Everything…everywhere…ends.

Death and taxes are really a misnomer for the quintessential inevitable that we can’t out-run, the real player in our terror about loss of control is sleep. Most of us, when we’re young, fight sleep as a mortal enemy of consciousness and by the time we’re old, it’s a love hate relationship between desire and need and the terrifying potential that somehow while we’re out we will permanently lose hold of this mortal coil. By age fifty, most of us know that aging can bring death in your sleep.

The key to that last statement is the word “aging”. We all know the arrow of time has no re-set button, so aging or the passage of time in one direction only seems a given.  But is it? What if the laws governing the process of aging are capable of being manipulated? What do we review first - the laws or the process?

Logically, the laws must dictate the process, so we have to think along the lines of gravity, electro-magnetism, temperature and light. The earth spins manifesting gravity in and out of the light of the sun creating periods of light and dark, heat and cold. So where’s the electro-magnetism come in?  As it turns out, the electromagnetic force is the one responsible for practically all the phenomena one encounters in daily life, with the exception of gravity.

Roughly speaking, all the forces involved in interactions between atoms can be traced to the electromagnetic force acting on the electrically charged protons and electrons inside the atoms. Electro-magnetism also includes all forms of chemical phenomena. The physics of electro-magnetism is the basis of the laws of chemistry, which arise from interactions between electron orbitals and chemistry, of course, is the basis of biology, on which rests our understanding of medicine and aging.

This includes the forces we experience in "pushing" or "pulling" ordinary material objects, which come from the intermolecular forces between the individual molecules in our bodies and those in the objects. So gravity holds us down and electro-magnetism, literally, holds us together.

The term "electro-magnetism" comes from the fact that electrical and magnetic forces are involved simultaneously. A changing magnetic field produces an electric field (this is the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction, which provides for the operation of electrical generators, induction motors, and transformers). Similarly, a changing electric field generates a magnetic field. Because of this interdependence of the electric and magnetic fields, it makes sense to consider them as a single coherent entity – an electromagnetic field.

This unification, which was completed by James Clerk Maxwell, is one of the triumphs of 19th century physics. It had far-reaching consequences, one of which was the understanding of the nature of light. As it turns out, what is thought of as "light", like from the sun, is actually a propagating oscillatory disturbance in the electromagnetic field, i.e., an electromagnetic wave or a vibrating string of energy . Different frequencies of oscillation give rise to the different forms of electromagnetic radiation, from radio waves at the lowest frequencies, to visible like a light 100 watt bulb at intermediate frequencies, to gamma rays at the highest frequencies.

Aging is simply the phenomenon of the “biological” responding to the physical world’s environmental cues. How we do it is the key to how we might manipulate the process and work with the laws, so to speak.

Here’s the Deal

We do it through another electro-magnetic wave/frequency of chemistry that carries information much in the same way lasers or fiber-optic cables do – hormone molecules. Hormones transmit the energy of light, temperature and gravity to primary physiological systems in us and all the earth’s species. That’s why that guy called it the body electric.

When the sun sneaks around the bend of the earth, between the magnetic field changes and the blinding light in photon packets traveling like a wave, cortisol surges to get us up, literally and figuratively (if you’re a man).  Testosterone cascades and blood sugar is mobilized to make muscles ready for fight or flight, depending on you situation.  The blood sugar provokes an insulin response to feed muscles or store fat.

If you get up with the sun and sleep with the moon and eat what the planet provides seasonally (no agriculture) in terms of animal, vegetable and minerals, how long you live would be infinite, unless you run out of hormones and lose your grip on the spinning world; and you will.

You will because we come into this life with enough steroid (sex and adrenal) hormones to grow up and reproduce.  The dying part seems to require no hormones. And there is one more small issue…everything else on the planet competes for her bounty with us. The germs, the viruses, the spores, and the animal, vegetable and mineral all view us as whatever they might need – food, a habitat, a reproductive vector or just a trellis to grow on.

Symbiotically, the germs in our gut give us an immune system to deal with “the other” in a fair fight. The same microbes also cause us to sleep. Their waste products build in our bloodstream until our immune system, shuts down consciousness to cull the herd in our guts just to even the score. When you don’t sleep because you’ve run out of hormones, it’s the beginning of the end. The inflammatory state created by your immune system to cull the herd can only do it in the dark. If you never go down, if you never let go of this mortal coil, the inflammation, instead becomes heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s.

Early Greek doctors like Galen and Hippocrates modernized  medicine by insisting that the causes of disease were not attributable to displeased or vengeful gods like the Sun and the Moon. Well, who knew? It turns out that they are, after all. Maybe it’s time to get religion, and some hormones.