5. Life Is a Set of Self-Sustaining Processes that Locally Maintain Order

What is life? In the context of aging, life is a set of self-sustaining, goal-directed processes (functions) that locally maintain and renew organization by using energy and exporting entropy to the environment. From the earliest protocells at the dawn of biological life, living organisms had to deal with entropy while fulfilling functions. Therefore, living is a continuous goal-achieving and self-maintaining effort. Aging is what we observe because this effort is imperfect, and its cumulative outcome is the rise of the deleteriome. Natural selection builds maintenance and renewal capacities (antiaging programs), including reset via gametes across generations, whereas aging itself is a biological consequence of imperfect processes operating within physical constraints in heterogeneous living systems. The practical implication is that extending life requires strengthening, engineering and reinventing removal, repair, renewal, replacement, and system-level control of damage flux, rather than turning off hypothetical aging programs, genes, drivers, or pathways.