The answer to the title question is pretty straightforward. There’s an obvious monetary return to increasing longevity of old, rich people. This does not require full success to be worthwhile—incremental improvements can be worth a whole lot.
In fact, one can easily argue that nobody really believes that aging research is the best way to reach 10,000-year mind-spans. Emulation/upload, or more likely non-biological minds to start with (all current humans die; future generations are all or partly electronic) seem like more likely paths to immortality for thinking beings.
Immortality for currently-living humans is pretty much _only_ likely through upload. Depending on timeframe, perhaps cryonics extends the time for any given individual before upload is working. Both early upload and cryonics+upload require some not-yet-identified economic situation to make it more desirable to upload/resurrect YOU vs cloning a much cheaper branch of a known-functioning em.
The answer to the title question is pretty straightforward. There’s an obvious monetary return to increasing longevity of old, rich people. This does not require full success to be worthwhile—incremental improvements can be worth a whole lot.
In fact, one can easily argue that nobody really believes that aging research is the best way to reach 10,000-year mind-spans. Emulation/upload, or more likely non-biological minds to start with (all current humans die; future generations are all or partly electronic) seem like more likely paths to immortality for thinking beings.
Immortality for currently-living humans is pretty much _only_ likely through upload. Depending on timeframe, perhaps cryonics extends the time for any given individual before upload is working. Both early upload and cryonics+upload require some not-yet-identified economic situation to make it more desirable to upload/resurrect YOU vs cloning a much cheaper branch of a known-functioning em.