Humanity+ Summit 2010 Coverage and Video

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The 2010 Humanity+ Summit was held this past weekend. Video from the event is archived at Livestream and you can find a brace of posts covering the event at the Speculist:

If you want to browse through the video streams, the links above are a useful guide to finding the presenters and topics of interest. A few items of interest related to engineered longevity:

There is a very ambitious schedule with an A-list group of speakers, full streaming worldwide over the internet
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John Smart announced his new venture to provide a push prize for brain preservation (25% for a mouse brain and 75% for a pig brain) at a nano-scale resolution. They have $100,000 but are hoping to grow that prize with additional donations. He discussed the plastination process in more detail, and his colleague demonstrated via video the extremely high resolution that they get with that now for small brain tissue samples.

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Aubrey de Grey described a role for citizen scientists to aid the work on anti-aging: improve the accuracy of media coverage by evaluating carefully and publicly reacting to press accounts of "breakthroughs" (many of which are not really). This keeps things realistic and reduces the fuel for the anti-hype side which can slow public acceptance.

From the other side of the aisle, the deathists-slash-anti-transhumanists at Futurisms have put together a large set of posts covering the Summit. Just read between the snark:

There's always a strange split at these sorts of conferences between big-picture visionary, scientific, and philosophical talks, and presentations on specific but low-level scientific findings that you'd expect to find at a more focused technical conference. The latter seem designed both to fill space and to give the attendees a sense that they are involved in an organized scientific project, and that they're in touch with what's going on. Given the dizzying pace, I'll probably be focusing on the more big-picture talks.