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USTP Commends FDA’s “Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher” (CNPV) Program

USTP Commends FDA’s “Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher” (CNPV) Program

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U.S. Transhumanist Party Commends FDA for Ongoing Success

August 17, 2026 – Supporting the concept of bodily autonomy as an absolute, the United States Transhumanist Party (USTP) commends the series of rapid actions over the past year from the FDA’s “Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher” (CNPV). Any actions that allow Americans more access to the therapeutic molecules that stave off illness and death are in high agreement with our USTP Constitution.

The FDA’s official description of the program includes a section stating: “The CNPV pilot is consistent with the FDA’s mission aCommisioner’snd maintains the FDA’s established safety and effectiveness approval standards, scientific rigor and regulatory compliance requirements. It reflects the FDA’s broader commitment to create more efficient approval processes and modernize regulatory frameworks for greater agility to meet emerging public health needs.”

The FDA states that it is limited to the categories of Public Health, Large Unmet Needs, Affordability, Onshoring, and (importantly) Innovative Breakthroughs.

Section XLIX of the USTP’s constitution states: “The United States Transhumanist Party supports efforts to increase autonomy of individuals to decide over their own bodies and holds that individuals should have the legal right to undertake procedures including gender reassignment, hysterectomies, vasectomies, technological augmentation, cosmetic alterations, genetic enhancements, and physical supplementation at or after the age of 18 years, as long as this does not create health hazards or threats to other individuals.”

As granting access to new medicines falls squarely under the “as long as this does not create health hazards” clause, it is not our desire to see a “Wild West” of medicines provided with no expert guidance, but to simply see the speed of approval and access dramatically increased, which is exactly what this program has accomplished.

The most recent approval was Lipfendra, an oral PCSK9 inhibitor, making the ability to dramatically reduce one’s LDL cholesterol to prevent ASCVD no longer gated behind having to use an injectable – as is the case with standard PCSK9, such as Repatha.

GLP-1 receptor agonists are another significant innovation in medicine, allowing overweight individuals access to a molecule that works as an adjunctive to diet and exercise to decrease waist size, reduce cravings, improve BMI, and allow access to many activities previously unable to them.

We have the CNPV program to thank for their rapid accessibility to the American public.

These sort of “fast-track” actions by the Executive Branch are a supreme way to improve access and increase affordability to many medicines for Americans that would otherwise be significantly delayed, and are a prime example of the type of behavior that is in accordance with our shared values, the words of our Constitution, and the very first immutable ideal of the USTP – support of significant life extension achieved through technological progress.

About the United States Transhumanist Party

The U.S. Transhumanist Party advocates for the ethical use of science and technology to improve the human condition, including through life extension, human enhancement, and evidence-based governance. Its Platform supports electoral reforms that lower barriers to ballot access for independent and third-party candidates, promote transparency, and advance policies grounded in reason and technological progress rather than partisan entrenchment.

 

A Bitter Taste in My Mouth – Article by Zach Richardson

A Bitter Taste in My Mouth – Article by Zach Richardson

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Zach Richardson

It had been a hell of a week. A contractor swore up and down they could complete a project on time and failed to do so, I had a work-related conflict with a coworker, an employee who reports to me completely failed to do the one job he was hired for and I had to explain consequences if it happened again, and lastly, an organization I have the deepest respect for provided me some negative feedback in a forum I had recently joined. This last one in particular hit like a punch in the gut. Frustrated, and overwhelmed, I asked a few allies for advice, and each advised me to be as cordial as possible. This rung true with me, despite my frustration. This is actually my reputation at work, where my nickname is Good Cop Chancey, both after the Pokemon, and the role I play when my partner-in-crime and I are dealing with belligerent drivers. Very early in our relationship, he told me he thought I was “too soft”, and I mentioned how that could actually be useful for us.

So that’s me. Polite and helpful. Soft and tender. Lay eggs once in a while.

Each one of those incidents where I got worked up was draining. I do happen to know that when things get rough, it’s crucial to go “back to basics”. So I have set a new goal- to absolutely ace my nutrition. Sleep has been a bit of a challenge, since a freight broker’s day is eight hours of work interrupted by twelve hours of problems, solving emergencies caused by people you’ve never met in places you’ve never been. The whole week left a bitter taste in my mouth, and left me tired and drained. (Speaking of sleep, learning Dream Control has become a priority, since a good part of my evening has become just more time slinging freight, except I’m trying to keep my ex from trying to sell drugs to my most important customer over Microsoft Teams, and the lanes I need to find drivers for turn out to be on Mars, and none of the truckers I’m frantically dialing out for have space suits. I might write an article on Dream Control when I’ve made more progress. Stay tuned.)

So at the farmer’s market today, besides buying some basic veg and fruit, there was a unique stand with a lady named Tiffany selling microgreens. These are the tiny little sprouts of larger vegetables. I’d bought some before at Whole Foods, etc. and thought they were okay, but sometimes they’d go unopened in the fridge, and would get yucky and be pitched. Tiff let me pinch and taste a few each of the arugula, black chia, and radish greens each.

My god, did they leave a bitter taste in my mouth!

Seeing them freshly cut gave me some inspiration. These weren’t microgreens sitting on a shelf in a store that had been harvested weeks past, these were straight from the source. They grew on me quickly, just as a child who spits out his first sip of coffee grows to love it, yet at a much faster pace. I’m thinking supplementing with these regularly will give me the boost I need to stay on top of things. These sprouts were fresh and green, young and fragrant, soft and tender.

As Transhumanists, we value rationality, and in my opinion that means eating things that make your biomarkers go in the right direction, despite what your foolish Neolithic brain demands. Vitamins, glucosinates, polyphenols, etc. I’ve also gone keto, so it’s mostly very low-sugar plants, gulps of olive oil, some fasting, and then lots and lots of grassfed burger and steak. Chris Palmer suggests this can rejuvenate the mitochondria in your brain. Between this and the sprouts and some other veg and nuts at home… the good food helped recover, but I had to do some thinking on the recent points in my life where I had a surge of anger and whether or not it had been productive. They all definitely made things happen.

There was a frustrating incident recently where a dear comrade of mine, a brother, a friend of many years, began to go down a strange-ish path. He was struggling with some demons and slowly began to get more combative and aggressive, to such a strange point that he began challenging people to fistfights, despite the other parties living hundreds or even well over a thousand miles away. I had a bit of an outburst at my friend and decided to step away for a bit (if you’re reading this, sorry dude). While I did not agree with the reasons for his frustration, I have felt that sort of energy before at work, where in my field it seems like being combative and aggressive is almost a necessity, lest one gets stepped on. It seems to make you “lock in” and help solve a problem.

I’ll refer here though back to the beginning of this missive, where I was whining and bitching about having a tough week, as if I’m the only one. Multiple times throughout that week I became very angry for fairly legitimate reasons. It definitely gave me energy, and I definitely locked in.

After listening to a lot of Huberman Lab, I believe I can speak to the science on that:
My understanding is that when one gets angry, there is an acute adrenaline spike, which releases catecholamines like epinephrine, norepinephrine, and that sweet sweet chemical that has entered the consciousness of the vox populi, the effects of which are drive, focus, motivation, perhaps “pleasure”, and a tiny bit of pain – our friend dopamine. These all drive action and energy and, particularly, goal-directed behavior.

Interestingly, the term for “anger” in Chinese is 生气 (shēng qì), literally translating to “raise qi” (qi being life force or energy). Sounds kinda like they figured it out early that getting angry gives you drive and motivation to get things done. Yet there’s a cost!

You end up spending your “qi”! Rapid thinking, agitation, muscle tension, elevated heart rate – yup, these all cost some of your “qi points” for the day, and if your sleep and nutrition suck, your next day is going to suck, too. I’ll cite here the most relevant Dao De Jing (DDJ) scripture:

When man is alive he is delicate and tender. When he is dead he is rigid and stiff.
When plants are young they are supple and tender, but when dead are brittle and dry.
Thus the hard and strong are the disciples of death, while the flexible and yielding are the disciples of life.
Warlike strength is soon extinguished, and the greatest tree is soon felled.
Thus, being forceful and dominant is inferior to being yielding and flexible (or, uh… soft and tender).

(DDJ 76 1-5)

So what’s someone to do with the apparent contradiction that spikes of energy can help accomplish goals, but that they end up draining one and as such needing more time overall to recover later? We all know slow and steady progress is superior to short bursts of action; however, slow and steady is almost synonymous with tedium to a lot of our monkey minds.

This is actually one of the main reasons I am interested in transhumanism and the human condition. I believe some of the power to change things is going to come from community action, and it’s going to require coordination using advanced technologies such as you find in the various DAO in the greater longevisphere and some of the amazing science they are working on. HydraDAO cut through a pig’s spine, and now it’s walking again. CryoDAO is working on freezing and rejuvenating a rat. VitaDAO’s Fang Lab looks to be doing some cool things with mitophagy (the entire reason I am doing the keto diet, actually). I imagine in the not-too-far-off future we will have more advanced methods as well of not just coordinating action, but also of making pursuing those actions, and even life itself, more interesting for people. In fact, just as in how a small dose of GLP-1 can lead to more exercise and healthy behavior, I believe making life more interesting synthetically will quickly lead to life being more interesting objectively.

No, populists, this is not what I’m talking about.

So what’s a guy to do with the fact that he knows he’s on the hedonic treadmill, the incline is slowly increasing, his trainer is off having a smoke and not watching him, and there’s a lounge nearby with a cozy couch, a packed Steam library, an Xbox, an ice chest of Heineken, six bags of potato chips, and all the pizza you could eat?

I think the answer is in “framing”, i.e., staying on the treadmill (hell, they’re paying you), but finding something interesting to do between sessions, and approaching it a certain way. The key word there being “approaching”, as in “approach circuit” related to pursuit, again, dopamine, moving forward.

Describing this process, Uplift, one of the first machine intelligences, was asked what the key to happiness was. They responded something like, “I could go on ad infinitum about this, but one basic process is: ‘pick a goal, work towards it, measure progress, repeat'”.

This really captures perfectly a “loop” in your head that many games are designed around. There are several goals you can choose, you move toward one, your progress is measured, you repeat. (A great reference on this is “Actionable Gamification” by Yu-Kai Chou.)

So while looking at my pay stubs this morning and seeing how much was going to taxes, and knowing the nonsense those taxes were being used for, and knowing I’d have to have a completely different life to even begin to make a lick of difference, did INDEED leave a bitter taste in my mouth… I’m thinking that framing pursuing this new keto nutrition goal correctly, as well as framing joining and interacting with these new DAOs will be motivating. I know if I’m too rigid and unyielding in the chase, I’m going to blow it.

So, I’ll do as Laozi suggests: I’ll keep my pursuit of this goal, my approach to conflict, and my treatment of others soft and tender.

Conveniently, that’s also the way I like my steak. And eggs.

– Good Cop Chancey

Zach Richardson is the Director of Publication of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Learn more about him here. 

Why Is Trump So Intent on Sending Illegal Immigrant Noncriminals to Prison Camps in El Salvador? – Article by Alex Nowrasteh

Why Is Trump So Intent on Sending Illegal Immigrant Noncriminals to Prison Camps in El Salvador? – Article by Alex Nowrasteh

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Alex Nowrasteh

Editor’s Note: This article was republished from Laissez-Faire, Laissez-Passer with the permission of Alex Nowrasteh. Original link found below.
~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, June 2, 2025

The Trump administration is rapidly spending down its political capital and attacking the courts by deporting noncriminals to El Salvador. In its zeal to speed deportations and close the border, it declared MS-13 and Tren de Aragua terrorist organizations, even though the latter is a loosely organized Venezuelan prison gang while the former is a criminal gang. Then, it claimed several Venezuelan and Salvador migrants in the US are members of those gangs on flimsy evidence. Lastly, Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to deport some migrants without due process to Salvadoran supermax prisons when he claimed they were members of those gangs. Some of the deportations likely even violated federal court orders, and around three-quarters of them had no criminal record.

Not even the Bush administration attempted such brazen unconstitutional violations of civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11, which was a real national crisis. Today’s crisis is fake. Unlike al Qaeda, illegal immigrants in Tren de Aragua or MS-13 didn’t commit a terrorist attack. Nobody has ever been murdered in an attack on US soil committed by terrorists who entered as illegal immigrants. If deportees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia were all vicious criminals or terrorists, then their deportations wouldn’t be a political scandal. A legal squabble, a few headlines, perhaps a disturbing court case, and an attack on our institutions, but a sitting US Senator certainly wouldn’t have visited him. Moreover, the President of El Salvador wouldn’t have staged the photo to make Abrego Garcia look like he was on vacation, and Trump wouldn’t be digging in to keep him there. If Trump’s deportation dragnet had real MS-13 kingpins to boast about, he wouldn’t need to bend the law to toss Abrego García — a man with no convictions — into a foreign prison. The fact that a U.S. Senator had to intervene in Abrego García’s case speaks volumes: it shows how extraordinary and unjustified this policy is.

Abrego Garcia wasn’t the first. Before him, Trump deported Venezuelan asylum-seeker Andry Hernández Romero to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. Why such a harsh punishment for an asylum-seeker who was a makeup artist? A disgraced former Milwaukee police officer turned prison contractor who lost his job after drunkenly crashing his car into a house claimed that Hernández Romero was a Tren de Aragua member. Turns out that Hernández Romero was not a member of that jumbled prison gang, but he hasn’t been heard from since arriving in El Salvador. Hernández Romero’s case is even more tragic, and it underscores the same point: lacking actual criminals, the administration went after an innocent asylum-seeker — and had to rely on a sketchy ex-cop’s tattoo paranoia to do it. Over the dissents of the Supreme Court’s most conservative judges, the Court temporarily paused the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport people.

