Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.
You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision.
Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though.
If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.
The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely.
Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.
The actual problem is that you would have to do selective breeding and genetic modification of humans the same way we do it with plants and animals. It is primarily an ethical problem.
Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
Two decades of this kind of research spending add up to $100 billion. And most billionaires are closer to $5 billion rich than to $500 billion rich.
It would sure be nice to have an infinite money glitch billionaire who cares a lot about funding anti-aging research and lobbying for anti-aging efforts, the way Musk cares about space exploration and trolling people online. We're lucky that at least some neglected fields get billionaire attention like this. But we can't rely on that happening.
Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
It would not raise the life expectancy to 100 years but it would considerably reduce the health burden on the economy.
Sure, it would be nigh impossible to do something like cram "genetic resistance to cancer" into a grown adult with current day tech, but there are other surfaces to attack in longevity.
Age-related illnesses shouldn't be dismissed with "they're just old" of course but there's no reason to expect a single cause. Other than passage of time itself.
It's why I stress that aging should be recognized as a disease. If we had the likes of WHO and FDA in agreement that aging is unwanted and treating aging is desirable, even if it can't be done yet, it would shift the perception considerably.
It would make it easier for billionaires to contribute to anti-aging research as a philanthropic effort - but it would also open many doors in terms of research funding and corporate investment.
That's not a reason to say that cancer is somehow "not a disease". It obviously is. We don't want cancer. We fund efforts to research cancer and funnel money into better cancer treatments, and we get results.
Aging should get the same treatment.
Those will give you at best another marginal decade. By all means worth doing but its not radical life extension. At the same time a young body can take lack of sleep and can physically perform even if not exercising much better than an old one. So there's more to it than just lifestyle.
We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.
I am not against trying to "solve aging", but I don't think we should think of it as just a disease, and there should be more plans on how to deal with the sudden "infinite" number of humans. While I may want to live forever, I would definitely not enjoy that in all circumstances.
That's beyond optimistic. What's more likely to happen is, we'll uncover some major pathways for aging and find a way to target them to slow aging down somewhat, at first.
People who get anti-aging treatments would live for longer, and would be healthier while they do. The adoption would be gradual, and it'll take a while for them to come down in price and proliferate worldwide - and it would still be up to people to decide whether they want them, although most doctors would recommend they do. The first generations of anti-aging treatments would allow people to live to the age of 100 fairly reliably, and remain healthier and more active while they do. Future generations would improve on that.
There will be no "sudden infinite number of humans" to deal with. Even if we started out tomorrow (for example, if it was confirmed that Ozempic has broad anti-aging effects), it'll take decades for this effect to become noticeable. Humanity can adapt to something like that easily.
I mean, sure, it doesn't scale as well as a magic pill as a business. But is certainly is O(n) with the number of people involved.
Compare it to being obese, wich can happen very young and is in part determined by how you are fed when you are a baby/child.
Those will give you an entire life. Living while being healthy is an entirely different life than surviving while being unhealthy.
Either way, a pill would scale better across all these people.
Why? Because there's a massive variation in people. Everyone who finds it "very easy" to as much as "sleep well, eat well and exercise" already does just that, and the implementation difficulty ramp up gets brutal quickly. It's simple to suggest and hard to execute.
Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they offer good sublinear scaling on many of the inputs. They're extremely hard to develop, but they're often well worth it, because the implementation scales in a way those "simple" solutions don't.
- noise pollution
- lack of fitness
- stimulant use during the day
- inability to manage a clean, nice sleeping environment
- obesity and sleep apnea
- a partner who can't sleep
- heat or cold in your bedroom
- mental illness
So, just from that list, we see that we'd need to overhaul housing quality so everyone has quadruple glazing and an air-conditioner, stop them chugging coffee, get them help with their laundry, fix their fitness and cure their obesity (which are themselves caused by poor sleep), and get them into therapy.
That sounds hard! Also, we're already working on a lot of it, but it's generally difficult or impossible to fix all of those problems.
A healthy lifestyle must be earned. It is a constant struggle against the fastfood industry.
Soon you'll see Coca-cola or Nestlé [0] selling both very unhealthy quasi-addictive food and drinks to kids and magic pills that cure obesity. Sounds scalable enough ?
[0] https://www.nestle.com/brands/healthcare-nutrition/medical-n...
Because although longevity is a nice recurrent idea for everyone in theory, when the rubber meets the road people routinely want to optimize time spent in living in pleasure.
The pleasurable stuff is almost all about "YOLO!" in every domain. A candle that shines twice as bright ends up consuming itself twice as fast and all that
If you think that being healthy should be a reward for a lifestyle of virtue, that's your problem, not mine. I'd rather have an actual solution than a blanket "those people don't struggle hard enough", pointed at the majority of US population that's overweight.
How about some regulation in the F&B industry? Reducing screen time at school? Those can be done now and don't really cost much.
And then make our cities pedestrian and bicycle friendly. More difficult but definitely a win.
Or would you rather pour billions hoping for a magic pill that solves it all? This is not realistic.