$6.96B was raised by private longevity companies in 2022

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/11/04/nothing-is-right-about-...

At least, that's how the articles about how "we know this field has a reputation for scammers but we're legit honest" phrased it.

With a GCSE grade C in biology, I can't tell what's a scam and what's a legitimate breakthrough, and I'm also mindful of the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect.

Which is terrible. It means that there are all sorts of barriers in place to developing drugs or therapies that prevent or reverse aging -- because you couldn't get FDA approval for something that it doesn't consider disease. It’s hard to even get the studies approved.

More details:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-new-goal-growing-old...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/19/1061070/is-old-a...

Longevity research = Maintain the health equivalent of a young person, indefinitely.

So longevity expands regular medicine to include interventions in everybody (at least all adults) regardless of normal health, as early as possible, to halt or reverse age related loss of functions and maximally delay death.

There's no diagnosis when you start treatment.

But seriously, life should be fun. If it's not I'd encourage you to think about how you can make a change, even if it's just your mindset.

But, I'd argue that should be a call for you to be even more intentional about adding more joy, beauty, and real, meaningful pleasure into your life. Those are the things we most easily give up, and if we're not careful we're bound to have little of it around.

Depends on the manner of your exit. You may not be blessed with a merciful swift stroke in your sleep. Some ways of dying (like ALS) are absolutely horrible and I am sure that in the concoction of emotions that the victim feels, sadness is a significant component. Regardless of what they imagined when they were 40 and death was still a distant event.

Plus, aging will reduce the quality of life you have.

Yet we have this disease, it's called aging, and it just takes awhile to kill people. For some reason it is considered by many to be normal and good.

First of all, if the treatments are simple enough, there will be a ton of third world countries doing it in cheap clinics and the US won't be able to stop it. Imagine trying to pressure China or India into discontinuing such services.

Second, it is advantageous for the billionaires to collect massive data on safety and efficiency of such treatments before testing them themselves, and data on mice are almost irrelevant here; for such profound treatments, you need to know how they work in people, and your dataset needs to be huge, because people are a pretty diverse lot.

Third, all developed countries struggle with aging populations. In order to keep their economies afloat, they need to be able to reduce impacts of aging across the board, not just in a few privileged people.

First, eternal youth isn't a cure for all illnesses. Second, even if all illnesses were also cured and the only causes of death were injuries, malicious or accidental, the average human lifetime would be something like 1000 years (at current rates). Third, as nations get richer, the reproduction rate goes down, and in many cases is currently below replacement.

I also don't expect it to only be available to the rich. The first 5-20 years perhaps, but in my lifetime full genome sequencing has gone from impossible at any price to a few hundred USD. I expect similar for anti-aging. Even if the stuff is patented and restricted, I can say similar about heroin and cocaine, and yet the black market for those exists.

In such a system, you can never solve overpopulation - the less people there are, the more system will try to make things more scarce to extract more profit from those people. A system built to be inefficient (from our perspective) so that it can be efficent from the profiteers' perspective

https://peterattiamd.com/ama43/

People seem to want some kind of magic pill that will prevent chronic diseases while still allowing them to eat junk food and not exercise. They are going to be disappointed.

What is with this new thing where we call death a "disease" anyways? A disease implies that getting rid of it is a good thing. It's sneaking a very controversial statement (dying should be eradicated) into the post.

If you want legalized assisted suicide for those with terminal diseases then that's a tricky issue. It's a good idea in principle but we need careful controls to prevent abuse or coercion.

That isn't a rule of thumb for an infinite lifespan. It's probably not even a rule of thumb for surviving retirement from 1928 through 1938.

7% compound interest is a wacky assumption considering over the last 122 years global equity has returned real returns of 5.3%.

What is society oriented around now? While the idea of living under an immortal human god doesn't sound particularly appealing to me, it would probably be better than the present situation (i.e. living under mortal, short-lived human gods with nukes)

If we gave you another 500 years you’d waste them too, begging us for more.

The first is Gregory Fahy, who works on thymus rejuvenation, and actually has a bunch of people (not mice), whose epigenetic clocks have turned back a bit, together with some improvements in physiology which indicate that the rejuvenation, albeit modest, was real.

The second is Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who works on cell rejuvenation using Yamanaka factors. He was already able to pull this off in living rats without killing them - a major success given that the Yamanaka factors aren't exactly safe.