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Evolution Has No Moral Value; Life Extension Does – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Evolution Has No Moral Value; Life Extension Does – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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Mr. Stolyarov responds to two statements by Michael Garfield and makes the case that evolution should not be pursued as a moral goal in itself; rather, the survival and increased longevity of every individual should be pursued, since our rationality, technology, and moral compass allow us to transcend the cruelty of primeval natural selection.

Mr. Stolyarov also refutes the allegation that older people somehow necessarily become resigned to or accepting of their own death. He presents counterexamples of individuals who lived past the age of 80 and who wished to continue living indefinitely.

See Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts on scientific progress and life extension: “The rapid progress true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may, perhaps, deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce: all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured (not excepting even that of old age,) and our lives lengthened at pleasure, even beyond the antediluvian standard. Oh that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity.”

References
– “Life as the Origin and Basis of Morality” – Video Series by G. Stolyarov II – Part 1 and Part 2
– “Eliminating Death – Part 1 – Death as Waste” – Video by G. Stolyarov II
– “World’s Oldest Man Wants To Live Forever” – WayOdd
– “Robert Ettinger” – Wikipedia

Radical Life Extension Won’t Cause Resource Shortages – Article by Reason

Radical Life Extension Won’t Cause Resource Shortages – Article by Reason

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The New Renaissance Hat
Reason
October 6, 2013
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That overpopulation exists at all is one of the most prevalent delusions in the modern world: thanks to the environmentalist movement, a cause that has ascended near to the status of civic religion, the average fellow in the street thinks that there are too many people alive today, that resources are stretched to breaking point, that the future is one of Malthusian decline, and that horrible poverty in the third world is caused by the existence of too many people. All of these points are flat-out wrong. Humanity is wealthier and has greater access to resources today than at any time in history, the variety and amounts of available resources are growing at an accelerating pace due to technological progress, the earth could support many times more people than are alive today, and where there is poverty it exists due to terrible, predatory governance and the inhumanity of man – it exists due to waste and aggression amidst the potential for plenty.

Even this pro-longevity piece by George Dvorsky subscribes, as many do, to the false idea that somehow we are consuming too many resources and will run out. This is silly: resources are infinite, because through technological progress we constantly develop new ones. People live in an age of change, with each new decade clearly different from the last, and yet live under the assumption that everything will remain the same going forward. Being worried about running out of anything that we use today is like being worried about running out of candle wax in 1810, or running out of room for horse breeding operations in 1840, or running out of food in 1940. All false concerns, and all false for exactly the same reasons: we are not static consumers of resources, we are net producers of resources.

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Make no mistake, it’ll take us a long, long time to get there, but we’ll eventually find a way to halt the aging process. Owing to advanced medical, regenerative, and cybernetic technologies, future humans will enter into a state of “negligible senescence,” a condition marked by the cessation of aging and the onset of everlasting youth. It sounds utopian, but as biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has repeatedly noted, it’s simply an engineering problem – one that’s not intractable.

I’ve been debating this issue for the better part of a decade, and I’ve heard virtually every argument there is to be said both in favor of and in condemnation of the possibility. I’m not going to go over all of them here. But without a doubt the single most prominent argument set against radical life extension is the issue of overpopulation and environmental sustainability.

As a final note, there’s a certain inevitability to radical life extension. It’s the logical conclusion to the medical sciences. So rather than futilely argue against it, we should come up with constructive solutions to ensure that it unfolds in the most non-disruptive way possible.

Link: http://io9.com/no-extreme-human-longevity-won-t-destroy-the-planet-1440148751

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing the Longevity Meme or Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries.  

This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license.  It was originally published on FightAging.org.

Support the “Little Mouse” Crowdfunded Life-Extension Research Project! – Post by G. Stolyarov II

Support the “Little Mouse” Crowdfunded Life-Extension Research Project! – Post by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
October 4, 2013
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As part of my escalating efforts to advance the prospects of radical life extension through my individual actions, I have donated $50 to an ambitious new crowdfunding project to research longevity-enhancing treatments in mice.

