If we strip away the rhetoric and calculate coldly:
Biogerontology will not save most people alive today. Even under an optimistic scenario, it will most likely deliver gradual therapies: less inflammation, better immune function, reduced frailty, some organ-level improvements, maybe +5–15 years for some people. But not mass rescue from death.
There are currently around 8.2 billion people in the world. Global life expectancy is about 73 years; as the population ages, the number of deaths will rise. The UN explicitly forecasts rapid global aging and an increase in the share of people aged 65+ to about 20.7% by 2074. The WHO gives global life expectancy as 71.3 years in 2021; the UN gives 73.3 years in 2024.
Replacement is poorly scalable and will not rejuvenate, for example, the blood vessels of the brain.
Without a radical change in strategy, several billion people alive today will die before the arrival of true negligible-senescence medicine. Five billion deaths is my lower estimate. Realistically, it will be more.
From this follows an unpleasant conclusion:
We need not only biogerontology, but a strategy for survival through death.
Without cryonics, immortalism effectively agrees to write off almost everyone who will not live long enough to reach radical medicine.
Do we want our parents to die?
Do we want Turchin to die?
We definitely should use rationality. I'm not convinced it will provide any meaningful change though as most people don't use it - they behave emotionally. Can we rationally agree to be more emotional about life extension?
I agree that the field of life extension suffers from weak ability to focus the attention. The problem is not only in the lack of the technologies, money or startups, but in the fact, that we don't yet behave like people, who are playing the same game. There is biotech, cryonicists, biohackers, geroscientsts, transhumanists, AI-people, donors, but there is no common language, no common strategy, no honest talk about failures, and the talk about policy changes and incentives barely appears.
We have the muscle memory to do startups and funds but startup isn't usually the most efficient form to fight against aging -> startups hide the data, optimise valuation and live in venture cycles.
It could be that rationality is one of the most important tools that we have. We should finally start thinking with our heads - what exactly raises the P(survival), what's overvalued, what's undervalued and where do we need cooperation.
Without a new way to think life extension separates into startup-casino, academic fear of failure, wellness culture and transhumanism poetry.
I also bet that most rationalists will die not from AI risk, but from age-related diseases, as the focus is narrowed to just one problem. I agree with AI risks, just I think we need to apply same tools against already existing machine of death.
So we need philosophy canon that we accept and the rational discipline of survival engineering and delivery.
The field of life extension experiences the signs of stagnation. Mostly the same people promote the same ideas for last 15 or more years - and the real growth of human life expectancy is mostly connected with success in medicine. the contrast is especially strong if we compare with AI.
One of possible solution is to use methodology which inspired many gathers of AI - the art of improving of human rationality.
It is based on several ideas:
Another important connection is relation with AI. Can we defeat aging and even reach immortality without superintelligence? Should we take risk of accelerating AI to ensure personal survival – or cryonics is enough?
Can we hope to resurrect the dead - including ourselves in the future with the help of AI?
In short, we should apply already developed methodology of rationality to the filed of life extension.