Oh man, this one hits close to home! I for one am deadset on setting foot on Luna one day, so I need this to work. Ever since reading the incredible treatment of this issue in the Red Mars trilogy, I’ve been on board! And with intuitive algorithms we now have an even better shot than before; not only will they help speed up research, they will also necessitate reduced inequality, which in itself is a huge boon to paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. After all, how many Einsteins never get to attend secondary education in todays world?

Substantively;

  unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century.

This paper is fantastic science, but the title/conclusion is just lazy rhetoric. “If we don’t get a breakthrough, we won’t have a breakthrough” is just tautological, and high-resolution recent trend analysis is not a meaningful tool for answering that question, anyway.