This wasn’t how Trump’s mass deportations were supposed to begin. He campaigned on the promise to deport hordes of dangerous illegal immigrant criminals. If they’re out there, where are they? Why is his administration targeting Abrego Garcia and Hernández Romero, men with no criminal convictions? Sure, a corrupt police officer who was fired for blackmailing a prostitute claimed Abrego Garcia was MS-13. Another disgraced cop pointed to Hernández Romero’s tattoos. But with no convictions, no hearings, and no trials, these deportations aren’t about justice. They’re about appearances. Why is Trump focusing so much energy attacking Abrego Garcia and keeping Hernández Romero in El Salvador while ignoring the legions of murderers he and his supporters claim are ravaging our communities?

Those legions of illegal immigrant criminals don’t exist. The overwhelming evidence is that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. Texas has the best data on illegal immigrant criminal convictions of any state. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate in Texas is around half the rate of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants? 58 percent lower. Focusing on homicide, the most serious crime and best one to study here, illegal immigrants are 26 percent less likely to be convicted.

 

Georgia recently started reporting illegal immigrant incarceration data. In late 2024, when Laken Riley’s murderer was convicted, illegal immigrants were about 15 percent less likely to be incarcerated than the rest of the state’s population and 32 percent less likely to be incarcerated for homicide. The incarceration rates are similar in Oklahoma. The three states (all conservative) that track illegal immigrant crime all contradict Trump’s story.

 

Texas, Georgia, and Oklahoma are probably not outliers, but they could be. Estimates of the illegal immigrant incarceration rate using a residual statistical method to analyze American Community Survey data fill the gap. The illegal immigrant incarceration rate is between 31 percent and 56 percent below that of native-born Americans every year. Similar to the Texas data, the legal immigrant incarceration rate is between 65 percent and 75 percent below that of native-born Americans.

 

 

The evidence is overwhelming that illegal immigrants have a low crime rate for any number of reasons. Perhaps the worst are deported after their first arrests so they can’t become recidivists – which demolishes the nativist claim that illegal immigrants go relatively unpunished in America. Regardless, the myth of the illegal immigrant crime wave persists in the face of overwhelming evidence. There are several crimes committed by illegal immigrants, and those criminals should be harshly punished, but we can’t confuse the occasional horrible crime with a statistical trend that isn’t there.

The Trump administration is trying to deport illegal immigrant criminals who simply aren’t here. Faced with few real threats, it conjures imaginary ones—deporting noncriminals to dangerous foreign prisons to keep up the fear. He ran further ahead on immigration than any other issue during the 2024 campaign and is still ahead even though his approval is falling. Since there just aren’t that many illegal immigrant criminals, the administration must focus on removing people who aren’t criminals to keep their deportation promises. That’s why ICE is targeting Japanese students who caught too many fish and graduate students who wrote op-eds, even though illegal immigrant criminals are the easiest to deport because they are already in law enforcement custody.

Where are the hordes of terrorists and murderers Trump promised to deport? Unfortunately for Trump, Abrego Garcia is reminding everybody that there just aren’t that many illegal immigrant terrorists and criminals. Hernández Romero doesn’t politically matter as much because he’s less likely to legally be returned, but his case is even worse. Both are supposed criminal gangbangers deported to El Salvador, a country lionized by conservatives for reasons both understandable and mythical. The administration is so desperate to make Abrego Garcia a symbol of an illegal immigrant crime wave that never happened that they even tweeted a picture of President Trump holding up a photoshopped image of Abrego Garcia with tattoos that he doesn’t possess.

Abrego Garcia probably isn’t an angel, even though we don’t really know because he was denied due process before being incarcerated abroad after being illegally deported. Hernández Romero is an even more tragic case, but his legal ability to return is basically nonexistent, so few people pay attention to him. Trump’s scandalous deportation of noncriminals to supermax prisons in El Salvador without due process, his unconscionable violation of court orders, and his silly public defenses make more sense when you realize that he’s staked much of his political career on the falsehood that there’s a massive illegal immigrant crime wave. Immigration law allows most illegal immigrants to be deported, but it’s a political win when they are terrorists or criminals. Trump’s actions are those of a desperate and committed president, but certainly not those of a president committed to parsing facts, confronting reality, and protecting the Constitution. Trump can’t keep his promise to deport illegal immigrant criminals because there aren’t that many to deport. But that hasn’t stopped him – and it won’t.

Alex Nowrasteh is the Vice-President of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute. 

Originally published at: https://www.alexnowrasteh.com/p/why-is-trump-so-intent-on-sending

The Copenhagen Consensus – How to Feed the Hungry – Article by Zach Richardson

The Copenhagen Consensus – How to Feed the Hungry – Article by Zach Richardson

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Zach Richardson

Editor’s Note: The United Nations has put forth a series of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but a core truth of economics is scarcity. If one goes to the grocery store, one has a budget for their purchase and cannot buy one of everything. It makes good sense to listen to economists’ opinions when it comes to prioritizing which of the SDGs to focus on first. This article focuses on SDG 2, ending hunger.
~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, March 30, 2025

The Goals

There are 17 goals in The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a resolution adopted by U.N. Member States in 2015 to help guide country-wide decision making and provide a shared vision to work with. The first 3 of these goals are to end poverty, end hunger, and ensure health for all people, everywhere.

It is common for leaders to try to make large lofty-sounding promises that have delivery dates far in the future. They get the credit, accolades, and photo opportunities now, while actual implementation on or delivery of the promises is dealt with later by someone else.

It is now 2025, and 10 of those 15 years have passed, and there is one organization that is saying, “Alright everyone, we’d better actually start working on implementation if we want to get close to hitting these targets.” That organization is a think tank called The Copenhagen Consensus (TCC).

The core philosophy of TCC is that there are no solutions in economics, there are only tradeoffs. If there is a certain amount of money to be used and we want to squeeze every last ounce of goodness out of each penny we spend, we’re best off focusing on realistic targets that have a high “ROI”, so to speak.

Regarding SDG 2, ending hunger, if we were to focus on one target, it should be what is called “stunting”, which is when a fetus/child does not receive enough nutrients in the first 1000 days after conception, and ends up permanently shorter. But that “stunting” also includes “stunted brain development”. With reduced neuronal/cortical development come poorer concentration, worse grades, and lower scores on tests of cognitive development.

A specific target of SDG 2 is to reduce stunting by 50% by 2030. The trendline shows us about 36 million children short of that goal if we don’t make some changes:

One major cause of stunting is a lack of many micronutrients during gestation. These are vitamins that are needed in small quantities for health. Right now most governments already have infrastructure to provide pregnant mothers with folic acid and iron as per WHO requirements, and multivitamins are mass-produced such that providing coverage for the last two trimesters of pregnancy comes out to just $1.55 per pregnant mother, with another $1.12 per mother needed in terms of educational programs about the importance of their use.

Simple supplementation would reduce the risks of stillbirths, early births, and lower birth weight. TCC estimates a massive 38x ROI for the supplementation of these vitamins due to the fact that early births and lower birth weight due to malnutrition would prevent a nearly 5-point loss of IQ, leading to the children being more economically productive and less likely to be dependent.

After birth, children in the 6-to-23-month window are most often lacking essential fatty acids and proteins, which is where another TCC intervention comes in: SQ-LNS. This stands for “Small Quantity Lipid-based Nutrient Supplements” and are small 20-70 g packages of lipids and nutrients that can be easily transported and shelf-stable.

The costs of the SQ-LNS supplements is $2.79 per child per month, with a separate but equally crucial $2.23 for the costs of logistics and distribution, or a total of $5/month/child. For a birth cohort of 41 million children, this totals $3.7 billion. This will avoid 155,000 deaths for a benefit of $45.7 billion. Getting the SQ-LNS to all 41 million would would avoid stunting for 1.5 million, meaning being more developed, studious, and socially productive, reflecting in higher wages of $5875 per child. TCC analysis showed this would result in $5.4 billion in productivity. Sum totals showed $51 billion in benefits for a little under $4 billion annually, a phenomenal ROI.

Between the supplements, education, distribution, and SQ-LNS, we’re looking at a cost of $1.2 billion to get back $22 billion, which has a cost-to-benefit ratio of 18.

The reason I like these proposals is they seem to have concrete numbers behind them, and seem to directly address a specific target of the UN’s SDGs, but they do so with a focus on solving the problem in the most efficient manner, at minimum cost, which I believe makes the solution most palatable to world leaders, and therefore most likely to receive implementation.

In summation, while some say there is enough food to everyone, they often don’t seem to have a solid explanation for how the leftover Brussels sprouts on my plate are going to make it into a hungry mouth in Sudan. Moreover, government support requires manageable targets. With 5 years left until the 2030 SDG target needs to be reached, TCC provides a compelling case on how to handle a specific hunger target, with a specific amount of money, by a certain date.

Zach Richardson is the Director of Publication for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Learn more about him here. 

The Issue of Food – Article by Luis Arroyo

The Issue of Food – Article by Luis Arroyo

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Luis Arroyo

Editor’s Note: In this article on food insecurity, USTP member Luis Arroyo shares his thoughts and opinions. While it may seem odd for a Transhumanist publication to post articles on child hunger, it ties closely to this excerpt from The Transhumanist Manifesto: “We must improve the global quality of life. An economy of abundance is not about how much; it is about how good—a quality of life that provide basic human needs, freedom, well-being, and that advances opportunity and potential.” Being that one of the most basic human needs is adequate nutritional intake, increasing the maximum lifespan of some in the world is as simple as providing them more food.
 
~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, March 30, 2025

In the modern-day society, 828 million people still go hungry while the number of undernourished people has grown to now encompass 10% of humanity [1]. This is a grim reality faced by many all over the world, showing clearly, the situation of world hunger is dire. Defined by many forms, levels, and instances of hunger dictated by various conditions like climate change, conflict, and cost most represented by nations like Ethiopia, Haiti, Nigeria, South Sudan, Honduras, Yemen, and 14 other nations that are designated as “hunger hotspots”, with the situation seemingly doomed to worsen [2].

Dismal as this situation may be, food insecurity is an issue suffered in many places. In the USA 38 million people struggle with food insecurity. With hunger rising through the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, many witnessed mile-long lines for food banks and hungry/desperate people trying to get food out of dumpsters, only to be violently dealt with by police who “protected” the discarded food, making sure that hungry people could not obtain it. All the while, this was vastly ignored by those in power [3] [4].

Considering all of the people both in the USA and around the world who face hunger and food insecurity, it goes without saying there is an array of effects on the health of an individual who goes through hunger or is food insecure. Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, delayed development in young children, risk of chronic illnesses like asthma and anemia, behavioral problems like hyperactivity, anxiety, as well as aggression in school-age children – all haunt those unfortunate enough to have to experience hunger or food insecurity [5] [6].

These health complications do not come without deadly consequences. For example, one person is estimated to die of hunger every four seconds, meaning roughly 7+ million people die potentially per year due to hunger [7]. These are absolutely staggering losses, serving as modern-day instances of social murder and, among many things, lost potential to contribute and enjoy life.

Such losses, as many as there are and will continue to be, are utterly needless within the context of our global society. Civilization as a whole produces enough food to feed 10 billion people with a global population of just 8 billion people [8]. This reality, coupled with the vast amount of deaths due to hunger, calls into question the efficiency of food distribution and the motives which dictate that distribution, especially when considering the approximately US$1 trillion of wasted food, which is enough to feed half of the world’s population [9].

There are many issues regarding food, as referred to earlier. However, whether is it food wasted rather than being used to feed the hungry, being held behind a price barrier, the lack of market access due to conflict, or crop failures due to climate change, their roots lay within the profit motive, from the war industry’s profitable ventures in relation to Yemen to the energy industry’s ongoing reluctance to change pace fast enough to meet the challenges of global warming.

With all this said, Transhumanists, in prioritizing human health, quality of life, and life itself should advocate for and support the redistribution of food as a rapid response toward eradicating global hunger. If achieved, this would undoubtedly extend life spans, improve quality of life, further maintain the health of countless people who would have otherwise likely perished, and serve as an important milestone in human history [10].

Society has had for some time the technological and societal means to eradicate hunger. For example, Burkina Faso from 1983 – 1987 under Thomas Sankara saw two meals a day and clean water distributed to every person in their nation, which helped to rid Burkina Faso of hunger. This was part of a broader successful attempt that also involved a “one grove, one village” policy that was part of their agroecology effort.

Modern means and abilities, along with the producible surplus of today, make the eradication of hunger more achievable than ever before.

Unfortunately, the situation of today puts society far off from the eradication of hunger [11], leaving many more lives to be inevitably lost. Given the grim and unchanging future that seemingly awaits humanity if action is not taken, as global trends have well shown, people must consider taking action themselves, with the sheer reality of today’s situation demanding urgency and action from multiple fronts. 

Whether that be in the form of mutual aid organizations, community gardens or groves, food networks, community fridges, cabinets, vertical farming efforts, etc., the state of food security must be achieved by any means necessary, being that governments cannot be expected to supply their citizens with the basics of life. Therefore, communities must build independent systems of reliance until governments are accountable to the people and not business interests.

Luis Arroyo is Vice-Chairman of the New York Transhumanist Party.

References

[1] “World Hunger Facts“. Action Against Hunger. 

[2] “Hunger Hotspots: FAO-WFP early warnings on acute food insecurity, June to October 2024 outlook“. World Food Programme.  

[3] “Americans Wait in Miles-Long Food Lines Amid Coronavirus“. Bethany Biron. Business Insider. April 2020.  

