That’s…not how it works. If I kept copying a car, using the previous one as a stencil, I’d eventually end up with something that mostly resembles a car but ultimately doesn’t work properly. Eventually, it would fail to function at all but at a glance it would look more or less the same. At no point would it ever resemble a motorcycle and by the time such a mistake would happen I would have stopped even trying long before that or, to go back to cells, the body would have died because too many things weren’t working correctly to live long enough to turn into a different animal entirely.

I think that's accounted for under mutations and cancer and such. You theoretically could mutate into a whale but the probability of your cells making specific enough mistakes for that to happen is so astronomically small that it's essentially zero.

Of course it's more complex than my overly simplistic explanation, but I don't want to bore you with details when you could achieve the same result by cracking open a biology textbook. I wouldn't really wish that on anybody right now, honestly. Not how I would want to kick off twenty-twenty-six.

To circle around back to the main point, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Aging should be studied more. There are breakthroughs in medicine just waiting to be discovered that could not just extend our lives, but also extend the portions of our lives where we are healthy and fit enough to enjoy doing things, rather than wasting away in nursing homes and hospice beds.