This international project, undertaken by researchers at the Kiev Institute of Gerontology and supported by the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, has an Indiegogo fundraising page, titled “I am a little mouse and I want to live longer!”, where contributions can be made.

I am proud to donate to this effort to support longevity research through crowdfunding. This project allows those of us who seek longer lifespans, and who wish to advance the science that will get us there, to contribute directly in a manner whereby each of us can make a sizable fraction of the difference for this research effort. I look forward to the great work that this project will accomplish. Achieving statistically significant mouse life extension in the near future could trigger massive public interest and the influx of major research funds to attain increasingly ambitious life-extension goals in higher-order mammals, culminating in us.

The project has already raised $8,673 and has 16 days remaining to reach its $15,000 goal. The Methuselah Foundation will match each $1,000 given with an equivalent donation – so it is possible to double one’s impact by contributing funds to this research effort.

Calico and the Paradigm Shift in the War on Death – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Calico and the Paradigm Shift in the War on Death – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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Finally, the war on human senescence and involuntary death has become mainstream. With Google’s announcement of the formation of Calico, a company specifically focused on combating senescence and the diseases it brings about, a large and influential organization has finally taken a stand on the side of longer life.

References
– “Calico and the Paradigm Shift in the War on Death” – Article by G. Stolyarov II
– “Google announces Calico, a new company focused on health and well-being” – Google Press Release – September 18, 2013
– “TIME Feature: CSO Aubrey de Grey on Google’s Newly Launched Anti-Aging Initiative” – SENS Research Foundation – September 18, 2013
– “Google’s Calico: the War on Aging Has Truly Begun” – Aubrey de Grey – TIME Magazine – September 18, 2013
– SENS Research Foundation

The Last Generation to Die – Article by Reason

The Last Generation to Die – Article by Reason

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The New Renaissance Hat
Reason
September 27, 2013
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The last generation whose members will be forced into death by aging is alive today. It won’t be the youngest of us, born in the past few years – they, most likely, have thousands of years ahead of them. It won’t be the oldest of us either, as even under the plausible best of circumstances we are twenty to thirty years away from a widespread deployment of rejuvenation therapies based on the SENS research program. As to the rest of us, just who is left holding the short straw at the end of the day depends on the speed of progress in medical science: advocacy, fundraising, and the effectiveness of research and development initiatives. Persuasion and money are far more important at this early stage than worrying about how well the researchers are doing their jobs, however.

We live in a world in which the public is only just starting to come around to the idea that aging can be treated, and demonstrations of rejuvenation in the laboratory could be achieved in a crash program lasting ten to twenty years, at a comparatively small cost. But still, most people don’t care about living longer, and most people try not to think about aging, or the future of degeneration and sickness that awaits. They think it is inevitable, but that is no longer true. If you are in early middle age today in the first world, then you have a good shot at living for centuries if the world suddenly wakes up tomorrow and massive funding pours into rejuvenation research. You will age and die on a timescale little different from that of your parents if that awakening persistently fails to happen.

So, roll the dice, or help out and try to swing the odds in your favor. Your choice.

Crowdfunding on Kickstarter and related sites is still the new new thing, the shine not yet worn off. One of the truths that this activity reinforces is that it is far, far easier to raise funding for the next throwaway technological widget than for medical research projects aimed at the betterment of all humanity. Research crowdfunding is a tiny, distant moon orbiting the great mass of comics, games, and devices on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. Hell, it’s easier to crowdfund a short film that points out how close human rejuvenation might be to the present day than it is to crowdfund a project to actually conduct a portion of that research. Is this a reflection of rationality? You decide, though it could be argued either way regarding whether a dollar given to raising awareness is more valuable than a dollar given to the researchers at this point in time. Both research and persuasion need to happen.

