Aging research seems to be progressing rather slowly at the moment; instead, most efforts have been directed at age-related diseases (extending healthspan rather than maximum lifespan). Is it possible that aging would be cured in the next 20-30 years, even with the current financial crisis?
People throw a lot of numbers out there. One person says maybe 20 years, another says it seems like 30, one organization pins breakthroughs at 2029, etc. Any of them could be right, but the most accurate way to think about it is that the goals of indefinite life extension get here in direct proportion to the collective speed at which the world goes to get there. Hence the importance of informing the world about this cause as fast as we can. There are many organizations and projects working on informing people.
Then also, as people point out, especially Ray Kurzweil, in many places, including the latest medium of the movie "Transcendent Man": things move along slowy, but thats fine, because they grow exponentially. For example, they set a goal to complete the Human Genome Project, and then half way through it the critics pointed out that they were only 1% done. However, as Ray pointed out, 1% done was right on track because if you double 1% seven more times you end up at 100% done. That's exactly what happened with the project, and they completed it ahead of schedule. Ray also pointed out that the exponential progress of most all technologies is rarely fazed by anything. Even the great depression, he shows, only made a tiny dent in the progress, from which the growth snapped back to where it would have been with out the depression anyways.