A free PDF version of «Смерть неправильна!» – the Russian translation of Death is Wrong – is now available for download from The Rational Argumentator. You can obtain your copy here and may spread it to Russian-speaking audiences as widely as you wish.
«Смерть неправильна!» was translated into Russian by Marcus Baylin.
The Russian translation of Death is Wrong – «Смерть неправильна!» – generously translated by Marcus Baylin – is now available via Google Books. You can see a complete preview here.
A paperback version can be obtained from Createspace for $11.23 here.
Amazon has begun to carry the paperback version here.
For some reason, the Amazon Kindle format does not yet support Cyrillic characters, so I have instead decided to offer an electronic version through Google Play.
The electronic version will be downloadable for FREE on Google Play within the next 24 hours on this page.
You have my permission to spread the electronic version of the book to Russian-speaking audiences as widely as possible, with no strings attached.
We can also send some free paperback Russian books to anyone who is willing to distribute them to Russian-speaking children. (This offer is good while supplies last; we have resources to ship 171 copies of Death is Wrong in either English or Russian. If you are interested, e-mail me at gennadystolyarovii@gmail.com with (i) your name, (ii) your MAILING ADDRESS, (iii) your support for indefinite life extension, (iv) the NUMBER OF COPIES of Death is Wrong requested, and (v) your plan for spreading the books to children, free of cost to them.)
Early this month I pointed out an example of the viewpoint on aging research that focuses on drugs, lifestyle, and metabolic manipulation and sees present work in that area to be a matter of significant and ongoing process. I disagree, for reasons that were explained in that post. Today, I’ll take a glance at a different view of the science of aging and longevity, one that is far more popular in the mainstream research community, and with which I also vehemently disagree.
Researchers in this field might be loosely divided into three camps, which are as follows ordered from largest to smallest: (a) those who study aging as a phenomenon without seeking to produce treatments, (b) those who see to slow aging through development of means to alter the operation of metabolism, such as calorie restriction mimetic drugs, and (c) those who aim to produce rejuvenation biotechnology capable of reversing aging. The vast majority of the aging research community at present consider that too little is known of the details of the progression of aging to make significant inroads in the design of treatments, and that the way forward is fundamental research with little hope of meaningful application for the foreseeable future. This attitude is captured here:
Let me ask you this: ‘Why can’t we cure death yet?’
Quote:We can’t ‘cure death’ because biology is extremely complicated. Without a fundamental understanding of how biological organisms work on a molecular level, we’re left to educated guesses on how to fix things that are breaking in the human body. Trying to cure disease without a full understanding of the underlying principles is like trying to travel to the moon without using Newton’s laws of motion.
The reason we haven’t cured death is because we don’t really understand life.
This is only half true, however. It is true if your goal is to slow down aging by engineering metabolism into a new state of safe operation in which the damage of aging accumulates more slowly. This is an enormous project. It is harder than anything that has been accomplished by humanity to date, measured on any reasonable scale of complexity. The community has only a few footholds in the vast sea of interactions that make up the progression of metabolism and damage through the course of aging, and this is despite the fact that there exists an easily obtained, very well studied altered state of metabolism that does in fact slow aging and extend life. Calorie restriction can be investigated in almost all laboratory species, and has been the subject of intense scrutiny for more than a decade now. Yet that barely constitutes a start on the long road of figuring out how to replicate the effects of calorie restriction on metabolism, let alone how to set off into the unknown to build an even better metabolic state of operation.
Listing these concerns is not even to start in on the fact that even if clinicians could perfectly replicate the benefits of calorie restriction, these effects are still modest in the grand scheme of things. It probably won’t add more than ten years to your life, and it won’t rejuvenate the old, nor restore any of their lost functionality. It is a way of slowing down remaining harm, not repairing the harm that has happened. All in all it seems like a poor use of resources.
People who argue that we don’t understand enough of aging to treat it are conveniently omitting the fact that the research community does in fact have a proven, time-tested consensus list of the causes of aging. These are the fundamental differences between old tissue and young tissue, the list of changes that are not in and of themselves caused by any other process of aging. This is the damage that is the root of aging. There are certainly fierce arguments over which of these are more important and how in detail they actually interact with one another and metabolism to cause frailty, disease, and death. I’ve already said as much: researchers are still in the early days of producing the complete map of how aging progresses at the detail level. The actual list of damage and change is not much debated, however: that is settled science.