The Last Generation To Die – A Short Film

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Set in the future when science first begins to stop aging, a daughter tries to save her father from natural death. The story takes place roughly 30 years in the future at the moment when science has first figured out how to stop aging through genetics. It is framed around the gulf between generations that would occur with the first release of this technology. A daughter who works for a company called Aperion Life – the first to bring this new technology to the public – wants to save her aging father. She starts him on the trials but he soon stops coming. The film continues with the conflict rising between them as she wants him to live on with her while he feels a natural ending is more human.The film centers itself around the natural conflict that would exist at this divide. Upon developing this story, I’ve asked many people and I’ve found a pretty even 50/50 divide of opinions strongly on one side or the other- either they want to die naturally and believe there is beauty in finality, or they want to see what the future holds and have more time to explore and learn more in life. I’d like to turn the question to you… Which side are you on? Would you want to live on or die naturally?

I feel this is a film that needs to be made. Asking these questions in the form of art and story will help start the discussion. Our world is changing very fast and the rate of technology is speeding up. What does all of this mean for humanity? Everything we know, from a book to a play to a song, ends… What does it mean when there is no ending? Would we be more complacent? Would life be as meaningful? Is there more of a beauty in the way it has always been with our passing or is there more beauty in our bodies and minds staying fresh and alive for many, many years to come? What about social justice and overpopulation? Would life become boring after living on indefinitely or would you find it exhilarating to have time to learn new languages, instruments, subjects – to read more books, to love more – to live several lifetimes? Would it be worth it if some of your most loved friends or relatives passed on and wouldn’t live on with you? Are you interested in seeing what the future brings in technology and social evolution or are you happy to have contributed and be a part of it for a short time?

Tim Maupin’s Film, ‘The Last Generation to Die’, to Explore Longevity and Life Extension

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Chicago filmmaker Tim Maupin launched a Kickstarter for a short film titled, “The Last Generation to Die.” Maupin thinks now is a great time to start a conversation about life extension. And he’s right. The idea that within decades a genetic fountain of youth may plausibly reverse the aging process, even indefinitely stave off death, seems to be rising up in pop culture. Maupin’s Kickstarter has so far raised over $15,000 – $6,000 more than its initial funding goal. Encouraged by the positive response, they’re dreaming bigger and hope to fund a stretch goal of $25,000 in the last 10 days of the campaign.

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing the Longevity Meme or Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries.  

This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license.  It was originally published on FightAging.org.

Editor’s Note from G. Stolyarov II: I am proud to have donated $50 to help make the film The Last Generation to Die a success. I encourage all readers to donate during the remaining nine days in which the Kickstarter project is open to accepting funds.

Calico and the Paradigm Shift in the War on Death – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Calico and the Paradigm Shift in the War on Death – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
September 19, 2013
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Finally, the war on human senescence and involuntary death has become mainstream. With Google’s announcement of the formation of Calico, a company specifically focused on combating senescence and the diseases it brings about, a large and influential organization has finally taken a stand on the side of longer life. Unlike the cautious, short-term orientation of many more conventional manufacturers of drugs and medical devices, Google’s philosophy of making investments with possible immense payoffs in the distant future offers tremendous hope that this company will be around through the many years it will take to engage in the search for promising treatments and their subsequent testing.

 Aubrey de Grey, one of the chief strategists and key intellectual innovators in the escalating war on senescence, has written that Calico signals that the war on aging has truly begun. De Grey emphasizes that it is no longer necessary to persuade most of academia that this war is a worthwhile endeavor: “With Google’s decision to direct its astronomical resources to a concerted assault on aging, that battle may have been transcended: once financial limitations are removed, curmudgeons no longer matter.” As with its remarkable advances in autonomous vehicles, mobile operating systems, and wearable computing, Google does not need to ask the permission of the entire world to explore the possibilities. Rather, it can simply achieve the breakthroughs, whose momentum and adoption naysayers would be powerless to halt.

