[csallen]

Combinatorics can make things astronomically unlikely.

Imagine the "aging program" bugs out 1 in 100 times, a pretty high failure rate. However, imagine the program runs in 10 systems in the body, and success in any one of these systems is enough to age and kill you. The body is quite fragile after all.

If this were the case, then in order to not age at all, a person would need not just a 1/100 event to occur, but a (1/100)^10 event to occur. That's 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000. In other words, one in a hundred quintillion.

A hundred quintillion is about 840 million times higher than the number of humans who have ever lived, which is 120 billion.

[dotancohen]

Serious question. There are biblical accounts of people living hundreds of years. For people who like to find scientific explanations for biblical stories, is this plausible?

[fc417fc802]

No, because the underlying mechanism of intentional aging (as opposed to incidental) isn't plausible. The top level comment is pure fantasy.

There's extensive scientific research on the subject of aging if you care to sink time into reading about it.

Consider one of the many examples of embedded systems that suffered from subtle bugs that were dependent on environmental factors after they were left running for too long. The official manufacturer provided solution was to reboot (ie there is no solution). Now imagine someone in a comment section somewhere proposes the idea that these bugs are actually intentional program features. That's the scientific level this discussion is at.

[dotancohen]

I see. Thanks.