Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension

My new article for Vice Motherboard. It’s about one of the biggest ideas I believe in–the necessity to spend more money directly on science goals instead of bomb making and defense:

It just so happens that there is another way—a method that would satisfy liberals and conservatives alike. Instead of always spending more on our military, we could transition our nation and its economy into a scientific-industrial complex.

There’s compelling reason to do this beyond what meets the eye. Transhumanist technology is starting to radically change human life. Many experts expect to be able to stop aging and conquer death for human beings in the next 25 years. Others, like myself, see humans merging with machines and replacing our every organ with bionic ones.

Such a new transhuman society will require many trillions of dollars to satisfy humans ever-growing desire for physical perfection (machine or biological) in the transhumanist age. We could keep our economy humming along for decades because of it.

Whatever happens, something is going to have to give in the future regarding military profiteering. Part of this is because in the past, the military-industrial complex operated off always keeping a few million US military members ready on a moment’s notice to travel around the world and fight. But there’s almost no scenario where we would need that kind of human-power (and infrastructure to support it) anymore.

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My latest piece for The Huffington Post. It’s a recap of 2015 for transhumanism and includes some select stories & videos:

Last year, I wrote that 2014 was a great year for the transhumanism movement. But 2015 was simply incredible — it might end up being called a breakout year. I’m not yet willing to declare transhumanism as “mainstream,” but it’s getting quite close now. Transhumanism has become a word that is used frequently by people around the world and in major media when discussing radical science and technology changing our species.

Below is a quick recap of some select stories in English that came out this year on transhumanism and some of my efforts to bring the future closer.

Let’s start with what might end up the most in-depth story on transhumanism ever written. The Verge sent journalist Elmo Keep to ride on the coffin-shaped Immortality Bus. Two months later a behemoth 10,000+ word piece appeared, leading the front page of the site for a few days. The article was also translated into numerous languages. Photographer Nancy Borowick astonished us with amazing photos of transhumanist activism. Then, Digg ran the story and had a chat session on the piece with the author.

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An interesting solution to testing combinations of compounds for longevity effects. As we move into implementing multiple approach therapies eg, SENS, which need several interventions we will need ways to measure their efficacy. Good to see people are thinking about this problem already.

Combination testing can it work? One of the MMTP collaborators Josh Mitteldorf suggests a way we might make it work.

http://majormouse.org/?q=node/152

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This came up recently and it occurred I never posted this here. This is a lecture by Robert Bradbury, not not Ray Bradbury. I had the pleasure of exchanging a few emails with him. Unfortunately those emails are lost so I cannot share them. He was an advocate of life extension and he was a big thinker. I’ll post both vids and a link to the M-brain page. He is not with us anymore I regret to say. Ready?

Renown aging expert Robert Bradbury discusses whole genome engineering, evolution and aging and ways to defeat aging. His talk touches on many areas including nanotechnology, biology, and computer science. More information can be found at http://manhattanbeachproject.com Follow updates at http://twitter.com/maxlifeorg

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Hydras, simple fresh-water animals, have the ability to live forever if kept in ideal conditions, a recent study shows.

The organisms are made mostly of stem cells that have the ability to continually divide, thus constantly renewing the body.

“The differentiated cells of the tentacles and the foot are constantly being pushed off the body and replaced with new cells migrating from the body column,” Daniel Martinez, a biologist at Pomona College, said in a statement.

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Death is a disease.

Diseases can and will be cured.

Do the math. wink

Disease GWAS show substantial genetic overlap with longevity. Shown are results for coronary artery disease and Alzheimer’s disease. The y axis is the observed P values for longevity, and the x axis is the expected P values under the null hypothesis that the disease is independent of longevity. The cyan, blue and purple lines show the P values for longevity of the top 100, 250, and 500 disease SNPs from independent genetic loci, respectively. Red lines show the background distribution of longevity P values for all independent genetic loci tested in both the longevity and disease GWAS. The grey horizontal line corresponds to the threshold for nominal significance (P = 0.05) for longevity. Significance of enrichment was determined with the hypergeometric test. (credit: Kristen Fortney et al./PLOS Genetics)

What’s the secret of centenarians who have health and diet habits similar to the average person but have remained active and alert at very old ages?

Genes. That’s according to scientists at Stanford University and the University of Bologna, who have written a new report published in PLOS Genetics, based on their finding of several disease variants that may be absent in centenarians compared to the general population.

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