Accelerating Future

H/t to Michael Graham Richard for the link.

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Aubrey de Grey and Dan Buettner are interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta on “how to live longer”. H/t humanplus blog.

Interesting insights from Buettner. The common denominators of long-lived populations worldwide include 1) plant-based diets (go veg for moral and health reasons!), 2) they live in environments where they are forced into physical activity, and 3) they eat beans, nuts, and sometimes tofu (on Okinawa). He says that the current longevity ceiling, if we do everything perfectly, is about 90, and that for most people, who would otherwise live to around 80 or less, “ten good years” are “on the table”.

Dan Buettner and Dr. Sanjay Gupta both show that they actually understand regenerative medicine to an extent and Gupta remarks on the evolutionary pressures that tend to lead to the body being designed primarily to reproduce, raise children, and afterward go downhill.

Congrats Aubrey! Such a high-profile interview, and of course you nailed it.

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Received from Ben Eisler via Facebook:

Hi everyone,

As some of you may be aware, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and President of Clarium Capital) is presently committed to matching all donations to the SENS Foundation for aging research by a further fifty percent.

In other words, this means that by reaching our target of ten thousand members, our group has the potential to raise an additional 500 thousand dollars for medical research to end the disabilities and diseases of aging, for everyone.

However, there’s a catch. To take advantage of this considerable matching grant, we must reach our target by the end of this year, giving us just over a month to get there.

We believe we can do it.

We are proposing a massive push so as to make this happen, and we need your help.

If everyone can attract just a few friends to sign up for our cause page, we can reach our target of ten thousand members and raise as much as 1.5 million dollars for SENS research. Ideally we would like to get there by Christmas, as that will give us a week to collect on donations.

This may seem like a tall ask, but remember, there is power in numbers. Once we reach two thousand members, everyone will need attract only four other people to reach our target. Once we reach five thousand, everyone will need to attract only ONE other person, and so on. All very doable!

In the meantime, both SENS Foundation (sens.org) and the Immortality Institute (imminst.org) will be promoting our cause on their websites, which will be a great help as well.

Let’s get to work, and bring an end to the disabilities and diseases of aging.

If 10,000 people all agree to give $100, and Peter Thiel matches it 50%, that equals $1.5M.

Some of us, like those in my generation (I’m 25), may be reluctant to give to SENS because they believe that medical science will progress fast enough without their intervention to let them live indefinitely. I would consider that unfair and calloused to our friends from earlier generations.

Of course, another route to life extension would be through friendly artificial general intelligence (FAI). It’s worth remembering that if we solve the aging problem but not the FAI problem, we all die anyway. However, if we solve the FAI problem but not the aging problem, it’s quite likely that FAI will then solve the aging problem for us. So FAI is truly the only long-term solution for life extension, but SENS is a possible shorter-term solution for the older among us. Even modest success for SENS might also cause the wealthier, older set to start thinking about the longer-term future, which includes the question of how to program powerful artificial intelligences that don’t automatically kill us through indifference.

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Glenn Reynolds has an article on the Singularity at Popular Mechanics.

Ron Bailey has the “deets” on the recent Manhattan Beach Longevity Summit.

Hank Hyena, a seemingly new-ish writer at h+ magazine, has a cool article on in-vitro meat, titled “Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives”. One of them is “exotic cuisine”:

In-Vitro Meat will be fashioned from any creature, not just domestics that were affordable to farm. Yes, ANY ANIMAL, even rare beasts like snow leopard, or Komodo Dragon. We will want to taste them all. Some researchers believe we will also be able to create IVM using the DNA of extinct beasts — obviously, “DinoBurgers” will be served at every six-year-old boy’s birthday party.

Give me that endangered snow leopard burger!

And to transhumanists who still eat meat from highly intelligent animals like pigs, I ask — why do you consume and cage animals who are obviously aware of their pain and suffering and yet still expect superintelligences or superhumans to treat you with respect? The human/not-human simplistic dichotomy of morality is not going to work as a moral structure in the long term. We’re going to need more precise technical definitions of what we value, even if those definitions disagree.

There is a line above which all animals should be profoundly respected, in my opinion, and I’m not sure where that line lies, but it’s probably pretty low. I am a mostly-vegetarian myself (eat fish and dairy occasionally), and to any vegans out there, I would be interested in hearing your opinions on shrimp and oyster. Does anyone know how many neurons are in a shrimp brain?

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Naked mole rats may be ugly, but they have an advantage — you can get cancer, and they can’t. Naked mole rats are the only known cancerless animal. Scientists have found that there is a very straightforward and interesting reason why. From the press release:

Despite a 30-year lifespan that gives ample time for cells to grow cancerous, a small rodent species called a naked mole rat has never been found with tumors of any kind—and now biologists at the University of Rochester think they know why.

The findings, presented in today’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the mole rat’s cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells “claustrophobic,” stopping the cells’ proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells’ growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.

“We think we’ve found the reason these mole rats don’t get cancer, and it’s a bit of a surprise,” say Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov, professors of biology at the University of Rochester and lead investigators on the discovery. “It’s very early to speculate about the implications, but if the effect of p16 can be simulated in humans we might have a way to halt cancer before it starts.”

Next, all we need to do is cross our genes with naked mole rats, and we’ll become cancerless mole people for all eternity. Problem solved!

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SENS has been officially announced as the winner of the 3banana Share-to-Win competition, but only barely. Thanks to everyone who commented! We transhumanists and early-adopters should be able to dominate the online social media space more aggressively. As Aubrey has pointed out in his Facebook messages, large donors are VERY sensitive to how much public support they see for non-profits before deciding whether to donate a substantial sum. So say I donate $100 to a non-profit I care about, which is something that practically everyone can afford and should donate. Not only does the non-profit gain $100, but it might increase the likelihood that a major donor will donate $100,000 by as much as 0.5% or more, which translates to an expected value of $500. So a donation of $100 can actually have an expected value of $600. In that vein, I really think you should consider donating to the SIAI cause on Facebook.

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I have a new interview with Aubrey available at hplusmagazine.com.

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Thank you for covering this, Nicholas W! Opener:

BOSTON — Who would have thought it? The quest for eternal life, or at least prolonged youthfulness, has now migrated from the outer fringes of alternative medicine to the halls of Harvard Medical School.

Bwa ha ha ha ha ha! They thought we were mad! We’ll show them who’s mad!

They forgot to mention the most important stepping stone between alternative medicine and Harvard Medical School — Aubrey de Grey and his supporters. Without him, this never would have happened so soon.

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After extensive promotion efforts, finally Aubrey de Grey and his supporters look like we’re going to win the 3banana comments contest, beating out the LA Rehabilitation House. For almost this entire contest, we’ve been behind. The nice thing about close victories like this is that we can be sure that everyone who did something for it contributed to the victory. If it weren’t for everyone helping, we would have lost!

Thank you so much to everyone who helped us win.

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See here. I support the phrase “immortality is 20 years away” more than “technology is accelerating in a precisely predictable way”. My concern is that the prediction doesn’t encourage people to take action enough, but I also think we shouldn’t underestimate the increased chance of action if people think that something is actually possible (if uncertain) within 20 years. Similar proclamations made the Space Race possible. I do think that we could get to longevity escape velocity within 20 years, with sufficient effort.

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