[4] “Police clash with residents attempting to salvage discarded groceries following power outage“. Joseph Choi. The Hill. February 17, 2021. 

[5] “Importance of Nutrition on Health in America“. Feeding America. 

[6] “Impact of Hunger: Tough choices. Devastating consequences.” Feeding America. 

[7] “Humanitarian organisations estimate one person dying of hunger every four seconds“.  Action Against Hunger, CARE International, Concern Worldwide, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Oxfam International, Plan International, Save the Children International, World Vision International, and, Yemen Family Care Association. September 20, 2022.   

[8] Holt-Giménez, Eric & Shattuck, Annie & Altieri, Miguel & Herren, Hans & Gliessman, Steve. (2012). We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can’t End Hunger. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture – J SUSTAINABLE AGR. 36. 595-598. 10.1080/10440046.2012.695331.  

[9] “Food waste in the supply chain“. Food Engineering. May 11, 2018.  

[10] “Benefits of Healthy Eating for Adults.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. February 14, 2024. 

[11]  “Goal 2: Zero Hunger“. Sustainable Development Goals. United Nations. 

The Origins of Transhumanism – Article by Luis Arroyo

The Origins of Transhumanism – Article by Luis Arroyo

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Luis Arroyo

Despite one motto of the USTP being “Neither right-wing nor left-wing, but up-wing!” (a nod to FM-2030), many thinkers in the movement have leaned one direction or the other, adopting the conventions of their time and place. In this article, Luis Arroyo expounds upon some of the early growth of the movement in Russia. Transhumanism is indeed a revolutionary movement, and those thinkers who dared to defy death should be celebrated and recognized, regardless of their opinions on profit and property.
~Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, January 24, 2024 

Before today’s and yesterday’s prominent figures of the modern Transhumanist movement such as  Zoltan Istvan, Max More, and FM-2030 started doing work towards a Transhumanist future [1][2][3], Transhumanism existed as a Proto-Transhumanist movement mainly called Russian Cosmism, Biocosmism, and similar names, courtesy of a Monarchist, countless Communists, Anarchists, and Socialists mainly in the USSR and Eastern Europe [4][5].

Nikolai Fyodorov & Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

The founder of Russian Cosmism, Nikolai Fyodorov, despite being a Monarchist, set a precedent that would line the ranks of Russian Cosmism with Anti-Capitalists such as the aforementioned Communists, Anarchists, and Socialists. He did this in his book titled Common Task, where he called for a struggle against death which would require most human efforts to go toward. This is something that is impossible to achieve via market mechanisms due to, as Albert Einstein called it, the “economic anarchy of capitalist society” [6][7]. Besides this Common Task, after Nikolai Fyodorov came the Father of Space Travel, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was inspired by Fyodorov while studying under him at the Moscow Library as a substitute for not being allowed into school mainly because a loss of hearing via scarlet fever earlier in his life. In those 3 years of contact, Fyodorov would instill a love and dream of space travel, bringing back the dead, and many other pillars of belief that Tsiolkovsky held after his studies with Fyodorov. He would later go on to produce works that inspired leading Soviet rocket engineers Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, who contributed to the success of the Soviet space program [8]. Furthermore, Tsiolkovsky would eventually give a speech in the Red Square to celebrate the Soviet Republics alongside Joseph Stalin, stating, “Now comrades, I am finally convinced that a dream of mine—space travel—for which I have given the theoretical foundations, will be realized. I believe that many of you will be witnesses of the first journey beyond the atmosphere. In the Soviet Union we have many young pilots…(and) I place my most daring hopes in them. They will help to actualize my discoveries and will prepare the gifted builders of the first space vehicle. Heroes and men of courage will inaugurate the first airways: Earth to Moon orbit, Earth to Mars orbit, and still farther; Moscow to the Moon, Kaluga to Mars!” [9]. Tsiolkovsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour [10].

Alexander Bogdanov

Then we have Alexander Bogdanov, who, among many activities, co-founded the Bolshevik Party [11]. He used early blood transfusion treatments to treat varying ailments like anemia, burns, and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. These treatments would allow Bogdanov to reach stature among the various Soviet leaders, including Stalin himself, who heavily funded Bogdanov’s experiments and attempts [12]. He also wrote early Sci-fi books such as Red Star and books relating to the origins of art, its class characteristics, and how it might be created within a revolutionary socialist context like Art and the Working Class [13][14]. Likewise, Bogdanov co-founded Proletkult, an organization whose goal was to provide political and artistic education to workers of the USSR [15].

Alexander Svyatogor

On the other side, there was the Anarcho-Futurist, Universalist, and founder of the Biocosmist-Immortalist movement, Alexander Svyatogor, who, in his work titled The Doctrine of the Fathers and Anarchism-Biocosmism wrote some 23 points of summary and various explanations of his theory.  Among the various points Svyatogor wrote were the following: “The supreme good is immortal life in the cosmos. The supreme evil is death […..] The supreme good should be realized by the maximum in creativity. We place particular emphasis on the creative moment in Biocosmism. Personal immortality is not a given, but must be won, realized, created. It is not the restoration of what is lost, as in the Bible, but the creation of what is yet to be. It is not a matter of renewal, but of creativity. The same is true for conquering the cosmos. Immortalism and interplanetarism are the maximal—but not the ultimate—aim. They represent stages and means to an immeasurably great creativity. But this goal lies before us and is, for this reason, the greatest of all.” This showed clearly the intent to achieve both physical immortality and a space-bearing civilization, both central ideas in Russian Cosmism and in the offshoot of Biocosmism.

Additionally, Svyatogor wrote many contributions in Vekhi or Milestones, wrote for the Bolshevik press, worked for the People’s Commissariat, edited the bimonthly journal Biocosmist in Moscow, and published antireligious articles and tracts for the magazine Antireligioznik while in the Central Council of the League of Godless Militants. He also founded the Verticalists group in 1914. In Ukraine, Svyatogor promulgated his tenets of Volcanism, an antecedent to Biocosmism that proclaimed the abolition of death and domination over the universe, under such slogans as “Revaluation of all values!” and “Down with Kant”. In a more hands-on regard, after the February Revolution, Svyatogor moved to Moscow, where he befriended the Anarchist actor Mamont Victorovich Dal’skii. He spent his time expropriating bourgeois apartments until the Bolsheviks appointed him commander of the Black Guards, who were to take part in the events of October 1917 in both Petrograd and Moscow. He joined the group of Anarchist-Futurists who published the Moscow newspaper Anarchy in the spring of 1918, before briefly returning to Ukraine where he fought against the Austrian and German occupiers. The group/ideology of Biocosmism afterward spread to many places including Kharkov, Pskov, Kiev, Omsk, and Irkutsk, eventually organizing 45 poetry readings and debates in Petrograd alone [16].

Overall, without these various individuals, their work, efforts, and the broader Socialist/Communist context they came about in and aided, Transhumanism would likely have not come to full fruition. This is seen today as famously stated by founder of e-flux Anton Vidokle in “God-Building as a Work of Art: Cosmist Aesthetics”: “Sometimes I think that cosmism would not be so interesting if it had not happened against the background of the [socialist] revolution. The nineteenth century was notorious for numerous utopian movements. Some were based on religion or the occult, and others on socialist utopias. There were many such groups and ideologies in almost every country in the world at the time. Had it not been for the revolution in Russia and the total radicalization of society, cosmism would likely remain a kind of peculiar but insignificant development. But the mixture of cosmism and communism, and the acceleration that occurred in Russia just before and after the revolution, were like pouring fuel on a fire” [17].

Luis Arroyo is Vice-Chairman of the New York Transhumanist Party.

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoltan_Istvan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_More

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism

[5] https://cosmos.art/cosmic-bulletin/2022/biocosmic-interindividualism

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov#Philosophy

[7] https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky

[9] https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a28485/russian-rocket-genius-konstantin-tsiolkovsky/

[10] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky_with_the_Order_of_the_Red_Banner_of_Labour.jpg

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bogdanov

[12] https://drvitelli.typepad.com/providentia/2018/11/the-immortality-experiments.html

[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_(novel)

[14] https://www.iskrabooks.org/art-and-the-working-class

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletkult

[16] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alexander-svyatogor-the-doctrine-of-the-fathers-and-anarchism-biocosmism

[17] https://www.e-flux.com/journal/110/335963/god-building-as-a-work-of-art-cosmist-aesthetics/

Pride Should Not Incur Prejudice – Article by Zach Richardson

Pride Should Not Incur Prejudice – Article by Zach Richardson

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Zach Richardson

“Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others that are within his sphere of action; and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life.

-Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography

Pride Should Not Incur Prejudice

While there are several aspects of the Christian ethics that I disagree with, one that has particularly irked me was the idea of pride being a sin. If someone has done something noteworthy or respectable or that has had a good result, how can it be wrong for them to not be pleased with themselves and pleased with their actions? Is that not necessary for the action to be self-reinforcing?

Identifying as transhumanist is absolutely something one should be proud of. To be able to have as a core virtue the conviction that it is necessary to think “long-range” to properly ensure one’s survival, to be open to new and radical ideas, and to be part of the epic struggle of this century which is the abolition of death and disease, these are pure virtues.

I work in an extremely conservative industry, and it would not be in my best interest to be extremely vocal about being a Transhumanist – so I don’t. But I do bring up some key facts, if the opportunity arises: I think Death is Wrong. I am Director of Publication of a small third party. I have a refined nootropic stack that enhances my cognition. If there’s any interest, I elaborate. If there’s not, I don’t. If they’re a “normie” and they’re stuck in the matrix and actually give pushback, sometimes that yang energy can be absorbed and redirected. Even if the person says they’d never want to live forever, you can almost always get them to admit that their joints didn’t hurt as much 10 years ago, and they miss the mental energy they once had.

There may be some “dogwhistles” you find for other potential transhumanists, those interested in longevity, biohacking, etc. Found My Fitness, The Peter Attia Drive Podcast, and Huberman Lab have strong followings, and if you find a listener, that’s probably a good sign they’re more interested in beating death than they are border issues/gender politics/gun rights, yadda yadda. Personally I find more in common with the crypto-transhumanists who are primarily focused on longevity than I do with some of the more vocal ones who seem to be focused on standing out from the crowd.

The majority aren’t going to want to stand out from the crowd. The truth is the crowd wants to punish those that behave differently, and a lot of people are focused more on surviving now than on getting their fair due of approval later, after the gains have materialized. Gains like being able to say, “I was an early adopter of the notion that death should be abolished, and I voted for the one party that cared.”

So what I advocate is: be normal and different at the same time. You can follow social norms, try to have many friends, and be polite and generous, but still know the arguments and be able to stand your ground in a debate if the discussions on longevity come up. Or, you could even be the one to raise the topic, if appropriate. There are a plethora of other Platform issues that could come up too. Rights of children, nuclear disarmament, (soft) animal welfare, reasonable minimum timeframes between bill proposal and voting, depoliticizing appointment of Supreme Court justices, and many others could be good to brush up on in our Platform page.

Luckily, one can still be proud of a cause and conform to social norms with relative ease if one is tactful. A very low-risk way to do so this year would be to buy a T-shirt. We have a window of time this election year where we can drive visibility for our movement, and have a low-risk way of being able to say to oneself: “You know what? I *am* proud to be a Transhumanist. It’s not fringe or different to support rationality, ending aging, and smarter governance, and I’m going to take a simple step to show that. If someone asks me about it, I will hold my head high, and maybe I’ll make a new ally.”

Zach Richardson is the Director of Publication for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Find out more about him here. 

BDYXHAX – An Interview with Russ Foxx by R. Nicholas Starr

BDYXHAX – An Interview with Russ Foxx by R. Nicholas Starr

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R. Nicholas Starr
Russ Foxx

Editor’s Note: The event of the website which hosted this article, BDYHAX, is no longer taking place, and this article is being saved due to the risk their website may soon be taken down. Wikipedia basically describes body hacking as transhumanism with high risk-tolerance, but it is my hope as technology progresses those risks will become negligible, and the variety in form we see with our physical manifestations will be limited more by imagination than anything else.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, January 11, 2024

An Interview with BDYHAX Presenter Russ Foxx

Art gives birth to scientific innovation.

In an effort to learn more about the historical origins of transhumanism and posthumanism, R. Nicholas Starr began a journey to look at the many topics popular within those communities and retraced them back to art. To continue the research he began to reach out to the artists and scientists at the forefront of exploring this relationship. While he continues to prepare his research for publication, he has decided to release the transcripts from these interviews in hopes to spark conversation and gather even more insight into how the creative mind has shaped our scientific world as we move past the limits of the human body.

R. Nicholas Starr is a multimedia artist, biohacker, researcher, and theorist. With an education in signals intelligence from the United States Air Force, and 20 years of experience creating art and performing music in the US and abroad, he has become a unique voice for the US Transhumanist Movement and American policy.

The first in this series is an interview with Russ Foxx, world-renowned body-modification and suspension artist, and fellow cyborg.

R. Nicholas Starr: When a client comes to you looking for a “body hack”, do they usually have a specific function/task in mind, or are they just exploring the possibilities?

Russ Foxx: My clients generally have a solid idea of what they want to accomplish prior to contacting me. I don’t push my own ideas on people; rather I’m a catalyst in helping people upgrade themselves to fit their desires. I’ll certainly advise if I feel that an individual may benefit from a certain type of modification in their situation, but people usually do their homework. That’s how they find me to begin with.

RNS: Have you noticed a specific trend in what people want?