Funding has always been a major bottleneck for true life-extending research, but now the resources of Google, as well as the highly skilled researchers who will surely be recruited by Calico, will enable this bottleneck to be overcome. Few details about the company are yet available, and it is likely that several years will elapse before major discoveries are announced. However, the barrier to mainstream acceptability of the war on senescence has been breached. Once significant successes are announced, other companies will hopefully shed some of their current caution and will seek to profit from the burgeoning field of longevity research. A few other companies still may even try to emulate Calico before any results are announced – just so as to remain competitive with Google and stay ahead of the pack, in their view.

The key to the success of any sustainable enterprise focused on life-extension research is to recognize that the sole pursuit of profits next quarter or next year is not a viable strategy for altering the status quo in radical ways. Great innovations require great leaps outside the norm. Such leaps are not often immediately rewarded financially by the broader market, which is why much of the longevity research to date has been sponsored by non-profit institutions such as the SENS Research Foundation and various universities. However, a prudent, forward-looking pursuit of profit can take the radical alteration of the status quo to the next level, by harnessing the immensely powerful motive of self-interest for the purpose of improving human lives. In this case, the improvement from gains to human longevity – and hopefully the ultimate defeat of senescence altogether – would be so immense as to be humankind’s crowning achievement. Google develops technologies with the eventual intent of marketing them to millions of consumers, and the success of Calico would be a triumph not just for longevity research but for the dissemination of cures to age-related diseases, and perhaps to senescence itself.

While anyone of sufficient intellectual courage can have a long-term vision and projects aimed at advancing that vision, Google has the distinct advantage of an extremely viable business in the present, which continues to bring in short-term revenues so that Calico does not need to be concerned with profits next quarter or next year. Instead, Calico will be able to survive on the profits of Google’s many ongoing operations, while devoting the time and effort of world-class researchers to pursuing all of the explorations, experiments, and tests that are needed to ultimately develop marketable cures. Once the cures are out there, though, the profits could be unprecedented, because life is the most precious, the most fundamental value we humans have. Any entity that discovers a way to transcend the current frailties of old age and push back or remove the current limits on human lifespans will become fabulously wealthy beyond comparison.

May Calico usher in Adam Smith’s invisible hand in the realm of longevity medicine – a hand that pushes back senescence and death and creates a world where health and wealth are ours to enjoy indefinitely.

Aubrey de Grey Comments on the “Hallmarks of Aging” Paper – Article by Reason

Aubrey de Grey Comments on the “Hallmarks of Aging” Paper – Article by Reason

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The New Renaissance Hat
Reason
September 8, 2013
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The Hallmarks of Aging paper was published earlier this year. It is an outline by a group of noted researchers that divides up degenerative aging into what they believe are its fundamental causes, with extensive references to support their conclusions, and proposes research strategies aimed at building the means to address each of these causes. This is exactly what we want to see more of in the aging research community: deliberate, useful plans that follow the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) model of approaching aging.

Read through the Hallmarks of Aging and you’ll see that it is essentially a more mild-mannered and conservative restatement of the SENS approach to aging – written after more than ten years of advocacy and publication and persuasion within the scientific community by SENS supporters. To my eyes, the appearance of such things shows that SENS is winning the battle of ideas within the scientific community, and it is only a matter of time before it and similar repair-based efforts aimed at human rejuvenation dominate the field. Rightly so, too, and it can’t happen soon enough for my liking. SENS and SENS-like research is the only way we’re likely to see meaningful life extension technologies emerge before those of us in middle age now die, so the more of it taking place the better.

