YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Aging could very well be a program to deal with the breakdown.

There are animals that don't "age"[1] so of course it's programmed. There's a balance between how often you want to recombine genetics and how long you want to be able to remember. It seems like a better system would have humans decline differently (i.e. no dementia) but having people grow old is almost certainly beneficial to the species.

[1] Their risk of death does not increase after reaching adulthood. I.e. every year after adulthood has the same risk of unexpected death. Humans and other animals that age have their risks of death climb in "old" age.

I've always thought eternal life would steal from the next generation if resources are scarce. If your reaction times, intelligence, etc are always good, and your experience and memories get better, it just seems like you'd out compete your kids and younger cohorts. All well and good but basically stops genetic turnover that got us to this point.

OTOH, you'd accumulate uncurable disease, injuries, etc as well. Maybe you become a disease resevoir inside your own growing family. Or you pass on as-yet-unknown genetic anomalies that are unhelpful, and you do so forever.

Granted that's a modern take, and in particular a modern rpg-like take. Regardless though getting rid of oldies seems like a reasonable way to move a species forward if natural selection is driving "forward".

It's probably a bit of both.

Maintaining order and fighting entropy is hard, but also planned obsolescence is a good thing for systemic resilience.

You have to regularly clear out the old to both a) keep the process of creating new things well exercised and b) prevent old things from monopolizing resources due to more time to compounding interest.