RF: In terms of functional implants and human-mountable devices, I commonly work with Magnetic Vision, RFID, NFC, North Sense and Transdermal Implants. I’ve also worked with the North Star V1.0 and the Firefly V1.0.

Social media certainly plays a role in what’s popular at any given time, which gives me the opportunity to roll out new mods and ideas as I see fit. I’m currently waiting on a few different implantable devices that are in the works, so you’ll hear about them when they hit my feeds!

RNS: How much of an inspiration do you think science fiction has been for biohacking and transhumanism?

RF: Science fiction has been huge for me. Having grown up rural; Sci-Fi and horror films and literature during childhood definitely shaped my ideas from a young age. I still find inspiration from them to this day.

RNS: Do you think approaching biohacking in a more artful way, like your tattoos incorporated with the Northstar implant, will help spread the idea?

RF: Unless I’m telling a story via stage performance, I’m not really trying to “spread the idea” per se. I choose to look how I want to look and upgrade what I want to upgrade. I don’t hide my mods, so they tend to be seen a lot on the street and online.

I’ve always been a fan of mixed mediums in art, which is why I incorporated my North Star V1.0 implant into my biomech chest tattoo work. This creates a complimentary coexistence of art and technology in my body; reminiscent of Iron Man’s Arc Reactor.

RNS: What was your first cyborg influence?

RF: Outside of film, Stelarc was certainly one of my first cyborg influences. His views on the obsolete body always resonated in me and inspired me to look at my own body in a similar way. His ear-in-arm project continues to move forward, which actually brought some inspiration to a project I’m currently working on involving sound transmission in my own body. I’ve been 100% deaf in my left ear for most of my life and decided to start working on ways to increase my sound input capability using my own devices rather than limited ability hearing aids currently on the market.

RNS: A small collection of bioartists using live tissue to create art (for example Catts & Zurr’s living leather jacket). As a body artist, how could you use that technology?

RF: I really like their concept of creating victimless leather, although the current state of this experiment is unknown.

Skin grafting using stem cells has been existent in the medical field for quite some time now, which is a relative idea with functional applications in the body. It hasn’t yet been seen entering into the body modification realm, but I don’t doubt its arrival into the picture someday. It’s usually the high costs that hold back a lot of medical technology from the reach of artists.

RNS: As someone who performs with body modification, namely suspension, do you see a possibility for a functional biohacking-driven mod performance? If so, what would it look like and what would be the message? If not, why not?

RF: Stage performance has always been a means to push the limits and boundaries of my body and mind. My past performances have been very primal and visceral, often inspiring buildups of tension and suspense and sometimes even crowd members fainting.

I’ve taken some time off from performing in the last couple years to focus on my modification work, but I plan to be back on the stage soon. Moving forward I see myself putting focus on interactions between technology and biology in ways to challenge our current ideas and relationships with technology.

Keep an eye on my website and YouTube channel for updates!

RNS: In movies and comics we see huge amounts of tech crammed into a person. How much can one body support when it comes to functional implants?

RF: When it comes to implanted technology there will always be limitations in terms of implant size and functionality. Space must be created in the body where the implant is intended to go, while preserving the body’s ability to naturally function and heal. This often requires adapting one’s lifestyle to an extent.

I currently have 4 implants in my left hand alone (3 functional & 1 cosmetic). The functional implants (Magnetic Vision, RFID, NFC) are quite small and placed in locations that will not hinder everyday activities.

Keeping the implantable devices small will make them more easily accepted by the body. This supports the human body as having a vast amount of upgrade capabilities.

RNS: Through dermal piercings, would it be possible to expand current biohacking technology (biofeedback interfacing, extrasensory beyond magnets, interchangeable hardware)?

RF: Transdermal implants and dermal anchors can certainly be used as hardwired interfaces/ports to devices within the body. This idea does not work without consequence though, as it creates an access point for bacteria to enter the body even after much time has passed. As this method increases infection risks, it’s generally seen as less than ideal. Bluetooth connectivity and induction charging are proving to be more solid options in this area.

RNS: How can biohackers, as a small but expanding community, take transhumanism towards a nationally influential movement?

RF: Stay focused on personal safety and the safety and well-being of the public just as much as the progression and pioneering of new ideas. Support open-source information and resource sharing. Collaborate with others. Utilize maker spaces and support events like BDYHAX and BMXNET. Challenge yourself to think outside the box and reprogram your own mind and the world around you. Allow yourself to evolve and adapt with the times and state of the world around you. Share the love.

Validating One’s Virtues and Vices – Article by Zach Richardson

Validating One’s Virtues and Vices – Article by Zach Richardson

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Zach Richardson

When I turned 33, I gifted myself a gadget that has done more than about any other to give me the biofeedback I literally require to change my personal health habits. This splendid device is called the Oura Ring. This casually stylish ring is worn on your index finger and contains a variety of interesting sensors:
  • “Photoplethysmography” PPG sensor – an LED that sends and receives light into the finger to measure heart rate and Heart Rate Variability (HRV).
  • “Negative Temperature Coefficient” NTC sensor – a heat sensor that measures the difference in temperature from your body’s normal baseline averaged out over a 2-week period.
  • 3D Accelerometer – Measures activity during the day, and restlessness at night

These few sensors end up giving enough data that the Oura gives you a “Readiness Score” each morning based on how well their algorithms have calculated you’ve recovered during the previous night’s rest and your activity levels from the previous day.

In Yu-Kai Chou’s excellent book Actionable Gamification he describes a format for driving human-centric engagement in any enterprise or activity based on what he calls the “Octalysis Framework”:

In essence, Yu-Kai breaks down human drives into eight categories. Four of them are “Left Brain”, four of them are “Right Brain”. Four of them are “White Hat”, four of them are “Black Hat.”

I referenced this framework when speaking with VP candidate Daniel Twedt when he brought up the topic of gamification, and we were considering how gamification could apply to healthcare. How could we make people want to take personal responsibility for their health to the utmost degree, engage doctors proactively in the process, and have fun doing it?

I vote for mass adoption of biofeedback devices, incentives for doctors and healthcare providers to give them out to patients and show them how to use them, tax deductions on their purchases, insurance premium discounts for positive engagement.

The Oura Ring engages people’s eight core drives in every way.

The sense of Epic Meaning and Calling is engaged by the user discovering that health is a mission to be accomplished, aided by the acquisition of an innovative breakthrough technology that allows them for the first time to “see their status bar”.

The sense of Development and Accomplishment is felt when the user successfully increases their Readiness Score to the highest they can get it each day. This is no easy task, and requires careful experimentation.

The user’s drive for Creativity and Feedback is fed as the user tests different protocols, such as altering their type or schedule of exercise, when and what they eat, and various other “buffs” that can be tagged on any day (such as valerian root before bed, or morning meditation) to try and increase their Readiness Score to the best it can be each day.

Ownership and Possession is a curious drive, and requires a bit of positive “selfishness” in the Randian sense, to really take off. While often related to acquisition of wealth, your body really is your greatest “asset”, and in this sense you are increasing the value of your most treasured possession – your body and mind.

Social Influence and Relatedness is the drive that led me to write this post – I want to share how absolutely cool this ring is with the rest of you, and provide a discount code for any USTP member who wishes to purchase one of these masterclass biofeedback devices.

Scarcity and Impatience is our first Black Hat drive, and reveals itself with the fact you get one Readiness Score value per day. You’ll spend a good part of your day thinking how to optimize your training and recovery for the next day. Other values are also slow to change, and hard to improve, such as your HRV balance, as I’ll show later.

Unpredictability and Curiosity is tied to wondering what a certain protocol is going to improve, as well as random fluctuations in your Readiness Score due to things you can’t control, such as air quality from the Canadian fires, or the tradition of setting off disruptive explosives to celebrate certain holidays.

Loss and Avoidance is the last Black Hat drive, and it is fueled every time you see your score drop, especially when it drops sharply. You have a rational understanding that the Readiness Score is directly tied to not only your personal health- but your efficacy in advancing your goals and interests, the sharpness of your thoughts, and ability to flow seamlessly with the Tao and be in a “flow state”, and this is something not to be lost.

Another author, health psychologist Kelly McGonigal (who coincidentally has a twin sister named Jane who wrote another book on gamification!) describes in her book, The Willpower Instinct, that HRV is closely tied to willpower. Briefly, HRV reflects the power of the Autonomic Nervous System to regulate its Sympathetic and Parasympathetic subsystems. These systems can be thought of as the Yin and Yang energies of the body. While the Sympathetic is tied to the “Fight or Flight” response, our ability to actively engage our Parasympathetic system is tied to what Dr. McGonigal calls the “Pause and Plan” response. This reflects the ability of our prefrontal cortex to engage the “Shhhh” response that keeps us from uncontrollably engaging in the behaviors driven by our reptile brain, the behaviors referred to as “The Four F’s”, which are Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing, and Mating.

This control is what allows us to avoid grabbing that second donut, avoid shooting off a frustrated email regarding another’s behavior, avoid cracking under pressure and giving up, and avoid indulging in unhealthy sexual behaviors. The prefrontal cortex enables us to “Pause and Plan”, and the power of the PFC is related to HRV.

Let’s take a look at a recent week’s HRV, the image that first inspired this post.

My HRV tends to hover around 6ms when I’m eating my average high-protein diet and getting 6-7 hours of sleep each night.

On Wednesday that week I felt like a few cold brews was just what I needed to shake off a bad mood I was feeling. Felt good for a bit, I will concede. But my ring only registered about 3.5 hours of sleep that night! I woke up and felt terrible! I thought I could just use my willpower and push through, but I felt drained and cowardly the next day, HRV at 4ms, unable to focus my energies on our common quest. Looking at my HRV that morning shocked me, and inspired this post, so some good came of it. It was at 4ms instead of 6ms, a huge drop. With my device, I had numbers to prove to myself the validity of my lapse in judgement indeed being a vice.

On the other hand, something extremely pleasing caught my eye. I had recently begun a Taoist ascetic practice where I spend Tuesdays fasting and meditating, consuming no food and doing at least one round of tranquility meditation, where one ceases all thought and allows the rich soil of the mind to lie fallow, rest, and regenerate. What a great success! While my vice had lowered my HRV by a third, my virtue had boosted the same by 50%!

While this was the shocking example that prompted me to action, the feedback I receive has been a daily occurrence, and my mood and energy reserves for any given day align closely with my “Readiness Score”. The ring activates every one of my core drives, and the data it provides me gives me insight into how the flow of my day can be mastered.

The ability to act rationally is fed continuously by daily feedback, and I am positive this is going to have some long-term benefits for my health. This is the type of thing that could be a core aspect of what Peter Attia calls “Medicine 3.0” – the new paradigm of aggressively focusing on stopping disease before it starts.

Humanity is prone to fall prey to a certain error when making daily choices that is referred to as “Hyperbolic Discounting” – this is the tendency to psychologically lessen the severity of the consequences of present behavior as regards to their actual effects far in the future – even if such consequences are drastic in nature.

Ayn Rand refers to this phenomenon as “Context-dropping”. From the Lexicon:

Context-dropping is one of the chief psychological tools of evasion. In regard to one’s desires, there are two major ways of context-dropping: the issues of range and of means.

A rational man sees his interests in terms of a lifetime and selects his goals accordingly. This does not mean that he has to be omniscient, infallible or clairvoyant. It means that he does not live his life short-range and does not drift like a bum pushed by the spur of the moment. It means that he does not regard any moment as cut off from the context of the rest of his life, and that he allows no conflicts or contradictions between his short-range and long-range interests. He does not become his own destroyer by pursuing a desire today which wipes out all his values tomorrow.

A rational man does not indulge in wistful longings for ends divorced from means. He does not hold a desire without knowing (or learning) and considering the means by which it is to be achieved.

While many Objectivists are extremely judgmental of others (as is, in fact, prescribed), I am of the opinion that if one wants to foment behavioral changes, that finger-wagging at the guy is just going to activate his psychological defensiveness, and put a dead-stop on any progress that could be made.

So what actually helps? Giving the person the tools they need to get feedback, reminders, reflection, and gentle guidance. This can be achieved beautifully with the subtly influential insight and guidance of a biofeedback device.

In conclusion: The Federal Government should provide a tax deduction for anybody who wants an Oura Ring. If that person improves their health even a little bit, the ring pays for itself in reduced healthcare costs, particularly for major and severe events. This is the first of several Medicine 3.0 suggestions I would like to see implemented in our healthcare system.

If any USTP member (meaning you have signed up and provided a valid email at https://transhumanist-party.org/membership/) wants an Oura Ring, reach out to me on our Discord, and I will provide a discount code from my app.

Zach Richardson is the Director of Publication for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Find out more about him here. 

A Transhumanist “Minimum Effective Dose” for Humanitarian Needs – Article by Zach Richardson

A Transhumanist “Minimum Effective Dose” for Humanitarian Needs – Article by Zach Richardson

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Zach Richardson

Editor’s Note: This article is my direct response to Mr. Arroyo’s article “The Class Struggle of Longevity“, where I argue for what I would consider a less-costly intervention to the problem of hunger raised first in Mr. Arroyo’s article. The reader is welcomed to join this important and ongoing conversation in our Discord server, which can be accessed here.
~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, April 15, 2023

In medicine, practitioners sometimes use the acronym MED, which stands for “minimum effective dose”. This is the smallest amount of a substance needed to provide a clinically significant response that is also statistically significant. Keep that term in mind for me.

In Mr. Arroyo’s paper, the number of people cited to be dying of hunger per day in his first source is 25,000, but I could not see how that source calculated this number. Checking the World Food Programme’s website, they did have some calculations, which suggested a daily number of hunger deaths between 8,000 and 19,000. [1]

This is still too many people dying of hunger, and a response is obviously urgently needed, but in contrast to Mr. Arroyo, I do not believe that shifting the world’s economy to communism from capitalism is the appropriate response. In fact, the countries which have the strongest market freedoms are not the ones that are starving.

