The Global Catastrophe that Nearly Everyone Studiously Ignores
Allow me to point you to an attractively blunt assessment of the human condition from the Russian end of the rejuvenation research advocacy community, tidied up a little after the automated translation made a hash of it:
Needless to say, a catastrophe - something unpleasant. Global catastrophe - unpleasant globally. And what is the most global of global catastrophes? Probably the one that leads to widespread death. And here we must note that if nothing is done, then all living people will die with 100% probability. Of aging. Therefore, it is aging that is the global catastrophe that is unfolding silently throughout the course of human history.
"Unfolding silently" because nearly everyone in the world studiously refuses to characterize the consequences of aging for what they in fact are. Everyone will die of aging - everyone! - and that is somehow removed from the normal fervor and unified efforts that greet any other form of mass death. Take the tsunamis of recent years, for example, one of which managed to kill about as many people as die of aging in any given day. There was a global outpouring of funds, support, and activity following that tsunami. Yet every day, without cease, that many people again are killed by the effects of aging - and next to no-one cares enough to do something in response to this horrible ongoing loss of life.
This is an age of biotechnology, in which we have a good grasp on the causes of degenerative aging and how to approach treating them. The goal of producing medical technologies that can rejuvenate the old and grant additional decades of life might be accomplished within a few decades, given billions of dollars in funding and and tens of thousands of researchers and supporting workers. But that support doesn't exist today. The peoples of the world think about aging little differently than they did a thousand years ago - they haven't yet woken up to see what could be accomplished through medical science within their lifetimes. As a consequence of this lack of support, many, many more people will age, suffer, and die than might have been the case - ourselves included, unless we get our act together.