New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be.

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.

That’s kind of naive. Plenty of people definitely “try”, billionaires would love to live a few hundred more years. We know how aging occurs, there is degradation in DNA, telomeres shorten, and a bunch of other things. The main problem is that biological life simply can’t undergo overhauls like machines do, and we will probably just solve aging by creating successor beings that can.

Just compare the effort and the investment that goes into fighting aging with what goes into fighting cancer.

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.

Global investment in cancer research (not treatment) between 2016 and 2020 came in just under $25 billion [1]. That means someone like Elon could have financed basically all cancer research around the globe for a decade. Instead he bought twitter. And remember that the Forbes billionaires are not the most wealthy people in the world. They are just the ones living in countries with public company accounting. There is a lot of dark money in the Middle East and Russia. So it's not like they can't, it's more that this is still seen as a delusion or megalomania in these circles, since most anti aging research funded by billionaire happens very quitely by comparison. You won't hear them announce it like they do with e.g. malaria.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...

That's consistent with what I said, yes.

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.

The point is if anti-aging didn't have this edgy image in billionaire circles, there would be more than enough money to go around. If everyone agrees that we should get on this like we do certain other diseases, we could certainly tap into a lot of resources.