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.