Thus if all you want to do is produce good treatments that reverse the effects of aging, you don’t need to know every detail of the progression of aging. You just need to remove the root causes. It doesn’t matter which of them are more or less important, just remove them all, and you’ll find out which were more or less important in the course of doing so – and probably faster than those who are taking the slow and stead scholarly route of investigation. If results are what we want to see then instead of studying ever more esoteric little corners of our biology, researchers might change focus on ways to repair the known forms of damage that cause aging. In this way treatments can be produced that actually rejuvenate patients, and unlike methods of slowing aging will benefit the old by reversing and preventing age-related disease.
This is exactly analogous to the long history of building good bridges prior to the modern age of computer simulation and materials science. With the advent of these tools engineers can now build superb bridges, of a quality and size that would once have been impossible. But the engineers of ancient Rome built good bridges: bridges that allowed people to cross rivers and chasms and some of which still stand today. Victorian engineers built better bridges to facilitate commerce that have stood the test of time, and they worked with little more than did the Romans in comparison to today’s technologies. So the aging research community could begin to build their bridges now, we don’t have to wait for better science. Given that we are talking about aging, and the cost of aging is measured in tens of millions of lives lost and hundreds of millions more left suffering each and every year, it is amazing to me that there are not more initiatives focused on taking what is already known and settled about the causes of aging and using that knowledge to build rejuvenation treatments.
What we see instead is a field largely focused on doing nothing but gathering data, and where there are researchers interesting in producing treatments, they are almost all focused on metabolic engineering to slow aging. The long, hard road to nowhere helpful. Yet repairing the known damage of aging is so very obviously the better course for research and development when compared to the prospect of an endless exploration and cataloging of metabolism. If we want the chance of significant progress towards means of treating aging in our lifetime, only SENS and other repair-based approaches have a shot at delivering. Attempts to slow aging are only a distraction: they will provide a growing flow of new knowledge of our biochemistry and the details of aging, but that knowledge isn’t needed in order to work towards effective treatments for aging today.
This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license. It was originally published on FightAging.org.
I am pleased to offer five levels of Open Badges as rewards for contributing computing power to the Folding@home project at http://folding.stanford.edu/, which enables anyone in the world to devote computational resources to protein-folding simulations that help advance the fight against a multitude of diseases – such as Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and many cancers. The Longevity Meme Folding@home team seeks to promote increased participation in Folding@home as one way to combat disease and help dramatically lengthen human lifespans within our lifetimes, with the goal of enabling humans to live lives without any upper limit.
These badges were designed by the artist and illustrator Wendy Stolyarov and is issued by The Rational Argumentator, in conjunction with LongeCity and the Longevity Meme Folding@home team.
You can store these digital badges and share them via Mozilla Backpack to display your achievements to others. The following are the qualifying criteria for each badge:
● Level 1: 5,000 points earned on Folding@home;
● Level 2: 10,000 points earned on Folding@home;
● Level 3: 50,000 points earned on Folding@home;
● Level 4: 100,000 points earned on Folding@home;
● Level 5: 500,000 points earned on Folding@home.
To request a badge, simply send an e-mail to gennadystolyarovii@gmail.com. Include your user name on Folding@home so that your points earned could be verified. You can earn a badge no matter what team you are on, if any, as everyone’s commitment of resources to the protein-folding effort helps the prospects of indefinite life extension. However, you are also encouraged to join The Longevity Meme team in order to help improve its ranking and raise public awareness of the effort life-extension activists are putting into the fight against disease.
You do not need to be a biologist or medical doctor to help hasten the arrival of indefinite life extension. An important array of activist endeavors, which are laying the groundwork for the eventual achievement of unlimited lifespans, can be implemented by anybody. They range from giving out books to playing games to simply running one’s computer – all the while making important contributions to scientific progress and the receptiveness of the general culture to the feasibility and desirability of indefinite longevity.
If you want to glimpse the possibilities in 90 seconds, watch my recent video, “What Anyone Can Do to Advance Indefinite Life Extension”.
In this article, I offer a more detailed overview of some immediately available activism options that anyone can pursue. The time commitment involved in each ranges from minimal to modest, but virtually any of them can fit into the schedule of anyone who recognizes the value of this amazing life we have and the importance of prolonging it as far as possible.
