How long indeed?

Make a poster or approach people with “How long do you want to live?” survey!

This!

Longevity meme contest, sponsor—@strygah, prize—$140! • What to do? Publish a meme in the comments to this post, quoting it or tagging @memortalism in a tweet with your meme. • Deadlines Memes are accepted until the end of the week (January 26, 23:59:59 UTC). The results of the competition will be announced on Monday, January 27. • Prize The author of the best meme will receive $140 in USDT (TRC20) wallet. Meme topics: longevity, vitalism, immortality, longevity economics, aging, transhumanism. The meme must be original: not seen anywhere before. The winner will be determined subjectively. Judges @yangranat, @strygah, @MikhailBatin, @DanilaImmortal. But if your meme gets a lot of likes, views, comments, then this will be taken into account. Powered by @OpenLongevity. If you want to become a sponsor of the next contest, then write @MikhailBatin or @yangranat.

I see no other way to extend life than by changing our attitude towards the idea of immortality. Towards the very word itself, towards the desire to live forever, towards openly stating that death is unacceptable. We will achieve nothing if we don’t speak the truth, if we choose compromise, if we try to please those who don’t like us. Not wanting to die is normal. It’s the stance of a sensible, reasonable person. Seeing the prospects of immortality in technology is a rational view of the world. Striving to reduce the number of deaths at any cost is the truly humane position—and no other. Those among us who scold us and claim there’s another tactic—that we should tell people what they want to hear about health improvements—overlook the fact that this tactic has already been used for the past 40 years and it failed. Just show that supporters of immortality are very rational people: IT engineers, AI developers, individuals competent in many other areas. Right now, immortality has a weak brand. In fact, it has none. We need to distance ourselves from all sorts of dietary supplements and the desire to age gracefully. We need intellectual courage to tell ourselves and those around us what we are doing and why. For nothing less than survival!

If you don't want eternal life, then what do you want? What are your terminal goals/values? What are you ultimately aiming for? What is your existence reduced to? My point is that there is no worthy alternative to eternal life. At best, you'll just want to live forever under condition X. This could be, for example, health or happiness. But the truth is that maximizing lifespan involves not just health or happiness, but becoming techno-gods, conquerors of galaxies, beings of entirely new intellectual horizons. In the short term, in theory, it may be necessary to sacrifice something, but eternity is worth it. In practice, I think that the pursuit of eternity is a win-win. We will not lose anything, we will only gain. It is very unlikely that efforts to prolong life will lead to prolongation of an unhealthy period of life, most likely the opposite. And the willingness to be unhappy makes happy. There is nothing that so clearly points the way for humanity and for each individual in particular as immortalism.

Why U.S. presidential candidates don’t talk about life extension is understandable; voters aren’t demanding increased longevity. But why does the longevity community say so little about the importance of a candidate’s position on aging research? Even a small community can influence an agenda if it is active. No one from the longevity community is traveling to Pennsylvania to canvass voters to support a pro-longevity candidate. There are no petitions demanding increased funding. Why? 1.There is no clear recognition that life extension is a political issue. 2.There is a lack of desire within our community to collaborate. Why? Because there is little discussion about the best collective course of action for advancing life extension. Everyone is busy promoting their own projects, and others’ projects are seen as competitors. There is almost no money in lobbying and political promotion of life extension. Where there is no money, there is no desire to spend time talking. This results in a paradoxical situation. Collecting, say, 50 million dollars in a fund for scientific research sets the benchmark that this fund can solve the problem of aging. But that’s absurd. That money could go toward longevity policy. However, this approach fosters overoptimism and the illusion that a cure for aging will be developed imminently. Here’s the dichotomy: If we are overly optimistic, we might believe that no policy change is necessary, focusing solely on who can develop a cure for aging the fastest. If we believe that existing technologies cannot defeat aging, we must maximize political efforts. Why can’t we do both? Again, because of a lack of honest discussion. We must consistently find the courage and persistence to engage in this dialogue. Otherwise, even in the next election, the theme of life extension will not appear in the rhetoric of the candidates.

“Death gives life meaning, too much of good things is unbearable”—this kind of escapism stops humanity from developing life extending technologies. Strangely enough, saving lives is both the basic of human ethics and something that humanity fights off, both in rhetoric and in practice 🤦‍♀️