Longevity research is interesting because you could theoretically get to a point where one year of research extends people's lives more than one year. Then the

Longevity research is interesting because you could theoretically get to a point where one year of research extends people's lives more than one year. Then the people who avoided car accidents and the flu could live indefinitely, which is much more of a transformation than people living to 120. Will we live to see this happen? The optimistic view is that longevity research is very under explored right now, and there may be some significant low-hanging fruit. Also, if AI or nanotechnology live up to their hype quickly enough, they could significantly accelerate research. More pessimistically, I see at least three major obstacles: (a) Medical research sucks as it is, and longevity research is inherently time-consuming. There are ways to ease this, like testing treatments on mice first, but I don’t see an easy way around the need to apply the test to humans and wait many years to see the results. (b) The human body is hard to understand and manipulate - we haven’t cured cancer yet, despite all our effort. (c) Until people’s attitudes about death change (or those people die and are replaced by people with different attitudes), longevity research will continue to attract much less attention than it deserves. Most people have psychologically committed themselves to doing nothing about death. They accept it will happen to them with 100% certainty, but they deny it will happen to them anytime soon, so they ignore it.