There is a point to this exercise: this post; the other posts on Fight Aging!; the Longevity Meme; the Methuselah Foundation; the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS); the activism; the wider conversation and advocacy for healthy life extension. Every day, more than 100,000 people die from the results of accumulated age-related damage in their tissues: each one is a pointed, grim reminder that we could be doing far more than we are to make it possible to repair that damage.

On some days, we know one of these people - and then we grieve for a while, before trying to put it out of our heads again. A father; a mother; a sister. It has to stop: one day, if we don't get our act together pretty damn quickly, one of those pointed, grim reminders is going to be you - and the years leading up to that event will not be free from suffering. The end of life - the slow failure of your biology under the weight of damage we almost know how to repair - is not a pretty picture.

This future is not inevitable! Scientists know more than enough to make a start on the defeat of aging; more than enough to make significant progress on real, working anti-aging medicine within our lifetime. But this progress requires your support and understanding - all our support. Medical science does not move forward in a vacuum, but rather only when we all step forward to call for results, putting our money where our mouths are.

Where would you rather be in the decades ahead? Suffering and dying, or out there in world with vigor and health, learning and enjoying life? If you want the better of those options, you'll have to help the rest of us invest in making it a reality.

Give it some thought. The future is what you make of it.

Technorati tags: activism, aging, life extension

Posted by Reason at October 5, 2006 8:56 PM | TrackBack (0)