I see a lot of people thinking, or at least hoping, that they’ll live for hundreds of years, if not forever. They use the “exponential growth” idea and the “longevity escape velocity” theory as arguments, and use those to convince themselves that they will personally get to benefit from significant life extension.
But tbh, this doesn’t stack up against the opinions of actual experts that i’ve seen. They all know how hard biology and medicine are. They all know the numerous challenges we face, and the complexities and the ins and outs of the aging process. And all of them say that the likelihood of significant life extension, let alone living past 120+, in our lifetimes is vanishingly small. None of them will tell you that biology is “growing exponentially” or “increasing rapidly”, biology is notorious for how slow it moves.
Longevity escape velocity, or LEV, is also an idea i see get thrown around a lot. It’s basically the idea that at a certain point in time, a treatment will come out that will extend your lifespan by, lets say 5 years, and in those 5 years there will be another treatment that extends it by, say, another 5 years, and so on. But this, putting it nicely, is complete horseshit. First of all, biology is, again, notorious for just how slow it moves. There is no scenario in which it will suddenly just magically fall into place and grant functional immortality, at least not in our lifetimes. And second, new medicines take time to develop. They need to be tested to prove their safety and efficacy. And if for example a new drug extended someones lifespan by 5 years, as mentioned earlier, that would take at least 5 years to quantify and measure. You unfortunately could not just assume that it will definitely extend lifespan, or just release it to the general public without the proper timeframes for tests, safety checks, etc. No doctor worth their salt would ever do that. So no, i do not believe that LEV is at all possible or realistic. I would love to be proven wrong tho.
Take something like heart disease for example. This is a relatively simple thing to understand. It’s essentially a heart that is either damaged, functioning at less than 100%, or clogged with plaque, LDL or “bad” cholesterol, etc. And yet, the best treatments we have after decades and decades of research is essentially just eating a better diet and hoping it improves. And that’s so much simpler to treat / understand than aging.
And aging research right now is essentially just trying out different chemicals and seeing if they work. I don’t know why “reverse aging in a lab is around the corner” or “aging is cured in mice” are such popular beliefs. They’re not true. The reality is much much more mundane.
I’m not saying you won’t live a healthy life, or that your healthspan won’t improve, but we need to be realistic. The idea that anyone alive today will live a significantly extended lifespan, let alone forever, is frankly absurd.
Good point