This is hilariously over-optimistic on the timescales. Like on this timeline we'll have a Mars colony in 10 years, immortality drugs in 15 and Half Life 3 in 20.
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This is hilariously over-optimistic on the timescales. Like on this timeline we'll have a Mars colony in 10 years, immortality drugs in 15 and Half Life 3 in 20.
These timelines always assume that things progress as quickly as they can be conceived of, likely because these timelines come from "Ideas Guys" whose involvement typically ends at that point.
Orbital mechanics begs to disagree about a Mars colony in 10 years. Drug discovery has many steps that take time, even just the trials will take 5 years, let alone actually finding the drugs.
The other reply has better info on covid specifically, but also consider that this refers to "immortality drugs". How long do we have to test those to conclude that they do in fact provide "immortality"?
Now sure, they don't actually mean immortality, and we don't need to test forever to conclude they extend life, but we probably do have to test for years to get good data on whether a generic life extension drug is effective, because you're testing against illness, old age, etc, things that take literally decades to kill.
That's not to mention that any drug like that will be met with intense skepticism and likely need to overcome far more scrutiny than normal (rather than the potentially less scrutiny that covid drugs might have managed).
Curing aging might be immediately obvious--like old folks have all their diminished capacity restored, and they are more similar to their physical peak.
Old people may have a lot of reason to volunteer to use these.
I think we will discover that our body can reset itself via some trigger mechanism. It built us once, the code isn't gone. It can do it again.
I don't think curing aging is an easy thing anyway. The whole of evolution is basically set up against it. Because it would break evolution itself.
There isn't a single species that has somehow gained infinite lifespans though mutation. I think it's a lot harder to accomplish. I guess a lot of it has to do with degrading DNA (and again, evolution never had to figure out a fix for that because it's a feature not a bug).