Could gravity be the reason we age?

Hi, this is Deepinder, Founder and CEO of Eternal. For those not familiar with Eternal, we are one of the top 25 companies in India by market-cap. However, I’m not sharing this as the CEO of Eternal, but as a fellow human, curious enough to follow a strange thread.

It’s open-source, backed by science, and shared with you as part of our common quest for scientific progress on human longevity.

I want to stay at the peak of my health for as long as possible.

There’s so much to do, and I want to be productive and continue working as long as I can. And like many others, I’ve spent years optimizing my health and performance. I’ve tracked my blood. I’ve fasted, trained, meditated, submerged myself in ice, sat in hyperbaric chambers, and taken countless supplements.

These interventions help – sometimes dramatically. But they also demand time. A lot of it. To the point that I felt my focus on health wasn't leaving more than 5-6 hours a day for my work. I believed that maintaining our fitness should be simpler than this. There had to be a less time-consuming solution.

Then, a curious thought crossed my mind.

We must be missing something. Being a student of system design, I wondered if there was a leverage point that humanity had missed altogether. Usually, the answers to the most complex problems are surprisingly simple.

But how could that be? Humanity has been obsessed with longevity for millennia. If a straightforward answer existed, would we not have found it by now?

The only way such a fundamental truth could have eluded us, I thought, was if it had been hiding in plain sight all along. If it was so embedded in our existence that we never even thought to question it.

I racked my brain, searching for what that overlooked factor could be. What is constant across all organisms, inescapable by mutation or adaptation, obvious yet invisible? And then, a word surfaced in my mind: Gravity.

Could gravity be the reason we age?

It was an idea I had never encountered before. In all my years exploring longevity research, I had never seen gravity discussed as a factor in aging. I knew instantly that I was onto something, at least something new to me at that moment.

The deeper I dug, the more I realized: no one seemed to be talking about this. Not in scientific literature, not in mainstream discussions, not even in the speculative fringes of longevity research.

I began hypothesising on how gravity could contribute to aging. After researching and ruling out a few early ideas, one thought experiment led to the following hypothesis:

Our brains sit above our hearts.

And we live most of our lives in an upright position. Because of gravity, our brain receives a little less blood flow than it should. Over time, this mild reduction of cerebral blood flow (CBF) leads to its gradual deterioration. How?

1. Due to the subtle but chronic CBF deprivation, our brain starts aging – marked by capillary rarefaction, beginning in our 20s.
2. As the brain ages, it struggles to maintain autonomic and neuroendocrine function, marked by subtle blood pressure increases starting in our 30s.
3. The body starts deteriorating, triggering a sympathetic diversion of blood away from the brain to the failing systems, starting in our 40s.
4. This further deprives the brain of its own essential energy supply, further accelerating the decline of critical physiological systems in our body in our 50s.
5. The brain compensates for some of this decline in CBF by increasing the oxygen extraction factor, but the process spirals downward, explaining why most of our visible aging and rapid deterioration happens later in life (the last 15-20 years of our life).

Gravity is the single most consistent force across our evolution and the condition that makes life possible on Earth, but it might also be a necessary evil. And as we age, the body struggles more and more to cope with it.

Evolution’s priority has always been species survival, and not longevity.

Our bodies only needed to function well enough for us to reproduce and pass on our genes. There was never a selective pressure to counteract the long-term degenerative effects of gravity. Our average evolutionary lifespan, originally around 30-40 years, was enough to reach reproductive maturity in our late teens. That was nature’s concern. What happened after that was an afterthought.

What if counteracting gravity and supplying more blood to the brain, could lead to a healthier brain, and as a downstream effect, a healthier body?

The more time I spent with this hypothesis, reading, researching, chatting with scientists, and just sitting with it, the more I began to feel like I was tracing the outline of something hidden in plain sight.

Clues kept appearing...

Scattered across biology, physics, medicine, and even evolution. When I looked at them through the lens of gravity, they started to make sense in a way I hadn’t seen before.

And every time, I expected it to fall apart. I wanted it to fall apart. But it didn’t. Their thoughts and questions made the idea sharper, not weaker. We found explanations that made biological sense. So far, we haven’t come across a contradiction that couldn’t be reasoned through.

It’s not proof, of course. But it’s the way the story holds together — simply, unexpectedly, beautifully — that makes me feel like there’s something here. Maybe not the whole answer. But maybe the beginning of one.

After two years of research...

Trying to disprove this hypothesis without success, I believe it deserves serious scientific scrutiny. Not as the only cause of aging – aging is multifactorial – but as a fundamental, overlooked driver that may be the rate-limiting step in brain longevity.

If we can solve the gravity problem, we might not achieve 180 years of lifespan. But we might achieve what matters more: a few more decades of healthy, productive life with our cognitive abilities intact.

Sometimes, recognizing what's been in front of us all along is the hardest discovery of all.

Read on to know more about what we found.