Don’t forget there are people (e.g. Robert Kennedy Jr.) doing their damndest to lower American life expectancy. And succeeding to some extent. Today’s Votemaster had an analysis of how many more Republicans than Democrats died of Covid.
I would add that antibiotics are still largely effective. I have three times suffered a UTI, which makes urination very painful. All three times it essentially disappeared within an hour of the first dose of an antibiotic. Incidentally, the first two times, it was recommended that I go through the while ten days of treatment. Now they advise you stop after a couple days.
I have nowhere your knowledge or connections, but R.L.E. pretty much has to work with “top-notch-meat-puppets” … so you can’t take your avg. 75 y.o. obese, diabethic, heart-condition and arthritic guy and give him eternal life or another 50 years.
So that means, maybe (big maybe) people who are born today might have a medical history (starting early life) to live to 150 … so by very definition, we will have to wait nearly 150 years to find out.
I’ll defer to the experts, or those who’ve done more research than my prior attempt to work on Biochem degree a few years back (time and budget, time and budget), but I’m of the opinion that looking at the rest of the world, the answer will be never. Cynical, but I strongly suspect we’re going to have a major functional environment crash from global warning, which will further increase social and political tensions to the point of societal collapse and open warfare within possibly my lifetime (20-30 more years at a guess), and certainly before there’s even a glimmer of a practical technology on the horizon.
And even if I’m wrong, I think the costs will lead to a more dystopian version than any radical life extension. It’ll be very much in the interests of the developers to sell the process to the highest bidders, and especially initially, I can’t imagine it’ll be cheap. We already have the sort of prime target, Musk, who openly wants the breeders and workers to keep doing their things, living short, brutal lives, while he and similar (read wealthy, white elites) rule over the rest. Combine that with expensive life extension? OMFG.
It’ll be in their interests to keep it expensive, so even if it happens (again, I doubt strongly, even if we don’t doom ourselves, I’d bet over a hundred years to develop something that doesn’t just make you ALL the cancer) it won’t be a radical life extension except for the tippy tippy top of the pyramid. Everyone else is going to be the same, or likely, a good bit worse as less becomes available to “the little people”.
I am really looking forward to when the minimum retirement age is 95, Social Security starts kicking in at 110, and public schools go on for thirty years.
The likelihood of this future—absent of some hereto unexpected negative climate feedback that results in a radical reversal of ocean temperature increase and terminal cryosphere degradation—is becoming increasingly evident, and in fact may be exacerbated by increasing political instabilities, rising hypernationalism, and the collapse of global order that might otherwise buffer some of the coming climate impacts and drive emigration from affected regions (or, at least suppress civil unrest and regional conflicts). But even absent of these challenges, there are so many fundamental genetic, cellular and epigenetic regulation, immunological, and neurological advances that would need to be made to enhance control of human senescence (not to mention making it practical and broadly available) that projecting when the confluence of innovations could occur is a fool’s errand, notwithstanding the question of whether it would be desirable to do so. But it seems increasingly untenable that we’ll even have the opportunity to test that proposition.