Movement for Indefinite Life Extension (MILE)
I am proud to have contributed resources to run several ads for MILE that incorporate the core message and the cover image of my children’s book Death is Wrong. These MILE/Death is Wrong ads were designed by my wife and illustrator Wendy Stolyarov and are accompanied by the following text:
Death is WRONG.
Together we can fight it.
Join the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension.
To help the MILE reach its Year 2 goal, you can start by clicking the “Like” button on the MILE Facebook page. Beyond that, if you would like to contribute to the advertising campaign and even develop your own custom advertisement that conveys the message of indefinite life extension, this would go a long way toward building the critical mass needed to catalyze public support for life-extension research.
Death is Wrong Book Distribution to Children
After the successful conclusion on April 23, 2014, of my Indiegogo fundraiser to spread over 1,000 copies of the illustrated children’s book Death is Wrong to kids, free of cost to them, I have worked assiduously to coordinate a worldwide distribution effort. Already, 644 out of the 1,029 total available books have been sent to longevity activists throughout the world. Countries where the books have been shipped thus far include the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, India, Indonesia, and Singapore. Tens of dedicated longevity supporters have already come forward to request absolutely free shipments of books, but we need more activists to help us distribute the remaining 385 books in their local areas.
Recipients have wide discretion to use their creativity in how to offer the Death is Wrong books to children, as long as the books are made available free of cost and are not resold. Books may be given away to kids directly, lent to multiple kids, given to schools and libraries that will accept them, or used at public readings – among possible other options.
The early successes of the book-distribution effort are among the most heartening and encouraging developments I have observed. Here are some photographs that longevity activists have sent in of their book shipments.
Here is a charming interview by Aleksander Kelley of his sister Hanna, who is spreading Death is Wrong to the kids she knows.
Help make future scenes like this happen. Requesting a shipment of Death is Wrong books is simple. Send me an e-mail to gennadystolyarovii@gmail.com with (i) your name, (ii) your mailing address, (iii) your statement of support for indefinite life extension, (iv) the number of copies of Death is Wrong requested, and (v) your plan for spreading the books to children, free of cost to them.
Once the shipments arrive, any additional images and videos of the books and events at which they are shared would be most welcome. They can help spread the message of indefinite life extension even further and show the world that the momentum for this cause continues to grow.
Distributed Computing for Medical Science
Would you like to help cure cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and other deadly ailments, just by running your computer? Most people’s computers spend much time absolutely idle; how about putting that idle time to good use, at minimal additional cost? Distributed computing initiatives such as Folding@home, Rosetta@home, and World Community Grid are absolutely free to join. You just need to download a program that runs the calculations involved in protein-folding simulations and other research efforts while you are not using your computer. Already, these distributed computing initiatives have led to several major medical research breakthroughs, such as this one by Chiba Cancer Center in Japan, which has identified seven drug candidates in the fight against childhood cancer. You can read more about the applications of protein-folding simulations to disease research in this brief post by David Baker of the University of Washington.
While no single medical breakthrough will achieve indefinite lifespans yet, every victory against death and diseases will help us approach that goal. The more of us survive the common killers of our time, the more of us stand a chance of personally witnessing the arrival of longevity escape velocity.
As an additional way to raise the profile of the ideas of indefinite life extension, it is recommended to join a distributed-computing team that explicitly embraces the struggle against senescence and death. On Folding@home, The Longevity Meme team has been folding for years and is ranked 156th out of 220,186 teams as of June 5, 2014. I am spearheading a collaborative effort between The Longevity Meme team, LongeCity, and my online magzine – The Rational Argumentator – to attract renewed participation in Folding@home and The Longevity Meme team among longevity advocates. To provide an additional incentive to join, I am offering a series of five Protein Folding for Life Extension Open Badges, designed by Wendy Stolyarov and available via Badg.us.
These are badges that you can store and share via Mozilla Backpack to share your achievements with others. The following are the qualifying criteria for each badge:
● Level 1: 5,000 points earned on Folding@home;
● Level 2: 10,000 points earned on Folding@home;
● Level 3: 50,000 points earned on Folding@home;
● Level 4: 100,000 points earned on Folding@home;
● Level 5: 500,000 points earned on Folding@home.
To request a badge, simply send an e-mail to gennadystolyarovii@gmail.com. Include your user name on Folding@home so that your points earned could be verified. You can earn a badge no matter what team you are on, if any, as everyone’s commitment of resources to the protein-folding effort helps the prospects of indefinite life extension. However, you are also encouraged to join The Longevity Meme team in order to help improve its ranking and raise public awareness of the effort life-extension activists are putting into the fight against disease.
