In a way, we've already "cured" aging. On average, we live a lot longer than many of our ancestors. We can check many diseases and conditions that would normally kill elderly people. The problem is like cancer, in that it's not one thing, but a multitude of things. (And cancer itself is among that multitude!)<p>Not many people, outside of healthcare workers and AIDS patients know of cytomegalovirus, but most of the population has it. What most people don't know, is that if we could otherwise have a life expectancy of 200 years, many of us would be dying from cytomegalovirus. (Simplified version: it takes up memory slots in our immune system, but at a slow enough rate, we die of other causes before that can happen.)<p>I suspect that "curing" aging will consist of extending the average lifespan a decade at a time, as we cure dozens of different conditions. Something as complex as a human body is always going to have some unforeseeable epiphenomenal mode of failure, given enough time. We know from thermodynamics and the Halting Problem that everything is bound to break down, and that we won't be able to predict all of the ways it can happen.<p>(For a given degree of complexity in any turing complete mechanism, maybe an overwhelmingly correct heuristic for the halting problem is a piece of paper with the word "Yes" printed on it.)