Aubrey de Grey, author of the original SENS proposals and now Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation that funds and guides rejuvenation research programs, is justifiably pleased by the existence of the Hallmarks of Aging. See this editorial in the latest Rejuvenation Research, for example:

A Divide-and-Conquer Assault on Aging: Mainstream at Last

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On June 6th, a review appeared concerning the state of aging research and the promising ways forward for the field. So far, so good. But this was not any old review. Here’s why: (a) it appeared in Cell, one of the most influential journals in biology; (b) it is huge by Cell’s standards – 24 pages, with well over 300 references; (c) all its five authors are exceptionally powerful opinion-formers – senior, hugely accomplished and respected scientists; (d) above all, it presents a dissection of aging into distinct (though inter-connected) processes and recommends a correspondingly multi-pronged (“divide and conquer”) approach to intervention.

It will not escape those familiar with SENS that this last feature is not precisely original, and it may arouse some consternation that no reference is made in the paper to that prior work. But do I care? Well, maybe a little – but really, hardly at all. SENS is not about me, nor even about SENS as currently formulated (though a depressing number of commentators in the field persist in presuming that it is). Rather, it is about challenging a profound, entrenched, and insidious dogma that has consumed biogerontology for the past 20 years, and which this new review finally – finally! – challenges (albeit somewhat diplomatically) with far more authority than I could ever muster.

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Aging has been shown, over several decades, to consist of a multiplicity of loosely linked processes, implying that robust postponement of age-related ill-health requires a divide-and-conquer approach consisting of a panel of interventions. Because such an approach is really difficult to implement, gerontologists initially adopted a position of such extreme pessimism that all talk of intervention became unfashionable. The discovery of genetic and pharmacological ways to mimic [calorie restriction], after a brief period of confused disbelief, was so seductive as a way to raise the field’s profile that it was uncritically embraced as the fulcrum of translational gerontology for 20 years, but finally that particular emperor has been decisively shown to have no biomedically relevant clothes.

The publication of so authoritative a commentary adopting the “paleogerontological” position, that aging is indeed chaotic and complex and intervention will indeed require a panel of therapies, but now combined with evidence-based optimism as to the prospects for implementing such a panel, is a key step in the elevation of translational gerontology to a truly mature field.

In essence, as de Grey points out, work on aging has been following the wrong, slow, expensive, low-yield path for a couple of decades: the path of deciphering the mechanisms of calorie restriction and altering genes and metabolism to slightly slow down aging. This path cannot result in large gains in life expectancy and long-term health, and it cannot result in therapies that will greatly help people who are already old. What use is slowing down the accumulation of the damage of aging if you are already just a little more damage removed from death, and frail and suffering because of it, and the treatment will meaningfully alter none of that? If we want to add decades or more to our healthy life spans before we die, then rejuvenation and repair of damage are what is needed: ways to reverse frailty, remove suffering, and restore youthful function.

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing the Longevity Meme or Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries.  

This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license.  It was originally published on FightAging.org.

Longevitize!: The Master Compendium for the Life-Extension Movement – Post by G. Stolyarov II

Longevitize!: The Master Compendium for the Life-Extension Movement – Post by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
September 7, 2013
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longevitize2013_med

Longevitize!: Essays on the Science, Philosophy & Politics of Longevity is a new and (literally) vital compilation, edited by Franco Cortese, which assembles perhaps the widest array of resources on radical life extension in one location. You can read a detailed description of the book here. Cortese’s ambitious projects have breathed new life into the transhumanist and immortalist movements, and Longevitize promises to be perhaps his most influential contribution to date, illustrating a thorough grasp of the current state of the efforts to defeat senescence and enable humankind to transcend its primordial limitations.

In addition to 164 articles representing diverse perspectives about the scientific, philosophical, and political aspects and implications of indefinite life extension, this compendium includes an immensity of links to external resources, including books, articles, and videos. I am proud that my Resources on Indefinite Life Extension (RILE) page formed the crux of the book’s Appendix II. Longevitize permits the reader to delve as deeply as can be desired into studying the feasibility, desirability, and possibilities for implementation of the defeat of senescence and involuntary death.

