Fight Aging!

There are two choices: do nothing and probably age to death, or support research into longevity science and live for much longer in good health if it is successful. Since you are here and reading this, the dice are already rolling for the rest of your life. Why not do what you can to improve the odds of a good outcome, a future in which effective rejuvenation treatments for age-related frailty and disease exist by the time you need them?

The choice comes down to doing nothing - except hoping that you have the right religious beliefs - or doing something - buying a cryonics policy and/or supporting scientific research. So what should you do? Perhaps the best way to illuminate the choice is to consider a previous choice human beings faced in their history. What should they do about disease? Should they pray to the gods and have faith that the gods will cure them, or should they use science and technology to find the cures themselves? In hindsight the answer is clear. Praying to the gods makes no difference, whereas using modern medicine has limited death and disease, and nearly doubled the human lifespan in the last century. Other examples also easily come to mind. What is the best way to predict weather, harness energy, communicate instantly over great distances, or fly to far off planets?

These examples highlight another advantage to making [the] wager - the incremental benefits that accrue as we live longer and better lives as we approach the holy grail of blissful immortality. Such benefits provide assurance that we are on the right path, which should increase our confidence that we are making the correct wager. In fact, the benefits already bestowed upon us by science and technology confirm that it is the best path toward a better future. As these benefits accumulate, and as we become aware of them, our existence will become increasingly indistinguishable from the most enchanting descriptions of any afterlife.

So we should throw off archaic superstitions and use our technology. Will we do this? Yes. I say with confidence that when an effective pill that stops or reverses aging becomes available at your local pharmacy - it will be popular. Or if, as you approach death, you are offered the opportunity to have your intact consciousness transferred to your younger cloned body, a genetically engineered body, a robotic body, or a virtual reality, most will use such technologies when they are demonstrated effective. By then almost everyone will prefer the real thing to a leap of faith.

Link: http://reasonandmeaning.com/2014/11/07/the-transhumanist-wager-fails/