Hints of progress will come, IMHO, when we’ll see a suspicious over representation of (very) wealthy centenarians. This is not the case yet.

On the other hand, in times where the projection for 2030 is 8.3 billion people with more and more aged ones, there is absolutely no incentive for governments to attempt to maximize lifespan, on the contrary the ideal of tax planners, nolens volens, is more and more “retire and die!”

This is why I see serious funding for human lifespan maximization as a struggle of private interest vs public interest, hence progress on this front HAS TO come from the private sector, as it would be utmost unreasonable for the public sector to support such kind of research.

But is not democracy the expression of the will of the people?

There are no democracies anymore (did they ever exist? Maybe right behind revolutions but a long standing democracy is a black swan, AFAIK the best approximations are the Swiss one and the regimes from EU Nordic countries). We still have here and there democratic shells, but the actual content is not democracy but hypocrite plutocracy. Besides, there is no strong will either. You have yet to convince the average people that progress on life extension is possible and many will oppose it as a bad idea, if not a blasphemy!

So, wealthy people have first to have firm reasons to believe that they could personally reap the benefits of funding big research on human life extension, then, if successful, the results should percolate down the ladder.

But there is still this immense problem of demographic pressure, in the long run yet another reason to spread out of this overcrowded planet.

http://demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html

… been increasing and the main reason for this is due to a decrease in infant mortality rates. Imagine that you have a baby that dies at age 1 years old and how fast that pulls down your lifespan stats. So any country (like the USA) that can dramatically decrease deaths of babies can best increase their average lifespan stats. So USA has done great at saving babies and we deserve come credit for that. Yes and USA is even good at reducing deaths of 50 year old from dying early with less heart attack or cancer deaths to add on 10-15 more years, but from a stats point of view 4 of these +15 year saves has less impact on the stats than saving 1 baby that lives to be 68 for example. What is important to understand is that humans have done very little to expand the “max lifespan” in the last 2,000 years where me might have a chance to have any records of it. Total count wise, there are almost no more 115 year olds today than there were 2,000 years ago (OK maybe 10 more, but not 10,000 more like you might hope or expect with all our crazy cool medical advancements). We are good at not letting you dye early from cancer, or a car accident, or being born a preemie you can now live a normal life span of 75, but we have not done anything (yet) to extend your lifespan from what most people are programmed to die out at the 70-95 range. I think that in 2012 or 2013, maybe even 2014 you will likely see for the first time that the “average life span” in the USA will actually start trending DOWN (special thanks to how easy we can get food calories in vs. the exercise needed in our daily lives to get them back out, thus an modern day plaque of diabetes, obesity, lack of exercise, and more heart related problems that still outweigh (pun) current medical advancements). Who knows…maybe TV shows like “The Biggest Loser” and other health trends will wake us Fat Americans up in time..(thanks Dr. OZ and others).

Until we can crack the DNA code for longevity (with quality of life the focus vs. just living longer) we will not make much more progress to increase Max Lifespan. I know Ray Kurzweil and many others are on a vitamin and health focused diet to expend their lives to make it to the event horizon of the longevity extension hopes….and yes maybe we can all make it if we are alive in the year they figure out how to extend my life by 13 more months…. but for now, medicine is just helping us prevent the dying early parts and almost ZERO progress on the extending max lifespan.

For me it was really exciting at first when they could expend the lifespan of a fruit-fly by 500%, or 2,000%, but when they transferred their studies to mice/rats it went down…and then for rabbits it went down again. and for monkeys we could keep them from dying early, but not make them live even 10% beyond their max lifespan. Fruit-fly logic did not hold up for complicated mammals.

The good news is that there are at least animals that do live past 200, so at least there is some whale DNA that proves it is possible. http://news.discovery.com/animals/top-10-longest-living-animals.html (maybe all that fish diet stuff…and swimming for exercise theory works…… at least for whales it seems to assuming you don’t swim near Japan and die of a harpooning). Plants have even more options for long life genes.

The Naked Mole Rat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole_rat
may prove to be one of the creates we learn the most from, but lets hope we don’t have to hibernate for long periods or change the way we process oxygen to get their reduced cancer and long life (28 years is long for a mouse/mole/rat) that these creates have.