Three Specters of Immortality
A long-form essay on priorities in advocacy and fundraising for longevity science:
I would like to address what I consider to be three common criticisms against the desirability and ethicacy of life-extension I come across all too often - three specters of immortality, if you will. These will be Overpopulation (the criticism that widely-available life-extension therapies will cause unmanageable overpopulation), Naturality (the criticism that life-extension if wrong because it is unnatural), and Selfishness (the criticism that life-extension researchers, activists and supporters are motivated by a desire to increase their own, personal lifespans than by a desire to decrease involuntary suffering in the world at large).What makes them worrying is the fact that they deter widespread support of life-extension from the general public, because they stop many people from seeing the advantage and desirability of life-extension today. Just what is considered worthy of scientific study is to a very large extent out of the hands of the average scientist. The large majority of working-day scientists don't have as much creative license and choice over what they research as we would like to think they do.
Scientists have to make their studies conform to the kinds of research that are getting funded. In order to get funding, more often than not they have to do research on what the scientific community considers important or interesting, rather than on what they personally might find the most important or interesting. And what the scientific community considers important and worthy of research is, by and large, determined by what the wider public considers important.
Thus if we want to increase the funding available to academic projects pertaining to life-extension, we should be increasing public support for it first and foremost. We should be catalyzing popular interest in and knowledge of life-extension. Strangely enough, the objective of increased funding can be more successfully and efficiently achieved, per unit of time or effort, by increasing public support and demand via activism, advocacy and lobbying than by say direct funding, period. Thus, even if most of these criticisms, these specters of immortality, are to some extent baseless, refuting them is still important insofar as it increases public support for life-extension, thereby hastening progress in the field.
Interesting and thought-provoking article.
Though I am not convinced that there has to be widespread appeal or acceptance for a technology to be allowed to develop and be implemented. Similar with electrical cars (in my opinion) and HDTVs from last decade, success came from (will come from) facilities where investors focussed (will focus) on moderate-high-income early-adopters. When the lifestyle was shown (will be shown) to be desirable, these were (these will be then) accepted en-masse (or by a significant number to create economies of scale benefits). Many will point out the elitism in such thinking, but it is often the elite who take risks and seek out those opportunities which will eventually benefit all. Further, when you take a populist approach, research directions, funding, and other decision trees get diluted, conflicted, and otherwise unfocussed. Special interest groups prey on such attempts at widespread acceptance. We need to stop treating longevity as some kind of public absolute good (though it is) like the cure for cancer or avoidance of climate change. The people that knew that best were the visionary tyrants such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk - beautiful visions but harsh and relentless taskmasters; able to shrug off populist criticism to eventually be recognized as the world-changers way out of proportion to their actual skill sets. As much as many of us openly and publicly criticize the elite and those who would pursue those fruits, many of us crave (and deserve) the experiences, but fail to accept the costs or uncertain paths to those fruits. As much as it is obvious, longevity research (and its necessary funding and expertise recruitment) really needs to focus on those 'dream team' billionaire visionaries such as with the asteroid mining or space tourism. These groups successfully play up the benefits (without being preachy) yet play down and obscure the business dealings, costs, players involved, or timelines. If this means transferring facilities to some middle east sheikdom to have billions invested, so be it. This is the truth of most significant breakthroughs - capitalist profiteering in the hands of the few, but which do eventually trickle down to all.
This is one of the few posts that doesn't let your obvious ideological bent get in the way of research.
The reason why the basic research will decide hiw fast this moves is bc most of the research is basic.
1. Profitability is years off.
2. You wouldn't want proprietary interests to block progress. I've seen it with cancer research.
3. Safety does matter. If you cut corners and people die, that will hinder later progress bc the public will slow the research.