TO AGE IN REVERSE (time, fragility, etc.)

Time to get more technical, so a distinction is helpful at this stage. Let us separate the perishable (humans, single items) from the nonperishable, the potentially perennial. The nonperishable is anything does not have an organic unavoidable expiration date. The perishable is typically an object, the nonperishable has an informational nature to it. A single car is perishable, but the automobile as a technology has survived about a century (and we will speculate should survive another one). Humans die, but their genes —a code — do not necessarily do. The physical book is perishable —say a specific copy of the Old Testament —but its contents are not can they can be expressed into another physical book.

Let me express my idea in Lebanese dialect first. When you see two humans, one young and the other one old, you can bet that the young will survive the elder. With something non perishable, say a technology, it is not the case. We have two possibilities: either both are expected to have to same additional life expectancy (the case in which the probability distribution is called exponential), or the old is expected to have a longer expectancy than the young, in proportion to their relative age. In that situation, if the old is eighty and the young is ten, the elder is expected to live eight times as long as the younger one.

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