On Rosetta@home, the LongeCity team explicitly embraces the ideas of indefinite life extension. On World Community Grid, the Endthedisease team supports life extension and has been involved in numerous disease-fighting computational efforts since 2007. Later this year, the Endthedisease team is anticipated to begin running contests with prizes for top contributors.
Games to Fight Disease
By flying a spaceship through an asteroid field in a computer game, you can help cancer researchers analyze data at a much faster rate than they could before. Play to Cure: Genes in Space is a mobile game released by Cancer Research UK, which anyone with a tablet or mobile phone can play for free. The stated aim of this game is to hasten the day when all cancers are cured – which is, incidentally, the key objective of one of the seven prongs of Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s SENS approach; Dr. de Grey has emphasized that cancer is by far the predominant way by which age-related nuclear mutations harm us.
You can read about the mechanics of and science behind Play to Cure here and watch this video introduction to the game.
Foldit is another free game that enthusiasts of life-extension research can play in order to add the human touch to protein-folding simulations. In 2011, Foldit players discovered the protein structure of a retroviral protease of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, an AIDS-like disease in monkeys.
See this list from the Citizen Science Center for more possibilities regarding games you could play and simultaneously participate in innovative citizen-science initiatives – including many devoted to the fight against disease. Games hold out the promise of enabling monumental contributions to scientific research by the general public. A game designed to be sufficiently engaging could attract thousands of non-scientists to do the work that research scientists could conceivably outsource in order to accelerate the rate at which certain kinds of data analysis are performed. The more quickly scientists can iterate through their experiments as a result, the sooner the cures to major diseases will arrive.
Conclusion
Of course, I would urge all life-extension supporters to donate even modest amounts of money to research and advocacy organizations such as the SENS Research Foundation and the Methuselah Foundation, as well as crowdfunded life-extension research projects that are being undertaken with increasing frequency. Yet, I hope that this overview has led readers to recognize that much can be done in addition to monetary donations. Integrate the active pursuit of indefinite longevity into your life, and you will continue to find easy but extremely important ways to become part of the solution to the most pressing problem of all time. Through our efforts, we will hopefully someday be able to celebrate humankind’s greatest victories in the fight against our mutual enemy: death.
Mr. Stolyarov provides a quick overview of ideas that anyone can implement to accelerate the pace of technological progress and bring about indefinite life extension for many who are alive today.
This is Mr. Stolyarov’s entry in the MILE Video Contest.
References
– SENS Research Foundation
– Methuselah Foundation
– MILE – Movement for Indefinite Life Extension
– Folding@home
– The Longevity Meme Folding@home Team
– Open Badges for Participating in Folding@home
– Rosetta@home
– World Community Grid
– Foldit
– Play to Cure
We are collecting $100 pledges for this Movement for Indefinite Life Extension Year Two Goal Advertisement Fundraiser (MILE y2 Fund). At this time there is a total of $600 pledged. If you want to get in on this, then send us a message at the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension Facebook page. The deadline for making pledges is 20:00 CST, June 15th 2014. You can either have us place the ads for you by sending the money in via PayPal, or you can request to place your own, and we will set you up with the basics.
The Movement for Indefinite Life Extension, which is more like a group spirit that promotes everybody, rather than something like a Foundation or Corporation, is pushing a 5-year goal to inform 8 million people about the individuals, projects, and organizations that are working directly or indirectly toward the goal of indefinite life extension. It is executed in 5 progressive steps.
Year One, which was completed on July 17th of last year, 2013, had the goal of reaching 800 “likes” in this awareness driving campaign.
We are now on our way to the Year Two goal of 8,000 “likes”, with the goal’s deadline coming up soon on July 17, 2014. We are right on schedule with saturation of organic likes and are confident that we can come in on time with the goal of 8,000, and probably exceed it, by the deadline, with around $1,000 in Facebook ads that are targeted to like-minded people and groups. (Of course, the more donations, the better. We’re all working to drive awareness to a critical mass of at least 8 million people for the final goal.)
Millions of people are hearing and learning about the work that is going on to make indefinite healthy life spans a reality, through all the press, events, projects, and endeavors that people around the world have been working on over the decades. With advertisements, we can find more of them and get them to consider putting their weight behind the general movements of transhumanism and indefinite life extension. The rate at which we grow to critical mass, and generate awareness, matters. The clock is ticking.
