A Report on the Personalized Life Extension Confererence

Ben Goertzel reports on the recent Personalized Life Extension conference at h+ Magazine: "It was a pretty sophisticated crowd with an attitude both radical and down-to-Earth - the general feeling was something like 'We all pretty much believe that "longevity escape velocity" is likely to happen sometime this century, due to a combination of scientific and technological advances, so if we can just live long enough into the century, we may be able to live centuries or millennia or longer. So now the question is: What can we do, in practice, and so increase the odds that we do live long enough to see the really radical life extension technologies emerge?' Or to put it in Ray Kurzweil's terms: how can we live long enough to live forever? If Kurzweil is right, then in 2045 or so, technology will have advanced far enough that involuntary death will be an unlikely tragedy. In that case, what really matters is to keep our meat-bags chugging till that wonderful date. Whether the precise date is really 2045 or not, the concept still has value. Aubrey de Grey has called it 'the Methuselarity' - the date at which, if you live that long (by hook or by crook), cascading improvements in life extension technology will likely keep extending your lifespan forever."

Link: http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/two-days-among-immortals