A group of scientists have begun a project that has a goal of reversing the aging process in 20 years.

After nine years of research and collaboration, a group of entrepreneurs and scientists – many known to h+ readers –- are disclosing their plan “to start saving up to 100,000 lives lost to aging every day, by 2029.” A Longevity Summit in November 2009 — organized by Kekich — brought together a number of researchers on human aging and longevity for a discussion on the state-of-the-art research, the implications of their discoveries, and round table, cross-disciplinary discussions that may lead to new and accelerated results.

[...]

The goal of the summit was “to devise scientific and business strategies with the goal of demonstrating the capability to reverse aging in an older human by 2029.” Many at the conference believe that humans are approaching something Aubrey De Grey calls “longevity escape velocity” (see the h+ article “Aubrey de Grey on ‘The Singularity’ and ‘The Methuselarity’” in Resources). This is the point at which the yearly advances in procedures for extending human life expectancy result in adding one year to the human lifespan –- potentially making death-by-aging a choice rather than a date with destiny.

I would be willing to put up signficant sums of money that they will fail. Which is not to say that this is a bad project. In fact, I’d venture that we’ll probably learn a lot from it. Not the least of which is that we still have a lot to learn about the aging process. I wish this project the best of luck. I really do. I wouldn’t be surprised if it manages to extend the human lifespan by 20 or 30% in a healthier way.

But reverse aging?

Immortality?

Pipe dreams.

I say this because we still don’t know all the questions to ask about how human biology works–much less the answers. You can see it in the article attached which already has several different proposed mechanisms and solutions to the problem of aging–which suggests that there are further problems and mechanisms to discover in the years ahead. Which means that we don’t even have a complete picture of aging yet.

I think that some of the starry-eyed singularity/immortality optimists really overlook just how long initial discoveries take to turn into reality, and how long it takes for society to adapt to those changes. It seems like living in the information age that we rapidly moved into the age of personal computers and smartphones with access to internet in just a couple of decades.

In reality, though, it took centuries for the initial first thoughts about computing to make it into reality. And that required other discoveries in the areas of electricity, manufacturing, radio etc.

And compared to the complexities of human biology, computing is as easy as addition and subtraction is compared to complex topology and partial differential equations.

Maybe one day that human race will manage to conquer death. But that day is a long, long way off. Certainly longer than 20 years. It’s centuries, perhaps even millenia away. And I doubt anyone living today is one of the “first of the immortals.”