I am proud to have contributed 27 essays to this anthology, spanning 9 years of my thinking and writing on the prospect of indefinite longevity. In addition, the excellent cover was designed by my wife Wendy Stolyarov, incorporating Maxim Vorobiev’s 1842 painting, “Oak fractured by a lightning bolt. Allegory on wife’s death.” Death destroys our irreplaceable individual universes much like that lightning destroyed the tree. It is time to put an end to this travesty, and Longevitize offers an amazing toolkit and intellectual foundation for doing so. Buy this book, read it, and use it in your further intellectual explorations – including your writing, research, argumentation, and activism.

Right now, Longevitize! is available as an e-book for $9.99, both in PDF and MOBI formats, from Amazon. A hard-copy version is currently being prepared.

Life Expectancy is Growing at the Upper End, Too – Post by G. Stolyarov II

Life Expectancy is Growing at the Upper End, Too – Post by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
September 7, 2013
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I was recently asked whether my advocacy of indefinite life extension may be undermined by considering the growth rate in life expectancy at the upper end – for instance, for the oldest 10,000 people alive at any given time, rather than for the general population. Mortality for infants and younger adults has surely declined over the centuries, due to safer environments and considerable reductions in infectious diseases, but what about expansion of the upper bound of lifespans?

It turns out that there, too, considerable progress is being made. In July 2009, the New York Daily News reported, on the basis of a study from the National Institute on Aging, that “The number of centenarians already has jumped from an estimated few thousand in 1950 to more than 340,000 worldwide today, with the highest concentrations in the U.S. and Japan”. In addition to being further evidence that the US is not such a bad place for longevity (if one manages to avoid bad health habits and death from car accidents, both of which are more prevalent in the US than in Europe), this is evidence that a dramatic expansion in lifespans is underway for all age groups. Indeed, centenarians are the fastest-growing segment of all. The 2010 US Census found that the number of centenarians in the US grew by 5.8% from 2000 to 2010.  In Japan, the number of centenarians rose by 3,300 between 2010 and 2011. This trend shows no sign of abating. While Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997, still holds the greatest longevity record (122 years, 164 days), she was clearly a lucky outlier, and a recent one at that, when one considers a broader historical scale.  Statistically, the chances of living longer rise with each passing year. And among human males, the longest-living verified individual, Jiroemon Kimura, died at age 116 years, 54 days, this year (June 12, 2013). I have great hope that his record will be surpassed in the coming years.

Thus, the promise of indefinite life extension is not undermined when considering trends in the upper end of lifespans. There, as with average life expectancy and life expectancy for adults, the growth is apparent.

Transhumanism as the Logical Extrapolation of Humanism – Post by G. Stolyarov II

Transhumanism as the Logical Extrapolation of Humanism – Post by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
September 6, 2013
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When discussing the relationship between transhumanism and humanism, some would claim that transhumanism rejects humanism due to the latter’s limiting aspects, while others hold that transhumanism is the logical extrapolation of humanism. I firmly adhere to the latter view.

The Wikipedia definition of humanism is rather broad: “Humanism is a group of philosophies and ethical perspectives which emphasize the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers individual thought and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism).” Historically, the advocacy of human agency and value has often led to humanists resisting static definitions of “human nature” (for instance, as advocated by various premodern religions) in favor of a melioristic view of progress and human potential. My own essay, “Human Nature is Tautological” (also available in video form) is an example of this position.

Indeed, I have often thought that humanism and transhumanism are separated only by the degree of emphasis on human improvability. Transhumanism takes the melioristic aspirations of humanism to a new level by emphasizing the power of technology to radically transform human lives by lifting age-old limitations. But nothing in humanism per se would resist such a radical transformation. Transhumanism, in my view, accepts the core values of humanism and takes them further in light of the recognition of technological possibilities, particularly as regards radical life extension and extension of human reach to both the mega-scale (space colonization and giant construction projects) and to the nano-scale (nanotechnology and its applications to manufacturing and medicine).