A Conversation With Bruce J. Klein
Bruce J. Klein of the Immortality Institute dropped by today to shoot some interview footage for "Exploring Life Extension". Bruce has been traveling the length and breadth of the US for months now, meeting members of the healthy life extension community and racking up more than a hundred hours of tape. It's an open question as to whether anything I said is compelling or useful enough to make it into the final version or subsequent use of footage, but we shall see.
The film is a good and worthwhile project, but more interesting to me is the web of contacts and relationships that Bruce is putting together in his capacity as Immortality Institute chair. Journalists, scientists, businessmen, community leaders, and so forth, many of whom are names you'll recognize. As a fairly immediate extension of the rumor circuit and grape vine, Bruce indicated that there's a lot more going on out there in the community than makes it to a level at which I'm going to notice. Which leads me to conclude, once again, that healthy life extension advocates are being nowhere near vocal enough about their efforts. If I don't know about it, you can be sure that most of the rest of the world doesn't know about it either ... and as I tend to restate every now and again, that's a big part of our funding and credibility problem.
I mean, come on folks. We all know that the science of healthy life extension is "just" details, money and work. The high level path for technology and development to greatly extend the healthy human life span is clear. The big problem is one of public awareness, education and support. Not enough people know what is possible - so if you're off out there doing your part to get things done, make more noise about it! We've moved beyond the stage at which minor efforts at publicity vanish into the wild; there are enough people online and offline, professional and amateur, who write on this topic to act as an effective echo chamber and amplifer now. Give them something to write about.
But onwards: the logical next step would be to monetize Bruce's large and expanding network of relationships in order to fund a high profile healthy life extension project under the Immortality Institute banner. What could this be: a research prize, a major media project with mainstream distribution, or something different and more out of the box? There are many options, many doors opened by means of contacts made and proof of capability. We shall see how it turns out.