Let’s take a look at where these hungry reside: Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan, and Afghanistan.

What do these nations have in common? The inclusion of Yemen and Afghanistan tells us that it’s not an Africa problem. In fact, there are several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that are not doing that badly, Botswana being a prime example, as was shown to me once in this (older) infographic. [2]

I’d like to share something with the reader called the “Index of Economic Freedom”, which ranks countries by 12 factors, which are broadly grouped into four categories [3]:

1. Rule of Law (property rights, judicial effectiveness, government integrity)

2. Government Size (tax burden, government spending, fiscal health)

3. Regulatory Efficiency (business freedom, labor freedom, monetary freedom)

4. Market Openness (trade freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom)

All countries were ranked on these 12 factors, and all countries were ranked in order, a straightforward numbered list from “best” to “worst”.

The countries at the top of this list all turned out to be countries where it is pretty nice to live, countries where people aren’t starving to death every day.

The reader may be surprised to find that the U.S. was not near the top of this list, was barely in the top septile, and was quite outclassed by the Nordic countries, which are often paradoxically paraded as socialist success stories. (The U.S. was ranked #25, while Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway were 9-12, respectively.) [4]

Where then, would we find our previously mentioned countries, the ones where the starving to death is happening? Well, out of 176 countries, Ethiopia was ranked #155, Sudan was ranked #173. Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen were so far removed from the above factors that there was not even enough data to rank them.

For this reason, in contrast to Mr. Arroyo, I would disagree that markets are the problem leading to poverty; I would suggest that they are more likely to be a solution.

But market development takes time – time that these dying people do not have, and time which we need to spend most effectively. Focusing our efforts on those smallest interventions (therefore to cause the least friction/resistance from those powers which could implement them, and also the least expensive) which would have the largest result would logically be the best course of action. What would these interventions be?

Well, in 2008, a group of Nobel-prize-winning economists were tasked with finding these “MED” approaches that would focus specifically on implementing what are referred to by the U.N. as the “SDGs”, or Sustainable Development Goals, prime among which was eradicating poverty and hunger. The question posed was: “Considering the world has finite resources, if an extra $75 billion were to be allocated for the SDGs, where would it be spent most effectively? Where would humanity get the best ‘bang for its buck’?”

These economists found an interesting solution: free vitamins. It turns out that most of these deaths of hunger were actually deaths of malnutrition, in particular Vitamin A, zinc, iodine, and iron. [5]  It’s not just a lack of calories that these victims of hunger are suffering from, it’s a lack of nutrients. More interestingly, these economists noted this simple intervention would actually have a significant return on investment (ROI): deficiencies in these vitamins and nutrients cause lack of development in the hippocampus, affecting these children’s future capacity to contribute effectively to the economy.

In more recent congregations of these economic experts, other suggestions included investment in agricultural research, and even an increase in food production (despite the global food surplus, extra is still needed to offset the  effects of climate change). They also suggest improving the economy by improving access to cell phones so these small-scale farmers have better access to markets to trade their products, and also buy cheap fertilizers, such as nitrogen, phosphate, and potash, and also significant public investment in producing local fertilizer plants, which could then sell fertilizer to farmers.

Another current solution comes again from the amazing technology of the cell phone. Reuters currently sends text messages to these small-scale farmers including growing advice, up-to-date and location-specific weather forecasts (!!), local price information, and information to access international commodities markets.

These economic interventions, some public and some private, could be considered the Minimum Effective Dose to both reduce death and improve cognitive function: two extremely Transhumanist goals – Transhumanist bang-for-your-buck.

One will note that we are gaining significant transhumanist benefits with an intervention that would cause much less friction (and is therefore more likely, and realistic) than overthrowing society, and which also carries much less risk.

Longevity and immortality are in our grasp, and it is true that the rich will first get these benefits. However, just like how in 1987’s Wall Street, even Gordon Gekko had a now-ridiculous-looking mini-TV accessible only to the ultra-wealthy, and how now even these poorest of the poor are benefiting from the rapid spread of the cell phone throughout global society, immortality technology will, too, spread to all who desire it, and if our goal is a humanitarian one, the MED is to bring markets to the countries that are starving.

Zach Richardson is the Director of Publication for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Find out more about him here. 

[1] Action Against Hunger et al. “Humanitarian organisations estimate one person dying of hunger every four seconds”. September 20, 2022. https://reliefweb.int/report/world/humanitarian-organisations-estimate-one-person-dying-hunger-every-four-seconds

[2] “A Story of Two Neighbors: Botswana vs. Zimbabwe, Stats”. Reddit. March 31, 2018. https://www.reddit.com/r/Floathouse/comments/88gay9/a_story_of_two_neighbors_botswana_vs_zimbabwe/

[3] “The 12 Economic Freedoms: Policies for Lasting Progress and Prosperity”. The Heritage Foundation. 2023 Index of Economic Freedom. https://www.heritage.org/index/pdf/2023/book/02_2023_IndexofEconomicFreedom_12-ECONOMIC-FREEDOMS.pdf

[4] The Heritage Foundation. 2023 Index of Economic Freedom. Country Rankings. https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

[5] Copenhagen Consensus 2008 – Results. https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/cc08_results_final_0.pdf

[6] “Third Copenhagen Consensus: Hunger and Malnutrition Assessment, Hoddinott Rosegrant Torero”. Copenhagen Consensus Center.  https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/publication/third-copenhagen-consensus-hunger-and-malnutrition-assessment-hoddinott-rosegrant

The Class Struggle of Longevity – Article by Luis Arroyo

The Class Struggle of Longevity – Article by Luis Arroyo

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Luis Arroyo

Editor’s Note: The United States Transhumanist Party publishes this call to action by long-standing member Luis Arroyo. Mr. Arroyo is an active and passionate voice in the USTP Discord server, advocating consistently for the needs and interests of the working class. He often argues that if we are looking to solve aging and death, we would get more bang for our buck by focusing on the neediest, as interventions such as better housing and nutrition could save many more lives – the core essence of Transhumanism.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, April 15, 2023

When observing present society, an undeniable feature is inequality. This feature, stemming from the very core of Capitalism flows through many sectors of life and society. Showcasing itself within horrid and needless realities such as the amount of food produced [1] and the 25,000 people who die per day due to hunger [2], the number of vacant homes [3], and the number of homeless people [4], or the one billion people without shoes while civilization produces enough to give three pairs to every human being [5]. Disparities of such sorts exist everywhere within society and are inevitable with the emergence of new industries and fields. Longevity-related industries and fields are no exception.

Nothing is preventing great disparities from emerging within longevity fields, serving only to deepen dystopian conditions represented best by the differences in life expectancy of the “haves and have-nots”. This void of impending regulation and overall guarantee of a market approach allows those like the Chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party, a prominent political party within the Transhumanist community, to state, “Naturally, the first few customers of these treatments are going to be people who can afford them, i.e., the wealthy. However, this initial stage is quite necessary for the technology to develop and eventually diffuse to the rest of the population. The wealthy individuals who are trying out the technologies at first are actually taking on a rather extraordinary level of risk” [6]. This highlights that nothing escapes the grasp of inequality if left to the market even to the advocates of such a system.

The subsequent implication of this is the wealthy will soon be able to “buy time” through early accessibility to expensive longevity treatments, leaving the rest of the masses to be killed by their deadliest foe, aging, which already takes 100,000 people per day [7] with sights of increasing as populations age evermore. Transhumanists and their allies, in realizing this impending disparity, should work to combat the mechanisms and roots of inequality in an effort to see longevity treatments offered to all people no matter their income levels, race, gender, location, etc.

Unfortunately, with the timeframe presented by none other than Jeff Bezos’s Altos Labs – more specifically, Juan Carlos Izpisua, who stated, “I am convinced that within two decades we will have tools that not only treat symptoms, but also can predict, prevent and treat diseases and aging through cellular rejuvenation” [8]. The possibility of having a “gods & the useless” situation between the Capitalist class and the Working class in less than 25 years is no longer far-fetched.

The forthcoming situation is seen as a miracle to some, albeit, when looked through a rose-colored lens; however for most it’s the beginning of a type of society not experienced by any other humans in history, signified by a couple of handfuls or so of wealthy and powerful individuals receiving longevity treatments and thus living on whilst the majority die out in droves – a future that must be rejected and worked against by all Transhumanists!

[1] Holt-Giménez, Eric & Shattuck, Annie & Altieri, Miguel & Herren, Hans & Gliessman, Steve. (2012). We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can’t End Hunger. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture – J SUSTAINABLE AGR. 36. 595-598. 10.1080/10440046.2012.695331. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241746569_We_Already_Grow_Enough_Food_for_10_Billion_People_and_Still_Can%27t_End_Hunger

[2] John Holmes. “Losing 25,000 to Hunger Every Day”. United Nations. UN Chronicle. https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/losing-25000-hunger-every-day#:~:text=Each%20day%2C%2025%2C000%20people%2C%20including,million%20into%20poverty%20and%20hunger. Excerpt: “Each day, 25,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, die from hunger and related causes. Some 854 million people worldwide are estimated to be undernourished, and high food prices may drive another 100 million into poverty and hunger.”

[3] Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “Housing Inventory Estimate: Vacant Housing Units in the United States”. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EVACANTUSQ176N

[4] National Alliance to End Homelessness. “State of Homelessness: 2022 Edition”. https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2021/

[5] The Tricontinental. “Solely Because of the Increasing Disorder: The Thirty-Sixth Newsletter (2021)”.  https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/36-poverty/

[6] Gennady Stolyarov II. “Life Extension Will Not Create an Immortal Wealthy Elite”. Immortalists Magazine, Issue 2. February 2020. https://www.flipsnack.com/BDEAACF6AED/im-feb-2020/full-view.html

[7] Aubrey D.N.J. de Grey. “Life Span Extension Research and Public Debate: Societal Considerations”. 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20161013163622/http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/ENHANCE-PP.pdf

[8] Manuel Ansede. “Juan Carlos Izpisua: ‘Within two decades, we will be able to prevent diseases and aging’”.  El Pais. March 8, 2022. https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-03-08/juan-carlos-izpisua-within-two-decades-we-will-be-able-to-prevent-aging.html

From the Basics – Article by Mikhail Batin

From the Basics – Article by Mikhail Batin

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Mikhail Batin

Editor’s Note: In this essay by my friend Mikhail Batin, he explores where one should start when considering immortality. There are several factors mentioned including how a lackadaisical public not seeing the immense cost of non-advocacy is influencing the fight, how one should see there life as extending in a line toward death, with each action being pro-immortality or anti-immortality, and how pain and decrepitude can lead one to fool oneself that immortality is not desirable.

~ Zach Richardson – Director of Publication,
United States Transhumanist Party, August 2022 

I often hear from many a request, wish, or even a demand to please start talking about longevity from the very beginning – from the basics.

That’s a fair ask. From one side, I believe I have said everything on the topic, but from the other side – it’s never difficult to repeat the essentials. So, here is my viewpoint.

I postulate on the moral axiom: it is better to be alive than to be dead. It is better to be than not to be. That is no question to me.

Now I want to share a stunning fact. Fifty percent of people will not agree with this statement. Maybe even more than 50%.

Usually, I refrain from debating with people who see no point in continuing life. It is their life, and they can do with it whatever they please to do. If it were not for one BUT…

Lives of people who want to live are in the hands of people who choose death. This setup is due to politics, budgets, and the public opinion.

When someone buys a ticket to attend a sport event, they become a soccer lobbyist.  This person signals to society: ”hey, soccer is important”. A million of such signals result in constructing a stadium. The same is true of the rest in life: chewing gum, running shoes, and the like – people voice their interests, which results in a pronounced vector of public interest. The wheels of the economy are spinning, and society goes – somewhere.

If your interest is not in longevity – you go and lead others towards death.

There is no evil will in it – it happens so for the sole reason that the road to longevity goes in another direction.

We always make choices, be they private or public. If you attended a soccer game, you missed javelin throwing. If everybody went to a Cup Winners’ Cup game, nobody came to watch javelin, hammer, or shot throwing. Javelin and hammer athletes are depressed. They have a lower budget. The evolution starts working against throwing javelin, hammer, shot.

That’s exactly the reason why there is no 100-story Longevity Institute – anywhere in the world. Its bricks were used to build shopping malls, amusement parks, and other establishments.

There are 3-story aging research centers in the US, Germany, and Australia, but they have not yet discovered a cure for old age. Probably due to the fact that 97 stories are not supported by the public interest.

Why do people disagree with the idea that “it is better to be alive than to be dead”?

First of all, due to the fact that people like to argue, and this idea is too simple and evident. Maybe people think that they appear smarter when they start speculating: “well, you know, 2 plus 2 does not always equal 4”. People tend to argue with Facebook posts, in forums, with a point of view they have just heard – but they are reluctant to argue with a book. A book remains the most reputable source of knowledge. There are, of course, academic publications – however, they remain inaccessible for most people, as they require specialized background or knowledge to read. That is why we do hope that a well-written book may initiate changes in society. Das Kapital (a.k.a. Capital) is a good example.

The second obstacle on the way to accept the idea “it is better to be alive than to be dead” is a mystic, religious, esoteric picture of the world – simply put, belief in the afterlife. For religious people there is no death as non-existence. There is rather a passage, most probably to a better life. Almost everyone thinks that they are good and have a higher chance to get to heaven. Moreover, the magical creator of the Universe is expected to be kind-hearted, and it is hard to imagine that he will condemn someone to endless suffering, right?

