As always I'd say that you'd have to be particularly pessimistic to believe these numbers. To hit these numbers would require the present revolution in capabilities in biotechnology to produce pretty much nothing of practical use. It would require the present sea change in the aging research and broader medical community in attitudes towards aging, the growing advocacy among researchers to treat aging as a medical condition (e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4468941/ ), and greater funding directed specifically at the production of ways to treat aging, all of that to go nowhere.
I don't think that is realistic. There are startups now working on ways to repair the specific known causes of aging, forms of damage that contribute to a wide range of age-related disease. Oisin Biotech for senescent cell clearance, Human Rejuvenation Technologies for clearance of metabolic waste that contributes to atherosclerosis among other conditions, Gensight for mitochondrial DNA repair, and so forth. Is all this really going to go nowhere, have no real impact on the present very gentle upward slope in life expectancy?
Betting against leaps in technology progress doesn't seem a winning choice given the past 150 years and the present environment especially.
There is no exponential progress in medicine. In fact, medicine is in some ways actually regressing, in particular through growing antibiotic resistance.
Where is this evidence for leaps in medical technological progress? The regular news stories prematurely heralding the end of some disease based solely on some priliminary in-vitro result that likely won't ever make it to a Phase 1 clinical trial?
I am betting that medicine will look twenty years from now largely as it does today. It will be painful, expensive, unautomated, unscientific, and of course, largely ineffective--just as it did twenty years before today. Had I made this prediction in 1970, 1980, 1990, or (extrapolating 5 years into the future) 2000, I would have been absolutely correct, so I see no reason to stop making it.
Take care of yourself. Do not assume regenerative medicine will fix the damage done to your body through smoking, excessive drinking, poor diet, or lack of exercise. Even if some genuine breakthrough arrived tomorrow, it would still take years to receive FDA approval and would likely cost a small fortune (see Sovaldi).
There is no exponential progress in medicine. In fact, medicine is in some ways actually regressing, in particular through growing antibiotic resistance.
Whilst medical progress isn't exponential this comment is way too pessimistic. Take the falling rates of mortality due to cancer[1][2].
Falling infant mortality means more people are living long enough to get cancer. But slowly we are winning that battle too as the mortality rate shows.
I am betting that medicine will look twenty years from now largely as it does today. It will be painful, expensive, unautomated, unscientific, and of course, largely ineffective--just as it did twenty years before today. Had I made this prediction in 1970, 1980, 1990, or (extrapolating 5 years into the future) 2000, I would have been absolutely correct, so I see no reason to stop making it.
It's usually a good bet to think that things will look the same in the future as they do now. However, your 2000-to-2020 bet is utterly and completely wrong because of the huge progress against Malaria if nothing else.
Since 2000, anti-malaria efforts have saved over 3 million lives and cut the mortality rate by nearly 50%[3]. That's a huge, planet changing piece of progress.
In the developed world, the HPV Cancer Vaccine is having a similar effect on cervical cancer (one of the most common cancer types for women).
Even if some genuine breakthrough arrived tomorrow, it would still take years to receive FDA approval and would likely cost a small fortune (see Sovaldi).
In most of the world public health systems pay for most truly effective medications.
How long would it take you to find a collision in SHA1 with $10,000 to spend on equipment and electricity?
Reading the intro to [1] specifically the 4th paragraph, would suggest that sometime in the next fifteen years, a breakthrough for finding a collision should probably be developed, and if you wait for when that happens, say, 14 years from now, then $10,000 should still buy you enough computing power to do it within a year, at the computing prices that exist then. Computing power increases much faster than inflation. So the answer is "15 years, 14 years of waiting and then 1 year of computing. +/- 30 years and 70 years, respectively."
in other words: it's just pure speculation. not a real answer. a real answer is "we don't know, but with current computers and current algorithms, > 100 years, it just can't be done with $10k in equipment. however this is likely to decrease soon."
you're basically adding the same caveat to life expectancy.
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.688
As always I'd say that you'd have to be particularly pessimistic to believe these numbers. To hit these numbers would require the present revolution in capabilities in biotechnology to produce pretty much nothing of practical use. It would require the present sea change in the aging research and broader medical community in attitudes towards aging, the growing advocacy among researchers to treat aging as a medical condition (e.g. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4468941/ ), and greater funding directed specifically at the production of ways to treat aging, all of that to go nowhere.
I don't think that is realistic. There are startups now working on ways to repair the specific known causes of aging, forms of damage that contribute to a wide range of age-related disease. Oisin Biotech for senescent cell clearance, Human Rejuvenation Technologies for clearance of metabolic waste that contributes to atherosclerosis among other conditions, Gensight for mitochondrial DNA repair, and so forth. Is all this really going to go nowhere, have no real impact on the present very gentle upward slope in life expectancy?
Betting against leaps in technology progress doesn't seem a winning choice given the past 150 years and the present environment especially.