From what I have seen the technology for this is still way off.
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Scarlett Fever and a multitude of diseases that used to be terrifying mortal threats are now basically non events but people still "wear out" and die of old age at about the same age as our 10-great grandparents. I'll start believing that this might be able to be radically extended only after I see it pushed upwards in a discernible and meaningful amount.
The technology is clearly not ready, but the real question is how far off is it?
The truth of technology is that the rate of increase in technology tends to accelerate.
200 years ago we were just starting to figure out the steam engine. All travel was pretty much horse-drawn carriages, steam locomotives, or steamships. It took another 100 years to move it forward to the internal combustion engine. We advanced that into air travel by mid-century, and put a man on the moon only 25 years after mainstream rocketry was really pioneered in WWII. In the ensuing half-century, we've made air travel safer [and all travel] safer and more economical.
We were only learning the fundamental laws of electricity in the mid-1800s. We figured out the telegraph in the mid-1800s. Electrical generation and transmission and artificial electric light barely existed and were certainly not mainstream before 1900. Only after this did we actually figure out radio. The first CRT televisions were the mid-1920s. The transistor wasn't commercially viable until after WWII. The computer driving the Apollo missions was less capable than a modern calculator. Yet know we all carry computers around in our pockets every day, have a worldwide instantaneous communication network, can Zoom with our long-lost relatives and business colleagues anywhere in the world. We're pioneering in new fields like machine learning and AI which may accelerate learning new things through analysis methods that are not necessarily human-intuitive aided by processing power.
100 years ago, we faced one of the larger pandemics the world had seen since the bubonic plague. At the time we did not even know that viruses existed. Penicillin wasn't even discovered until almost a decade later. Around that time we were starting to understand that DNA existed, but it wasn't until 1953 that the actual structure of DNA was discovered. We barely started to scratch the surface of genomic sequencing in the late 1970s, and it was only 20 years ago that we actually figured out the sequence of the human genome. Yet last year we sequenced a virus, developed a vaccine using mRNA which taught our bodies to produce a specific protein generated by that virus, and learn to build immunity to it. That doesn't even take into account all the medical advances over the last 100 years.
But what we've seen over the last 100 years is that we now have advanced technology for communication and processing, and we've ALREADY been using that to accelerate our learning and development of medical advances to where we've advanced medicine more in the last 20 years then probably in the 40 years before that, and more in the last 100 years than in all of human history combined. And on all fronts, it appears to be accelerating, not stalling.
There is ongoing research in the mechanisms of aging. We have some good understanding of HOW we age. We haven't really figured out very much how to slow or stop that process. It might be impossible. I don't know. But if it's possible, we're at a better time in history than ever to figure it out.
Will it happen in my lifetime? Well, one of the ideas being floated is that every advance that gets us partially there helps people live longer for the next advances to get us the next extension to be developed, such that at some point simply getting to step 1 may allow you to live long enough to see the problem solved. The question is whether step 1 is figured out before I'm too old and decrepit to make use of it, or after I've already passed.
Either way, it's exciting.
