Here is why you're being downvoted: human longevity is an extremely difficult, multifaceted problem. Research doctors are not even trying to slay a dragon but a hydra: combat one way to die of old age and another one pops up.
Lastly, attempting to forecast "chance of immortality in the coming 60-odd years" is asking a question that relies for its answer on extremely controversial ideas. Particularly, attempting to answer requires us to forecast whether the rate of advancement in ageing research is speeding up or slowing down. This is hard, and can be affected by a bunch of different factors: funding breakdown in non-corporate research, Great Stagnation Hypothesis, breakdown in public acceptance of science, economic decline in some places, economic growth in some places, public uptake of anti-aging ideologies, attitudes towards the retirement crisis we're already facing even before anti-aging research comes in. Oh, and then we face the issue of whether we can or are improving our quality of scientific findings through better research training or data science/machine learning techniques. And then we get to the really out-there stuff "immortalists" are often secretly thinking of and can't stop yacking about: the chance that we manage to create Friendly Artificial Intelligence and trigger a Singularity, thus rendering us all immortal utopian transhumans before many of us on this board even hit retirement age.
TL;DR: I have no bloody idea, but I still regard contributing to my Roth IRA as a pretty sensible move.
EDIT: The one trend I'm willing to say I observe is that average life expectancy is a fairly good tracker of social and economic development, even once you've gotten over the infant-mortality hump. If you want to be immortal, you should encourage society to act in ways that result in longer average lifespans and also to fund anti-ageing research in hopes of achieving the fabled "ageing escape horizon" where medical science advances faster than you die.
How about a simplification: chance that computational technology will increase by 3 orders of magnitude in 30 years: almost 100%. Chance that increases in computational power lead to increases in biological breakthroughs: 100%.
Therefore, we should not measure the current rate of anti-aging research but rather project it exponentially in some fashion to match the likely trajectory. This has been true for DNA sequencing for example.
>chance that computational technology will increase by 3 orders of magnitude in 30 years: almost 100%.
Define "computational technology". If you mean something along the lines of storage space or parallel processing power, I'll grant you that. We're probably not getting another 1000x increase in processor clock-speeds (serial processing power), though.
>Chance that increases in computational power lead to increases in biological breakthroughs: 100%.
This is exactly why I mentioned data science/machine learning. These are the tools we use to turn increasing amounts of computer processing power into significant, reproducible scientific advancements.
Besides, if I want to be ludicrously optimistic and base everything on computing I could simply yell, "Chance of solving the FAI problem in 30 years: almost 100%! EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE, GUYS!".
Your point about sequencing is a good one, but this is the only area of biological research clearly improving exponentially...
Without being too argumentative, I'd put the odds of increases in computer power leading to biological breakthroughs at much less than 100%! I'd be surprised if it was as much as 5-10%.
What areas of biological research are fundamentally limited by computer power? I can think of a few where more power would be nice to have, but none where that power would be transformative.
The possible exception is the example you mention---DNA sequencing--but the problem there is that the rate of growth of sequence information is greater than More's rate; slightly ironically, this field really needs computer scientists to help develop new algorithms much more than it needs computers...
But your question is specifically about computational power. Any area that requires modeling or methods that must be over-simplified in order to run on today's hardware are candidates for benefit from computational power. That seems to leave a lot of room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelling_biological_systems
But I will grant that development of new algorithms is also important. It's just that computational power itself assists in the discovery of new algorithms via the development of better research platforms.
Any time ^_^. The first step is to come out and say that longevity research is a scientific project, not a mystical one (there's no Truth of This Universe saying we can only live 80-something years no matter the scientific might we throw at the problem). That also carries some acknowledgements we need to make: biological immortality being discovered in 2060 will do you no good if you died of a heart attack in 2030, so eat healthy, exercise, and de-stress if you're really so devoted to long life!
Lastly, attempting to forecast "chance of immortality in the coming 60-odd years" is asking a question that relies for its answer on extremely controversial ideas. Particularly, attempting to answer requires us to forecast whether the rate of advancement in ageing research is speeding up or slowing down. This is hard, and can be affected by a bunch of different factors: funding breakdown in non-corporate research, Great Stagnation Hypothesis, breakdown in public acceptance of science, economic decline in some places, economic growth in some places, public uptake of anti-aging ideologies, attitudes towards the retirement crisis we're already facing even before anti-aging research comes in. Oh, and then we face the issue of whether we can or are improving our quality of scientific findings through better research training or data science/machine learning techniques. And then we get to the really out-there stuff "immortalists" are often secretly thinking of and can't stop yacking about: the chance that we manage to create Friendly Artificial Intelligence and trigger a Singularity, thus rendering us all immortal utopian transhumans before many of us on this board even hit retirement age.
TL;DR: I have no bloody idea, but I still regard contributing to my Roth IRA as a pretty sensible move.
EDIT: The one trend I'm willing to say I observe is that average life expectancy is a fairly good tracker of social and economic development, even once you've gotten over the infant-mortality hump. If you want to be immortal, you should encourage society to act in ways that result in longer average lifespans and also to fund anti-ageing research in hopes of achieving the fabled "ageing escape horizon" where medical science advances faster than you die.