The important cause of life is the incentive. In addition to that, there is the small incentive that the group of people that pledges to this Movement for Indefinite Life Extension Year Two Goal Fundraiser, will be written about as instrumental leaders in the success of the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension Year Two Goal, and in the movement in general.
Eric Schulke was a director at LongeCity during 2009-2013. He has also been an activist with the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension and other causes for over 13 years.
Mr. Stolyarov provides an update regarding the effort to distribute over 1,000 free, paperback copies of Death is Wrong to children.
As of May 28, 2014, 644 books have been sent out, and 385 remain to be distributed, out of an eventual goal of 1,029 books provided to children, free of cost to them.
Instructions for Longevity Activists to Request Copies of “Death is Wrong”
– Send an e-mail to gennadystolyarovii@gmail.com
– Provide (i) your name, (ii) your mailing address, (iii) a statement of your support for indefinite life extension, and (iv) a brief description of your plan to spread the book to children in your local area. Remember that all copies received pursuant to this initiative would need to be offered to children free of charge (as gifts or reading opportunities) and may not be resold.
– Provide the number of copies of Death is Wrong that you are requesting.
– Preferably, provide an indication that you would be willing to send photographs of the books that have been delivered to you as well as events where you will be distributing the books.
References
– Death is Wrong on Amazon:
* Paperback version
* Kindle version
– Death is Wrong Official Home Page
– “Spreading the Word That Death is Wrong” – Article by Gennady Stolyarov II
– Updates Regarding Book-Distribution Effort
– Death is Wrong Book Trailer – Video by Peter Caramico
Most people want to die of in their sleep, in peace, of old age, without pain and surrounded by their family and loved ones after achieving success and after having done something worthwhile.But the facts suggest, that such a peaceful end is granted to very few people, while most people have to endure different disabilities and diseases associated with aging and terrible pain and decreased function, performance, and the lack of joy coming with it.The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project originated in 1990 in a collaboration between the World Health Organization, Harvard School of Public Health, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), and the World Bank.
The focus of the Global Burden of Disease Study is to provide a detailed statistical analysis of the impact of diseases leading to death and disability across various regions around the world. The purpose of the study is to reveal gaps between current and ideal health circumstances and develop strategies to reduce this gap.
The 2010 Global Burden of Disease study reveals a significant shift in the nature of disease worldwide. There has been a significant increase in chronic disease worldwide. This is due to demographics of aging, and the subsequent increase of age-related disease.
Worldwide, the contribution of different risk factors to disease burden has changed substantially, with a shift away from risks for communicable diseases in children towards those for non-communicable diseases in adults.
As life expectancy has increased, the number of healthy years lost to disability has also increased in most countries, consistent with the expansion of morbidity hypothesis, which has implications for health planning and health-care expenditure.One of the key findings reveals that we are living longer, but under an increased burden of chronic disease that impairs our quality of life.These results are distressing: men can expect to spend an average of 9.2 years and women 11.5 years with some form of a chronic disability. In other words, during the last decade of lives, on average, our quality of life might become significantly impaired by the presence of a chronic disease.
The paradox, then – the fact that people want to be actively saved if they are near or at the moment of death, but also want to die peacefully – seems to be rooted in a pretty profound medical illiteracy.
Healthy people don’t die in their sleep, “peacefully” or otherwise. You don’t hear about too many 25-year-olds dying suddenly of heart attacks or strokes during their nightly slumber.
When people in their twenties die, it’s usually considered tragic. When babies are found dead in their cribs, it’s referred to by a name (“Sudden Infant Death Syndrome”). But when elderly people die, in bed or otherwise, there tends to be a curious tone of, “Well, at least they went peacefully.”
The increase in life expectancy and the resulting growth of the elderly population are also thought to be driving up the number of elderly people with disabilities.
Typically in the case of dying in your sleep due to old age, an autopsy can determine exactly what went wrong, or what stopped working. For example, your heart could simply get tired and stop beating, because it’s been working hard for the past eighty or ninety years.
The phrase “natural causes” or dying “of old age” is a very strange one really. Ultimately what it means is that someone who dies of natural causes, dies of aging in a way that has not been given an additional name; so really it’s just a matter of terminology. The difference is between dying of “natural causes” and dying of some other specifically named thing that doesn’t really often affect young adults.