Ronald Bailey wrote a lengthy look at the Longevity Summitt held in November 2009 in California,
Tech entrepreneur and futurist Ray Kurzweil opened the conference with a virtual presentation on exponential technology trends that are bringing the prospect of achieving longevity escape velocity ever closer. “We are very close to the tipping point in human longevity,” asserted Kurzweil to the conferees. “We are about 15 years away from adding more than one year of longevity per year to remaining life expectancy.” This has been labeled by summiteer and life-extension guru Aubrey de Grey as longevity escape velocity. Achieving escape velocity, according to Kekich, would mean that “your projected day of reckoning moves further away from you rather than closing in on you.”
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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 being by 2029. By then, Kurzweil argued, people will be beginning their intimate merger with information technologies, biotechnologies, and nanotechnologies. Kurzweil, age 61, emphasized, “Something I am personally interested in is not just designer babies, but designer baby boomers.”
The participants at the conference were all over the place, from researchers working on remediating telomere length to those trying to find chemical equivalents for the effects of calorie restriction in non-human animals to efforts to preserve organs intended for transplantation longer.
While I certainly hope that Kurzweil is right, I suspect there’s more wishful thinking in Kurzweil’s estimation of how close breakthroughs in life-extens