthday to come. When that evening was over, a sadness would fill me, how was I going to wait another year? I wanted time to pass immediately, let the days not stop, let the night not come. It's my birthday again soon. What a fool I was. Today, if I could, I would pull the strings to stop time. Now I realize that the birthdays that I wait for it to come actually take a lot out of me every year. A little more weariness, a little more sadness, a little more wrinkles, a little more skin spots. That's called old age. And the end is death.

We have changed a lot since the first cell to say hello to life by going against the course of the universe. But one thing does not change: the survival instinct or the fear of death! Most of us do not even think of death when we are running around due to our obligations during the day. If our ancestors did as we do, we probably wouldn't exist with our obligations. Fortunately they didn't… They put their vital security before their every need. They put the oxygen masks on themselves, then on their offspring and other members of the group who were unable to wear them. But in the end, like all other living things, they had to face death.

The survival instinct eventually turned into fear of death, because our ancestors were now aware of the reality of death. Being aware of death has separated us from other living things and introduced us to a completely different world: the world of myths! A thousand and one epics were created in the name of death and immortality and they were pursued. From the loudest to the most unknown, their main goal was to achieve immortality. If we exclude the myths that dominate the world, almost all the remaining myths and epics speak of a substance or cure that, when used, prolongs life or leads to immortality.

Unfortunately, the alchemists who have been chasing these epics since primitive times failed to reach their goals. But they left many ideas for the future. How much scientists use these ideas is debatable, but we are one step closer to immortality. Of course, we are talking about “biological immortality” because “true immortality” was found about forty thousand years ago, when a group of people scribbled something on the cave walls.

The universe started from a small point and created a space that we cannot reach the end. We, too, are beings that exist in this space, going towards disorder within the rules of thermodynamics. But we are a little different from the inanimate. What makes this difference is our rebellion against the system in the universe flowing into disorder. The system we are talking about is mentioned in the second law of thermodynamics as "closed systems tend to reach an equilibrium position". What is meant by the equilibrium position is the irregularity relationship with the environment. So long story short, closed systems tend to flow towards disorder. We are open systems; We can reduce our tendency towards disorder with the energy we get from outside, or in other words, by disrupting the order outside. But it's clear that we can't stop it, because in the end we die.

Here, the most important point of death is our cells, whose irregularity increases over time. We only slow down this process with the energy we receive from our surroundings, and the ability to do this sets us apart from most inanimate objects.

In fact, we are not conscious of this process and we exist because the works we do in line with this process are successful. It's probably a few oil molecules that start these things. We may owe our lives to the cellular structures formed by those fat molecules coming together on Earth or elsewhere in space.

The effort to exist is within us at every moment of our lives. We want to make our presence felt by other people with an article we write, a word we receive in the group or a composition we make. Survival is no longer enough for us to exist.

However, "existing" for oil molecules does not go beyond preserving their physical integrity. They have also introduced different chemicals among themselves in order to continue their existence. Thus, they have become an "open system" by creating a much more stable structure. Open systems, as we mentioned earlier, are systems that try to reduce their own disorganization tendencies with the energy they receive from their environment.

An open system is doomed to disappear after a while after cutting off its relationship with the outside. The same conviction can occur when the systems at the microbial level that compose it, cut off their relations with their environment. If a cell has come to a point where it can no longer continue to live, the main reason for this is that the stable molecules that exist within it lose their stability for some reason.

As we mentioned, open systems are in exchange with their environments, but this exchange does not always mean getting useful molecules into the system. In some cases, harmful molecules that can be taken from outside can upset the entire system. Worse, the systems around it can also suffer from this situation. When our cells are faced with this situation, they digest themselves. Thus, the surrounding cells are not damaged and the physiological balance of the body continues to be preserved. The self-digestion of cells is called "apoptosis".

In fact, aging is nothing more than the death of cells over time. Cells undergo changes over the years due to harmful molecules and transfer this change to their next generations. Although these changes are not fatal on a cellular basis, they can be fatal in terms of organ physiology as they accumulate in other cells. Or it can be fatal on a cellular basis and can be seen in most cells in the organ. While cells that decide to defend their environment end their own lives, they may not know that it will actually end the life of an organ.

So what does time have to do with it? We have said that cells assign tasks to certain molecules in order to establish the order of their internal systems. However, these molecules are also made up of atoms, and after a while in the universe that goes into disorder, it starts to lose its stability, no matter how much effort is made. When these molecules, which are responsible for maintaining order, become dysfunctional, the cell also becomes dysfunctional. This event occurs in most cells in the organs that have survived over time, and over time, the organs begin to become dysfunctional. We can call this process the aging process. Yes, aging is a process and unfortunately the end is death.