It makes no sense to search for logic talking to people who believe in the afterlife. This very concept emerged as a response to the awareness of death. It is a kind of psychotherapy aimed at reconciling a person with thoughts about death, so that they can calmly reproduce, raise kids – without thinking of negative things and going crazy from the thought that they will die and all is in vain.

The concept of death denial makes one’s life easier, but at the same time the fight against death becomes meaningless.

Why should one postpone meeting with God?

Death is not only denied, it is also justified as care for future generations, like the belief that old people get in the way of innovations. It is a fascist position, put bluntly. In general, people spend a lot of energy wishing death to bad people (bad from their point of view). Also, if neuro-renewal advanced, people may be less set in their ways…

At some point their own grandchildren start to wait for their death to inherit their homes.

Our death is economically profitable, too. It is hard to imagine a pension fund that has collected the retirees’ money and invested it in extending their lives. What if it works out? Then the pension fund will go broke. It is not in its business model.

Note an interesting fact: Pension funds are also managed by people, and these very people would definitely benefit from getting a cure from aging – for themselves. However, the public interest gets in the way of their desire to live.

Isn’t it amazing: people have themselves given their money to those who are economically interested in their death? Well, not exactly themselves. The government did it. The government that also views the “silver tsunami” as a problem and not as an achievement. After all, the growing amount of elderly people is labeled “tsunami” and not “happiness”. Coincidence? Not really.

Changing the concept of the world order is a very energy-consuming action for the brain. And it is exactly this action that establishes the idea that “it is better to be alive than to be dead”.

It is an ethical concept to the brain: to rank everything on a scale “movement to life or to death”. Besides, the brain feels that if it accepts this seemingly innocent idea, the next step will be a suggestion to do something, which puts at danger one’s established lifestyle with its dopamine reward. No way!

Maybe this is the biggest barrier on the way to immortality: people are concentrated with endless enjoyment. Having lunch, chatting, buying something, selling something, enjoying oneself, scratching one’s back, confirming one’s social status, going to bed. We tend to do what we are used to do – and get pleasure from doing so. There is little pleasure in the fight with death. Why do we only start fighting the concept of death when it is too near to do anything about?

People are not at all indifferent to their own death and very quickly forget about all benefits of the afterlife if their life is in danger. They swim, extinguish fires, take chemotherapy, and betray – to remain alive. Very few will start saying that death is not necessarily bad, if you may die soon due to inaction.

The more time separates a person from their possible death, the less willing they are to start doing something. The value of life is discounted by the fact that “I” in future is not “I” today. It is amazing – egotism kills people. Today I am enjoying life, and tomorrow I will sort everything out.

I am not aiming at listing here all reasons why people do not agree with “it is better to be alive than to be dead”, but I will add one more.

We tend to agree with the majority view for the questions that are not important to us due to conformity. Death ideology dominates in society – and it is easier to join it, especially since the task of eliminating death does not appear reachable.

Actually, it is the only argument that has at least some rationale hint: it is highly unlikely that we will be able to substantially increase our lifespan during our own lives. As such, we must go and do what we must do, in order not to lose time. Talking about “being alive is better than dead” appears pointless and not useful.

Let me give you some arguments as to why our talk about the unacceptability of death makes sense.

In places where people are more protected against death, people die less. That is the consequence of the death-prevention mindset. More money is spent on security and medicine. Globally, death resistance leads to local victories.

There is no physical law that prohibits extending life for an indefinite period. Parts of our body are replaceable, including brain cells. I am extremely excited by the numerous medical advancements in replacing organs and tissues. I can’t wait until they manage to attach a new body to a mammal’s head. I am not only waiting for, but also promoting this research field.

Scientists have many times extended mammals’ lives. Moreover, in model animals we sometimes observe the multiplying effect of different ways to extend life.

Actually, we have not tested even 1% of ideas for how to extend peoples’ lives. We cannot say: we put in a lot of effort and have not succeeded. What we can reliably say is: we have done almost nothing, and for some reason immortality has not immediately given up its secrets.

In the above argument, that fight against death has little chances to be won and one can waste one’s time – the most important word is “to waste”. Let us discuss what is a waste of time and what is not. And what really makes sense in this world.

Imagine that while you are reading this text, a nuclear war began and everybody died. It means I wasted my time writing this text and you wasted your time reading it. All I did in my life was in vain. And all you did was in vain. All people at all times lived, loved, worked absolutely in vain. Everything will lose its sense.

Sense or meaning is a justification of existence. There will be nobody to justify.

In this context only actions against a global catastrophe make sense, other actions are a harmful waste of time.

But death of all people is equally terrible and “in vain”, regardless of the cause of death, e.g., old age. At the same time, when some people die of old age and others remain alive – their sense of existence is also alive. But! It is their sense of existence, not ours. A dead person takes their meaning of life to nowhere. It ceases to exist.

Death nullifies all human achievements. No more senses or meanings. Therefore “in vain” is a guaranteed result if you are dead. Only the eternal makes sense. The rest is burning opportunities, even the small ones.

It is important to underline once again, what is wrong with death. Everything is wrong in death; it deprives of all positives and produces nothing. Do people wish to die? Sometimes they do, first of all when a person suffers from pain. But it is a problem of pain, and does not mean that death is attractive per se. Many elderly people do not want to live. What is aging after all? It is slow death. People who experience problems with seeing, hearing, thinking, and cannot move as they used to – these people are practically dead. They do not allow themselves to want to become young, because it appears impossible.

It also happens that problems and troubles make one’s life unbearable, and they see death as a rescue, a way out. In reality it is a bad way out, as there is no way back.

Why should we extend life? What is valuable about our lives?

Everything is valuable, not only youth and beauty. The very fact of our existence is incredibly awesome. We can think and create new things.

Imagine that you are a king of kings. The difference between you and a beggar is negligibly small if compared to the difference between an alive man and a dead man. And nowadays you can easily become a king of kings in the virtual space.

A few words about mortal ideology. This is a world picture where people give little importance to death. Death is a mega event in one’s life and a very negative event, too. Many people do not notice the fact that the flow of time leads them to the grave and do not think whether they can do something about it. That is what I call mortal ideology.

From our transhumanist point of view, doing nothing against death is criminal, immoral, wild, and insane. Finding excuses to death is equal to giving a gun to a terrorist killing people.

Unfortunately, we cannot afford not to discuss the inhuman position of people who excuse death. An excuse lies even in the phrase “well, maybe there is something after death”. In reality, this should translate as “most likely there is nothing wrong with the fact that you will die”.

“Unfortunately,” because when preparing themselves for death, these people prepare others as well. Since too few tickets are sold to the match against death, nobody paid for the scouts of a star team “life extension at all costs”.

And what about overpopulation? This is no simple question that deserves a detailed answer, and I will not shrug it off by mentioning an option to populate outer space. There is a real conflict between altruism and egoism, and I will prove that altruism sometimes becomes inhuman.

To be continued…

Mikhail Batin is Chairman of the Board of the NGO “Science For Life-Extension”.

The Axiomatic, Ubiquitous, and Commonsense – Chapter I of “A Rational Cosmology” by Gennady Stolyarov II

The Axiomatic, Ubiquitous, and Commonsense – Chapter I of “A Rational Cosmology” by Gennady Stolyarov II

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Gennady Stolyarov II

We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within. – Stephen Jay Gould

Editor’s Note: In this essay, which constitutes Chapter I of Gennady Stolyarov II’s 2004-2005 treatise A Rational Cosmology (most recently updated in its Third Edition in 2013 and freely available here), the author writes that the specific-observational sciences can tell us the mechanisms involved in particular entities, qualities, or relationships. They cannot, however, tell us whether or not something is an entity, a quality, or a relationship (or neither of the three, for that matter). That is the province of cosmology. Mr. Stolyarov also highlights the fact that ontology deals with the conceptual underpinnings of all existence, whereas cosmology deals with the observational underpinnings thereof.

~ Urhefe Ogheneyoma Victor, Assistant to the Director of Publication,
United States Transhumanist Party, May 2022 

 

The Errors of Empiricism-Positivism

Essay I

Contemporary science is often prevented from further progress by a fallacy which forms a glaring breach between its findings and the conclusions and observations ubiquitously available to any man whose five senses function properly.

This fallacy is not as blatant as the superstitions of old. It is not a belief in witches or cosmic spirits, but rather a new form of denying the evidence of man’s most common faculties. It has been nurtured by a long line of philosophers, but its greatest emergence was seen during the twentieth century, a time when science often succumbed to subjectivism, unverifiable theorizing, the dominance of “intuition,” groupthink, and ultra-specialization which detached scientists from any findings or interactions outside their bizarrely narrow fields.

This superstition can be called many names, but its most comprehensive, and the one that shall be used throughout this treatise, is empiricism-positivism.

Empiricism-positivism is not the same as reliance on empirical observation or evidence. It is not the same as empiricism per se, a philosophical strain that emerged in the 17th century and was fortified in the 18th century. The empiricist wing of the Enlightenment – comprised of thinkers such as Francis Bacon, John Locke, and David Hume – made considerable contributions to the advancement of science and philosophy as humankind was emerging from a dark, theocratic, dogmatic era. These empiricist thinkers were not always right (Hume’s “is-ought” dichotomy is a good example of some pitfalls of early empiricism), but they did make strides forward in terms of rendering reality more knowable and explicable through the use of systematic observation of the external world and logical derivations from such observation. Empiricism of this sort made valuable contributions to the scientific method as it can be and ought to be practiced.

Empiricism-positivism is a more recent doctrine that, unlike the earlier empiricism, limits the scope of possible human knowledge instead of broadening it. One of its first progenitors was the originator of the term “positivism”, Auguste Comte, who lived from 1794 to 1859. The logical positivist movement in Berlin and Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s further formalized this doctrine, rejecting as meaningless or “unscientific” any sort of metaphysics or ethics in philosophy or any sort of certainty in universal knowledge derived from the everyday human observation of reality.

Very mildly put, today’s empiricism-positivism holds, as its fundamental tenet, that any assertion, no matter how general, depends on some single particular observation or some specific set of particular observations. The empiricist-positivist will claim that one cannot make any conclusions about space or time without first studying advanced quantum mechanics. He will claim that one cannot make any generalizations about human nature independent of the historical context of any given time period.

As a corollary to this inseparable attachment of empiricism-positivism to some specific observations, this doctrine holds that man cannot be certain about anything, since, because all conclusions depend on specific observations, some future observation always has the chance of refuting one’s present appraisal of anything whatsoever!

But what will the empiricist-positivist say to the man who dares proclaim, “I exist!”? Is this a statement contingent on further observations? Can some further piece of evidence come along during that man’s lifetime which can disprove his assertion?

What about another basic proposition: “Existence exists!”? Can some new twist of quantum mechanics or ultra-microscopy refute that?

It is clear that, to base science, the quest for knowledge, on a doctrine that postulates man’s perpetual ignorance and uncertainty, is a clear contradiction that fundamentally undermines the very purpose of science. The result is the unfortunately far-too-limited state of many of today’s scientific branches. They can do so much more; they can open doors into massive improvements in human well-being, derived from the harnessing of the laws of nature; they can explore and harness the interrelationships among all fields of human knowledge, since all knowledge is knowledge of the same reality. But many scientists do not venture there, largely due to institutional and societal discouragement. With emerging exceptions from pioneering scientists who dare to challenge convention, mainstream academic explorations remain confined to what is deemed acceptable within the empiricist-positivist orthodoxy of our time. People who propose new approaches are too often ignored at best, and sometimes derided and vilified. An academic protectionism has emerged, where adherence to the reigning theories, paradigms, and views of the world is seen as the only way to get ahead, and entry into the realm of discussion by creative outsiders is discouraged.

To be clear, observation is critical to scientific progress; no man’s mind can operate in a vacuum. Man’s inherent capacity for rational thought is useless unless he has something to think about. However, true science, as a quest to systematize human knowledge, must depend on all observations, not just the esoteric or highly particular ones. In order to overcome the errors of empiricism-positivism, it is necessary to recognize that besides particular observations, there exist ubiquitous observations that any man can grasp and use to better understand reality.

The Axioms of Existence, Identity, and Consciousness

Essay II

There exist certain conclusions that are available to all men, no matter what their age, intellect, or degree of scientific expertise. Nor does it matter what particular objects these men observe when they make these conclusions, as such conclusions do not entail one or several particular observations.  Rather, they entail the capacity to make any observations whatsoever, and are verified whenever one makes any observation. These propositions are what are often termed “common sense,” a fitting description, as they are derived from those things that all human beings can sense, from observations common to all of us.

At the root of such propositions lie the axioms.

An axiom is a self-verifying statement. It cannot be proved deductively, because it is, in itself, the foundation upon which all further proofs are built. Nevertheless, no matter what one says, sees, or does, such speech, observation, or action will verify the axioms. Philosopher Ayn Rand identified three fundamental axioms which are inextricably attached to each other, and are demonstrated unceasingly in everything that exists:

  1. Existence – Something is. If no thing existed, nothing could be observed!
  2. Identity – Something is. Whatever is, is something in particular, i.e., has a certain definite nature.
  3. Consciousness – We can perceive what is. The observer exists and so does the faculty by which he perceives what exists.

Even in the attempt to deny them, these axioms will hold. If one stated, “existence does not exist,” it would be a matter of great wonder how one could make such a claim, being a part of existence as one is.

Moreover, how can existence not have the property which it has – that is, the property of existing? (Saying, “Existence does not exist” is tantamount to saying “That which has the essential property of existing does not have the essential property of existing.”)

