Aging is important:
- Aging kills 100,000 people per day.
- 2/3 of all deaths are caused by aging.
- Trillions of dollars are spent annually on the diseases and disabilities of aging.
- Aging populations with lower percentages of working age adults threaten developed economies.
Aging is tractable:
- Aging is reducible to between 7 and 12 distinct biological causes, depending who you ask.
- Human trials for some interventions into aging, such as senolytic drugs, show promising results.
- Experiments in mice provide further evidence of tractability.
Aging is neglected:
- The very idea of curing aging is controversial to the point of taboo among most policymakers and scientists.
- The SENS Research Foundation, one of the leading organizations working on curing aging, has a budget of only a few million dollars per year.
- Some broadly publicized efforts to extend lifespans, such as Alphabet's Calico, focus on low-hanging fruit and not fundamental intervention in the root causes of aging.
Therefore, aging should be the 5th cause area that the effective altruism movement devotes its attention and resources to, joining global poverty, animal welfare, existential risk, and meta-EA.
This seems like a good place to plug Dr. Michael Greger's new book, How Not to Age. It has >13k citations and talks about what people can do to slow down aging. Pre-orders are quite important for determining the marketing and ranking of book and this particular book comes out Dec 5 so there are just a couple more days to contribute to pre-order numbers. I'm told his books are quite popular in China, which could be hugely meaningful in combating the rise of animal product consumption in that country. Additionally, in the spirit of ETG, 100% of book sales go to charity!