It's a common notion around the NBA that the big men of the game often age faster. For example, take Greg Oden, a 7-foot big man who came into the league at just 19 and was hyped as a great big man. However, after the age of 22, he played only 23 more games in the NBA. Further carbon dating performed on his body revealed his biological age to be roughly 500 years. How could this be?
Enter Albert Einstein. The father of the theory of general relativity. This theory tells us that objects closer to a massive object (like the Earth) experience time ticking more slowly than objects further from that same object. This is known as gravitational time dilation, a key consequence of general relativity. This effect is so profound that increasing your height by about a foot will speed up time by about one nanosecond per year (a source). No wonder our big men are reaching impotence at such young ages. But what can be done to allow the big man to remain robust into old age?
My first proposal would be to instruct the big man to lie down, a lot. If team trainers tied a 7-foot big man to the ground and only allowed him to get up for big games, he could theoretically shave about seven nanoseconds off his age each year (one nanosecond for each foot closer to the Earth). If the big man of interest is on a max contract worth about $40 million per year, this one weird trick could be worth about 9 nanodollars per year (40 million dollars times 7 nanoseconds divided by 31,536,000 seconds, or the number of seconds in one year). Doctors hate this because it doesn't really do shit.
My next proposal would be to have the big man spend his offseasons in a space hotel mere kilometers from a small black hole. According to analytics, if we place the big man about 3 kilometers from a small black hole of one solar mass, we can slow his aging down to just 1% of the normal rate relative to a normal person on Earth. If he spends six months of the year in this space hotel, over the course of the year he'll only age by about six months and two days. Thus, his career will last about twice as long. This is a revolution in sports medicine. However, physical proximity to even a small black hole presents practical difficulties. We must find alternative methods.
My last proposal would be to strap the big man into a small Ferris wheel and spin it fast. As with objects in a strong gravitational field, objects that are accelerating very quickly create the phenomenon of artificial gravity and therefore also experience gravitational time dilation due to the equivalence principle. If we take a Ferris wheel with a diameter of 10 meters and spin it at about 5.1 million revolutions per second, the big man will age only about 1% as fast as a normal person sitting on the surface of the Earth (I did the math) due to centripetal acceleration. This will be an unpleasant experience, but I expect a team with the right culture could embrace it (hmu Pat Riley). With my methods, Udonis Haslem could still be in the league in the year 3000.
For reference, here is an artist's rendition of big man Chet Holmgren on a Ferris wheel. Many draft pundits had concerns about this big man's durability, and those concerns were only magnified when he broke his tibia and fibia (as reported by u/Giddey_Cent) after mere seconds of exposure to bigger man LeBron James. Slowing Chet's aging process to just 1% of the normal rate could ease these durability concerns. Therefore, Sam Presti should think long and hard about a Ferris wheel ride with the big man.
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