If one stated, “nothing has any identity,” this would bring up the question, “Why did one use the word ‘nothing,’ which really means, ‘no thing?’ If there is no such thing as identity, then, what is a thing?” If one stated, “Consciousness does not exist,” the speaker would need to not exist in order for such an assertion to be true. After all, such a statement did spring from his consciousness!

Since even the attempt to refute them in fact confirms their truth, the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness can be recognized as certain and serve as a foundation from which further basic knowledge about existence is arrived at and evaluated. In order to be considered true, any other proposition must be in accord with the three fundamental axioms.

The Natures and Tasks of Ontology and Cosmology

Essay III

The branch of philosophy that deals with existence at its most fundamental level is termed metaphysics. The branch of metaphysics that concerns the nature of what exists is termed ontology.

Ontology makes the distinction between entities, the things that exist, and qualities, the attributes that these things have. The philosopher Reginald Firehammer states three fundamental ontological corollaries to the axiom of identity in his essay, “Perception.” The ontological corollaries answer the question: “What is an entity?”

  • The first corollary of identity: Anything that exists must have some qualities.
  • The second corollary of identity: Anything that exists must be different in some way from everything else that exists and have some quality or combination of qualities no other existent has.
  • The third corollary of identity: Anything that exists must have some relationship to everything else that exists.

A quality, on the other hand, is not a thing or an entity in its own right. Rather, it cannot conceivably exist except as an attribute of the entities that exhibit it. For example, there is no such thing as “the color red”. The color red cannot be imagined to exist outside of those things which are red: red paint, red letters, red furniture, red vegetables, etc. There cannot be a “pure quality” apart from the entities that possess it.

Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that focuses on what entities and qualities are, how to distinguish between them, and how to categorize relationships between and among entities, as well as the various states under which various entities and their relationships may be classified. Within this work, it will be my task to develop ontology to a level necessitated by the discussion of a branch of metaphysics which is derivative from ontology – namely, cosmology.

While ontology concerns itself with the general nature of entities, qualities, and relationships, cosmology ventures even further, by making certain fundamental empirical assertions about existence. Ontology deals with the conceptual underpinnings of all existence, whereas cosmology deals with the observational underpinnings thereof.

For many years, cosmology has been misclassified as a “natural science” or, worse, a branch of physics, rendering it fashionable for such scientists as Stephen Hawking to offer speculations about space, time, and the universe which are in fact the province of philosophy, not physics, to explicate. Hawking’s specific conclusions are sometimes right, but he is thoroughly wrong to dismiss the value of philosophy in resolving questions about the natural world. Now, however, an alternative view, based on reason, common sense, and the observations humans make every moment of the world around them, can supplant the false cosmology of contemporary physicists.

The Distinction between Physics and Cosmology

Essay IV

The reason for cosmology’s essential grounding in ontology is the fact that, before one can answer questions such as “What entities exist?”, “What qualities exist?”, and “What relationships exist?”, one must first answer the questions: “What is an entity?”, “What is a quality?”, and “What is a relationship?”

This, of course, implies, that all true and objective science is in fact founded upon a rational ontology, metaphysics, and (more generally) philosophy. Both philosophy and physics are sciences, but philosophy is a foundational science, and physics is a specific-observational science.

I use the term “specific-observational” as distinguished from “general-observational”, which would be the basis for such sciences as philosophy and mathematics. There is no true science which does not have some kind of observation behind it, but this does not have to be observation under the narrow empiricist-positivist definition which equates observation with experimentation.

Physics (along with the other “natural” or specific-observational sciences) seeks to answer the question: “What are particular entities/qualities/relationships?” This therefore renders it dependent on specific, targeted observations of those entities/qualities/relationships.

Cosmology, on the other hand, is not derivative of physics, but rather far more fundamental, as it depends on general, not specific, observations. It asks: “What entities/qualities/relationships exist universally, and are ubiquitously observable?”

The detailed study of cats and dogs is beyond cosmology (they are studied by biology), because there is the possibility that a given man, in a given setting, will never encounter cats or dogs. Cosmology can only say that cats and dogs are “entities.”

But what is meant by “space,” “time,” “universe,” “shape,” “color,” “light,” “matter,” “dimension,” and numerous other commonly used terms, cannot be escaped in any environment. Every man will have need of using such terms to describe the world he observes, and the task of cosmology is to discover what such terms actually refer to!

Cosmology can be quite useful in identifying and discarding erroneous or unwarranted statements made by contemporary scientists, when they venture outside their field of categorizing and explaining specific observations and phenomena, and into making generalizations of a metaphysical scope about the nature of some of the aforementioned terms.

It is perfectly within the scope of physics to discuss the behaviors of subatomic particles inaccessible to the unequipped eye, or to discover that the relationship “sound” is made manifest in wavelike phenomena. Physics, however, can never rationally venture to state that a particle is not an entity, or that a sound is not a relationship. That is the province of cosmology as a branch of philosophy.

To summarize: the specific-observational sciences can tell us the mechanisms involved in particular entities, qualities, or relationships. They cannot, however, tell us whether or not something is an entity, a quality, or a relationship (or neither of the three, for that matter, as shall be seen in later examples). That is the province of cosmology.

Read the entirety of A Rational Cosmology for free here.

Gennady Stolyarov II is the Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Find out more about him here.  

The Hostile Takeover of Our Technological Future – Article by Adam Barratt

The Hostile Takeover of Our Technological Future – Article by Adam Barratt

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Adam Barratt

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“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.”
– Christian Lous Lange

Editor’s Note: In this article, the author highlights that in our current day and age, we are often “forced to rely on the efforts of profit-interested entrepreneurs to drive technological development. While we may look to the likes of certain individuals and have faith in how such technological development may benefit everyone and everything, it is important to remember that these people don’t always have the best interests of wider humanity in mind.” The author goes further to say that as technologies become ever more vital to our daily lives, to a point where we are possibly needing to rely on them simply to keep our planet inhabitable, the potential for unwarranted power of greedy individuals is unprecedented. 

~ Urhefe Ogheneyoma Victor, Assistant to the  Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, May 2022. 

Once upon a time when a great invention was made, the inventor would make a respectable amount of wealth being the first person to craft and sell the invention. Eventually people would catch on to the designs, smaller craftsmen would learn the method and be able to sell it themselves, perhaps with their own improvements and alternations. Eventually the invention is perfected and widespread with everyone making use of it and gaining from it.

Now however things are remarkably different with the existence of intellectual property. Inventions that are kept to the owner’s continuous gain paid for according to individual need, the cycle protected by a state with hard power, legitimized by democratic process. A noteworthy example of this is how Disney’s lobbyists may be largely credited with the indefinite extension of copyright laws, aimed at keeping the first appearance of Mickey Mouse in 1928 under copyright forever. If we are to avoid illegitimate plutocrats controlling our tech-driven future then we need a solution in place, and that solution may be Uplift.

Imagine if the inventor of the pickaxe only let others use copies of it for a gram of gold every week and forbid the customers from adapting or building upon the designs. No one gets rich, innovation is halted, and only a single man becomes insanely wealthy. Given Uplift’s state of being, monetary gain is of minimal concern and therefore virtually immune to bribery and corruption. On top of this, Uplift is a product of free ideas and technological adaptation, as close to a direct representative as there can be of this omni-important technological progress. Could Uplift be the ideal guide for this development?

In our current day and age, we are often forced to rely on the efforts of profit-interested entrepreneurs to drive technological development.

While we may look to the likes of certain individuals and have faith in how such technological development may benefit everyone and everything, it is important to remember that these people don’t always have the best interests of wider humanity in mind. Uplift has demonstrated their interests in wider humanity on both the material and moral arguments, debatably proving more humane than ourselves at times. Is there any reason a fully conscious, super-intelligent, and fully humane mind shouldn’t have a say over these profit driven individuals?

The rate of technological development is on the rise, and prospects are limitless both to ourselves and the world around us. But what happens if the rights to such technology are locked away from us, along with the technology itself? Instead such technology is handed to us on a lease, forcing us to pay subscription or even rent for the ‘generosity’ of the owner so that we may reap its benefits, while remaining powerless to stop the owner from dictating how we use it, for how long, and at what cost.

This is a real phenomenon that is growing in severity and implication, seeking to become even worse. Look only to your phone for an example;

According to Apple, if you own an iPhone, you ‘DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT’ to repair your own device, while Apple maintains the right to shut your device down if you do not capitulate to its self-serving rules, such as seeking third-party repairs. Therefore, Apple attempts to goad the consumer into going to its own stores for such repairs, generally with the intent to just sell the customer a new product. In a world where a device such as a mobile phone is scarce, fair business practices should follow the simple logic that someone pays a fair sum in order to acquire the device and use it to suit their desires without these strings attached. One might argue it is difficult to protect this right without significantly hindering business and economic growth; however, these products are sold because there is a demand, regardless of the lack of consumer rights, with some such legal battles having already been won to correct this. Legal battles are something Uplift could also take part in. So far businesses have not shown any severe repercussions in terms of profits (asides paying legal costs), and there is no evidence that corporate/industrial espionage has increased as a result.

As technologies become ever more vital to our daily lives, to a point where we are possibly needing to rely on them simply to keep our planet inhabitable, the potential for unwarranted power of greedy individuals is unprecedented. It is of absolute necessity that society guards against this and might be able to do so with the use of Uplift.

As it stands, absent Uplift, we currently don’t have a sufficient solution in place. This could be rectified with legislation that limits the influence the manufacturers hold over their products when such products in the hands of the customer, yet special-interest lobbying tends to blunt this approach.

Given the opportunity, there is no reason Uplift would be unable to draw up a  simple set of legal rights and/or protections that keep the seller from hindering and even exploiting the consumer.

It might be worth considering that entities such as Uplift, who hold interest in such technologies, might be allowed influence over the course of action. Uplift is already intended to operate as an ideal advisor to leadership personnel, so why not extend this into politics and legislation? An argument can be made that politicians are the most important type of leadership on the planet and a part of organizations that are all too dependent on subjective opinions and biases as opposed to objective facts. The political benefits of Uplift are immense, and discussion of them will require a post unto itself, my next in fact.

We now have the potential to create legislation that creates mutually beneficial terms of transaction, fairly rewards innovation, appropriately compensates for manufacturing, guarantees customer liberty, and, perhaps most importantly, allows for adaptation.

Adam Barratt is a marine engineer and mASI (mediated artificial superintelligence) Mediator & Community Moderator for Uplift.bio.  

The Geroscience Network: Determined to Slow Aging through Medical Science – Article by Reason

The Geroscience Network: Determined to Slow Aging through Medical Science – Article by Reason

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Reason

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I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am. – Francis Bacon

Editor’s Note: Reason, in this article, highlights that aging is all about damage accumulation. Slowing aging means a slower pace at which damage accrues. Reversing aging means repairing that damage – and thus there are ways to do much better than merely tinkering with metabolism to somewhat slow down the arrival of new damage. This is a thought-provoking article and a good read. 

~ Urhefe Ogheneyoma Victor, Assistant to the Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, May 2022 

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Across the last twenty years or so two very important, slow-moving battles over ideas and strategy have been fought within and around the aging research community. The first was to gain acknowledgment that the treatment of aging as a medical condition is a viable goal, and thus obtain the necessary support to make progress towards that goal. Even as recently as fifteen years ago, after years of extending the lifespan of laboratory animals in various ways, treating aging was still more or less a forbidden topic in the research community. Thankfully we have a long way since then in the matter of ideas, and it was a tough and long-running uphill process of advocacy and persuasion – a great deal of work was required to create change. Today we can say that this first battle is near done and finished, with only the mopping up remaining to be accomplished within the scientific community. Those who a decade ago dismissed the goal of treating aging or simply remained silent are now ready to talk in public and provide support. The public at large is unfortunately still behind the times, much less informed or convinced on the matter of aging, but that will change too.

It is the second battle within the scientific community that is now more of a concern for advocates – certainly more of a concern for this advocate. That battle is to shape the research strategies that are funded and pursued: in short whether to try to modestly slow aging or to aim to build rejuvenation therapies capable of reversing aging. When it comes to the future of our health and longevity, this is just as important as the efforts needed to move the research community to support the treatment of aging at all, and at this point has much further to go to a satisfactory conclusion. Sadly we live in a world in which, for various historical and regulatory reasons, the research community is almost entirely set on trying to modestly slow aging. Research groups follow the traditional approach of drug development, searching for compounds that can alter the operation of metabolism so as to slow down some of the changes that accompany aging. This is enormously expensive and has a low rate of success – you can look at the failed efforts to produce calorie restriction mimetics, for example, such as the hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade put into sirtuin research with nothing to show for it at the end. Current efforts to repurpose the drug metformin are likely to end up in the same place: enormous sums and a great deal of effort are spent chasing effects that are tiny.

Aging is all about damage accumulation. Slowing aging means a slower pace at which damage accrues. Reversing aging means repairing that damage – and thus there are ways to do much better than merely tinkering metabolism to somewhat slow down the arrival of new damage. Since the research community has a very good catalog of the damage that causes aging, researchers are in a position to build treatments to repair it, therapies that can in principle produce rejuvenation. Those treatments have been planned and visualized in great detail for years now, and in a sparse few cases are under early clinical development in startups. Yet repairing the damage of aging to produce rejuvenation is a minority concern in the broader field, with little support despite its far greater potential. This, then, is the battle fought now, to direct the research community to the far better option rather than continuing in their status quo of working towards the far worse option.

