The original paper in which the idea of actuarial escape velocity was proposed by Aubrey de Grey is open access, and worth reading for a full treatment of the c

The original paper in which the idea of actuarial escape velocity was proposed by Aubrey de Grey is open access, and worth reading for a full treatment of the concept. The thing to take away here is that this is inevitable, but not necessarily for us, unless we dig in and get the job done right now. The development of the necessary technologies is very thinly funded, meaning that timelines are very uncertain. Senescent cell clearance may be under development in two US startups right now, a part of allotopic expression of mitochondrial DNA in clinical trials in France, clearance of one type of amyloid has had a successful trial in the UK, and clearance of glucosepane cross-links a couple of years away from a drug candidate, but other areas of biological repair needed for SENS-style rejuvenation of the old are still years away from getting to even this nascent stage. It is a miserable state of affairs given that the cost of progress towards prototypes in mice is a few hundred million, less than a single drug's development funding. Funding and advocacy make a huge difference at this point in the bootstrapping of rejuvenation therapies. ---- Escape Velocity: Why the Prospect of Extreme Human Life Extension Matters Now http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC423155/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC423155/ The escape velocity cusp is closer than you might guess. Since we are already so long lived, even a 30% increase in healthy life span will give the first beneficiaries of rejuvenation therapies another 20 years—an eternity in science—to benefit from second-generation therapies that would give another 30%, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, if first-generation rejuvenation therapies were universally available and this progress in developing rejuvenation therapy could be indefinitely maintained, these advances would put us beyond AEV. Universal availability might be thought economically and sociopolitically implausible (though that conclusion may be premature, as I will summarise below), so it's worth considering the same question in terms of life-span potential (the life span of the luckiest people). Those who get first-generation therapies only just in time will in fact be unlikely to live more than 20–30 years more than their parents, because they will spend many frail years with a short remaining life expectancy (i.e., a high risk of imminent death), whereas those only a little younger will never get that frail and will spend rather few years even in biological middle age. Quantitatively, what this means is that if a 10% per year decline of mortality rates at all ages is achieved and sustained indefinitely, then the first 1000-year-old is probably only 5–10 years younger than the first 150-year-old.