A Look at the Maximum Life Foundation

The Maximum Life Foundation is the brainchild and online presence of engineered longevity advocate and marketing entrepreneur David Kekich - also one of the first Methuselah Foundation donors, as it happens. The Maximum Life Foundation was founded in 1999, and thus predates most of the latest generation of serious ventures in advocacy and fundraising for longevity science, such as the Methuselah Foundation, SENS Foundation, or Immortality Institute. This is reflected in the messaging of the Maximum Life Foundation and its founder, which comes across as a hybrid of two eras: on the one hand the past era of supplements and hopes epitomized by the Life Extension Foundation; on the other hand, the present era of biotechnology and a real chance at medicine that can slow or reverse aging. All, of course, heavily filtered through Kekich's view on markets, health, self-actualization, and progress.

See, for example, Kekich's message as the Maximum Life Foundation founder:

And you’re probably aware that the power of technology per dollar doubles every 12 months. As I said, this means our tools could be 1000 times more powerful in just 10 years… and a billion times more powerful before mid century.

...

Now stop and let this sink in for a moment. Look back on the entire 20th century and mentally calculate what 1000 times more progress would equate to. Try to imagine what effect having tools, a billion times more powerful, could have on you and your well-being. This is an incredible, world-changing concept that will impact YOU more than anything else you have ever experienced. Almost all the old rules and restrictions are tossed out.

I should point you to David Kekich's recently released book, "Life Extension Express," which can be downloaded for free from the Foundation website. This takes the concepts and lessons of longevity advocacy developed over the past decade, and presents them in a jazzy, self-help book stream of consciousness format:

  • Aging is the greatest threat to individuals in this world of ours, and age-related disability is the greatest cost we will each bear in suffering and money - but most people don't think about doing something about that.
  • We life in an age of advancing biotechnology that will soon make it possible to address the aging process as though it were a disease.
  • Medical advances have the potential to produce accelerating gains in longevity in decades ahead - eventually adding years of healthy life faster than we age. But this will only be the case if we step up and help to make it happen.
  • Take care of your health, or you might miss the boat. Big and impressive biotechnology is on the way, but that won't help you if you're dead.

There will one day in the not so distant future be published a "Human Longevity for Dummies" book - and I imagine it will look and sound a lot like "Life Extension Express." One of the challenges in the present longevity advocacy movement is reaching out to educate the public at large, putting the implications of the visions and ideas of de Grey, Kurzweil, Vinge, and others in front of people who haven't paid much attention up until now. The flashy self-help space hasn't been widely explored (to the best of my knowledge) by the present generation of advocates for engineered longevity, but here Kekich is placing his best foot forward. We'll see how it goes.

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