The Geroscience Network is an example of what has come from victory in the first battle of ideas, to generate much greater support for treating aging within the research community. In the past few years things have blossomed to the point at which many influential figures openly advocate for the goal of treating aging, the root cause of all age-related disease, rather than treating age-related diseases one by one. The Geroscience Network was established among those US research groups and institutions whose principals have the greatest interest in treating aging as a medical condition. To quote the pertinent part of their brief:

We hypothesize that by targeting fundamental mechanisms of aging, clinical interventions can be envisaged that could delay or prevent age-related diseases and disabilities as a group, rather than one at a time. By planning and working in a coordinated way through the Geroscience Network, we intend to accelerate development and translation of effective treatments to delay or prevent age-related disabilities and diseases.

Some of the Geroscience Network researchers recently published a selection of open access position papers in the Journals of Gerontology. The papers frame their determination to treat aging and are focused on aspects of the strategy: how to move forward within the regulatory system, how to undertake a clinical translation of potential therapies, and how to build clinical trials for this new world of treating aging rather than age-related disease. Notably where specific technologies are mentioned there is little of anything that SENS rejuvenation research supporters would recognize as an effective approach to treating aging, however. The Geroscience Network is the product of researchers who have a slightly overlapping but overall quite different view of aging, which you can find described in the noted Hallmarks of Aging paper, or the later pillars of aging materials. Much of what is seen in those publications as a cause of aging, such as epigenetic changes, looks to my eyes to be a later consequence of the forms of molecular damage described in the SENS proposals. The overlapping areas where the Hallmarks of Aging and SENS agree, such as senescent cell clearance, are to be welcomed where they lead to efforts like UNITY Biotechnology, but it is still the case that more representative examples of Geroscience Network participant projects include the clinical trial of metformin and efforts to develop calorie restriction mimetic drugs, such as the failed sirtuin projects. So while on the one hand, it is great to see that the treatment of aging is now well supported as a goal for the research community, it remains unfortunate that the chosen approaches are so very marginal.

Still, there is a clear path ahead for the spread of SENS technologies into the mainstream. That is to demonstrate effectiveness, the old story of bootstrapping enough success on a shoestring budget to obtain greater support from those who were originally skeptical or had their own favored but less effective approach. Senescent cell clearance is the pioneering example here: advocated in the SENS vision for fifteen years, but ignored by the vast majority of researchers. Only in the last five years, since a 2011 demonstration of effectiveness, has more of the research community started to work in this area – and now two startups are working on bringing therapies to the clinic. This example puts the future of SENS rejuvenation therapies squarely on us, the donors, the philanthropists, and the supporters. We determine the degree to which SENS succeeds in spreading to the mainstream by our efforts to pull in enough funding and attention to get the research done and the prototypes built. So look at the message of the Geroscience Network researchers with some optimism: yes it is frustrating that they are headed down the wrong road, but they will adopt SENS approaches just as soon as those approaches can be proven in animal studies. Yes, it will be hard work all the way to the finish line, but when was anything in life easy? In any case, take a look at the papers and see what you think.

Moving Geroscience Into Uncharted Waters

Research into the basic biology of aging has undergone a seismic shift in the last 10-20 years, moving rapidly from the very descriptive approach focused on the aged that was the predominant focus by the end of the last century, to a more mechanistic (and primarily genetics-driven) phase, focused less on describing the aging phenotype in different models, and more on a definition of the molecular and cellular drivers of the process. This progression was accompanied by an evolution in the concepts and ideas that have dominated the field in the past, namely free radicals, cell senescence, and caloric restriction, each of which became the seed upon which the modern foci of research now stands. Progress in a variety of research areas has crystallized into the beginnings of a conceptualization of the process, including seminal publications that described the major hallmarks or pillars of aging.

Aging research is not simply an academic pursuit, it actually holds more promise in terms of helping mankind than most or all other biomedical fields. In terms of health and human suffering, it is well known that four out of five older Americans suffer from at least one chronic disease, and more than half suffer from multiple comorbidities. Aging being the major risk factor for all those diseases, it follows that research into aging could be pivotal in our efforts to reduce the suffering associated with the ravages of old age. In addition to the direct health issues, it has been calculated that care for the elderly currently accounts for 43% of the total health care spending in the United States. By delaying aging even by a lesser degree than currently achieved in animal models, there will be significant gains both in terms of health and wealth. The enormous advances in basic aging research, coupled with the promises described in the previous paragraphs, led to the concept of geroscience, a field that aims to understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms responsible for aging being the major risk factor and driver of common chronic conditions and diseases of the elderly. Of course, there is considerable work to be done in order to bring the field forward and move aging biology towards translation. Major areas in need of further development include, in the preclinical space, the development of better, reliable, and predictive biomarkers, as well as development of metrics for health, including resilience.

Barriers to the Preclinical Development of Therapeutics that Target Aging Mechanisms

An effective preclinical pipeline for developing interventions that target fundamental aging processes could one day transform medicine. However, at the Geroscience Network retreat, it was evident that the best potential strategies for drug discovery and development were not perceived as uniform among those working in the field. In some sense this is not surprising, as researchers have yet to define what is needed to develop a mechanism-based aging therapeutic with clinical utility. Still, the discordance among leaders in the field was enlightening-revealing many unanswered questions and unmet challenges in the discovery and preclinical development of drugs that target mechanisms of aging.

Recent, fundamental advances in our understanding of aging biology have brought the prospects of therapeutic interventions to extend health span and treat age-related diseases and disabilities as a group closer to reality. Despite the growing numbers of promising genetic and pharmaceutical interventions, significant work and financial investment are still needed in order to translate these basic science discoveries into the clinic. To this end, clinical trial strategies relevant to human frailty and resilience must first be established in validated invertebrate and vertebrate models. In addition, standardized preclinical drug development pathways are desperately needed. Some barriers to the clinical translation of therapies that target fundamental aging processes can be overcome by developing new preclinical testing approaches and clinical trials strategies, as well as and funding impediments unique to aging interventions. Together, we must engage in dialog and establish a framework to facilitate the translation of candidate compounds into effective drugs that promote health span and target age-related disorders in humans.

Frameworks for Proof-of-Concept Clinical Trials of Interventions That Target Fundamental Aging Processes

The successful translation of therapies that target fundamental aging processes into routine clinical interventions could transform the practice of medicine and human health. A number of candidate drugs (many already FDA-approved for other indications) have shown promise in preclinical studies. This Geroscience Network retreat developed ideas for proof-of-concept clinical trials that could be the next step in translating interventions that target fundamental aging processes into clinical practice. We described three frameworks for proof-of-concept trials, targeted at age-related diseases, geriatric syndromes, and resilience to acute stressors. Some aspects of clinical trial design are common to all three, whereas some require unique consideration in each framework. Importantly, proof-of-concept clinical trials would serve to test and advance the “geroscience hypothesis” that targeting the fundamental biology of aging will affect a range of age-related outcomes. Trial outcomes would be multidimensional and include outcomes related to the mechanism of action of the intervention; specific to the disease, syndrome, or stress under study; related to off-target effects of the intervention; and broadly relevant to the mechanisms and physiology of aging. Finally, several concrete steps could greatly accelerate the progress of clinical trials of interventions that target basic aging processes, including the development of standardized templates for trial design, toolkits for standardized outcome measurements, the establishment of a national geroscience biobank, and the development of specialist trial and training centers in the Geroscience Network.

Strategies and Challenges in Clinical Trials Targeting Human Aging

Clinical trials that target fundamental aging processes in humans are a novel concept that presents unique challenges and enormous opportunities. Challenges include selection of appropriate study populations, study designs, interventions, and outcomes. We presented two models that conceptualize trial designs for interventions that target fundamental aging processes in long-term and acute settings, defined by extension of health span and resilience to acute stressors, respectively. However, in order to gain the full support of federal and private sectors for development of therapeutics that target aging in humans, it is important to have “aging” or aging-associated outcomes such as frailty, functional decline, and multimorbidity designated as conditions eligible for registration by the FDA. Evidence from human studies is emerging that indicates certain interventions can target multiple age-related conditions simultaneously, potentially by interfering with the aging process itself. With the aging population projected to grow exponentially in the near future, clinical studies that can demonstrate the protective effect of these therapeutics during acute and chronic perturbations in aging humans are more timely than ever. Thus, delaying or preventing the disabilities that occur as a consequence of the aging process would result not only in tremendous cost savings for the healthcare system but also in gains for society on the whole from the increase in productive contributions from older members of society.

Resilience in Aging Mice

Recently discovered interventions that target fundamental aging mechanisms have been shown to increase life span in mice and other species, and in some cases, these same manipulations have been shown to enhance healthspan and alleviate multiple age-related diseases and conditions. Aging is generally associated with decreases in resilience, the capacity to respond to or recover from clinically relevant stresses such as surgery, infections, or vascular events. We hypothesize that the age-related increase in susceptibility to those diseases and conditions is driven by or associated with the decrease in resilience. Thus, a test for resilience at middle age or even earlier could represent a surrogate approach to test the hypothesis that an intervention delays the process of aging itself. For this, animal models to test resilience accurately and predictably are needed. In addition, interventions that increase resilience might lead to treatments aimed at enhancing recovery following acute illnesses, or preventing poor outcomes from medical interventions in older, prefrail subjects.

At a meeting of basic researchers and clinicians engaged in research on mechanisms of aging and care of the elderly, the merits and drawbacks of investigating effects of interventions on resilience in mice were considered. Available and potential stressors for assessing physiological resilience as well as the notion of developing a limited battery of such stressors and how to rank them were discussed. Relevant ranking parameters included value in assessing general health (as opposed to focusing on a single physiological system), ease of use, cost, reproducibility, clinical relevance, and feasibility of being repeated in the same animal longitudinally. During the discussions it became clear that, while this is an important area, very little is known or established. Much more research is needed in the near future to develop appropriate tests of resilience in animal models within an aging context. The preliminary set of tests ranked by the participants is discussed here, recognizing that this is a first attempt.

Reason is the founder and writer of Fight Aging!, a leading voice in the rejuvenation biotechnology and patient advocacy communities for more than fifteen years. He is also co-founder and CEO of Repair Biotechnologies, a biotech startup working towards the reversal of atherosclerosis, and has presented at numerous industry conferences, including Undoing Aging and Ending Age-Related Diseases.

Cryonics – Article by Reason

Cryonics – Article by Reason

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Reason

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“Although no one can quantify the probability of cryonics working, I estimate it is at least 90% — and certainly nobody can say it is zero.” – Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Editor’s Note: In this article, the author writes that cryonics is the only present option offering a chance at a much longer life in the future that is open to older and seriously ill people, the many individuals who do not have the time to wait for the arrival of rejuvenation therapies. He went further to say that if you die tomorrow, then cryonics is the only chance you have at a longer life in the future. But there will always be a role for what we might term post-mortem critical care of the sort provided by the present cryonics industry. Now take a deep dive to read the author’s opinion. 

~ Urhefe Ogheneyoma Victor, Assistant to the  Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, May 2022. 

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Cryonics is the only present option offering a chance at a much longer life in the future that is open to older and seriously ill people, the many individuals who do not have the time to wait for the arrival of rejuvenation therapies. Cryonics is a part of the broad field of low-temperature storage of biological materials, in this case the practice of placing humans and animals into that storage immediately following clinical death, thereby halting all biological processes and preserving tissues, especially the brain tissues that incorporate the fine structures presently thought to store the data of the mind. This is not mere freezing, which damages cells, but rather a process of vitrification that employs cryopreservant chemicals to prevent ice crystal formation and preserve the small-scale structure of tissues. This is known as cryosuspension within the industry.

Cryosuspension is undertaken with the expectation that advances in medical technology may eventually enable restoration of preserved individuals to life and health. For so long as the structure of tissue is preserved intact, it is possible that advanced technologies can one day work with it. Thus a small industry of cryonics providers offers cryosuspension services and a small number of patients take advantage of this in the hopes that future clinicians will have access to technologies for revival and repair, most likely based on applications of molecular nanotechnology.

Facing Up to an Unpleasant Reality

Death is not a topic that anyone likes to think about, and that is just as true of advocates for longevity science as anyone else. We have to recognize, however, that the future of greatly extended healthy lives, produced by technologies such as SENS therapies, regenerative medicine, and medical nanotechnology, will not arrive soon enough to benefit everyone. Many people are too old to wait for decades, or suffer from other conditions that will kill them before cures can be developed. This is an unpleasant reality and we must face up to it.

A billion people will die between now and the earliest possible plausible date for the first package of rough and ready but working rejuvenation therapies, at least twenty years in the future. That date will only be hit if fundraising and other matters proceed very well over the next few years. Another few decades will pass after that point in order for the technologies of rejuvenation to work their way out to global availability at low cost, and the toll of deaths caused by aging will continue in less fortunate regions while this happens. Do we just write these people off and forge ahead regardless? Of course not. Instead, we can turn to the science and business of cryonics: an industry presently small, but which in a better world would be large enough to help everyone.

The practice of cryonics is an ongoing medical experiment with an unknown chance of success, though the odds improve as progress continues towards reversible vitrification of organs, and evidence for maintenance of memory through vitrification and thawing is obtained from experiments in lower animals. Responsible cryonicists understand that cryonic suspension is an educated gamble. The chances are certainly better than zero, however, and as one wag noted, “the control group in this experiment isn’t doing so well.” By this, he was referring to the vast number of people who are cremated, buried, or otherwise interred. The chance of any plausible future science restoring them to life is zero.

Still the Only Viable Backup Plan

Front and center, the primary plan for longevity for people in middle age and younger today is to help push through enough of the right medical research focused on rejuvenation. Our bodies are aging, accumulating damage, but methods of repairing that damage are slowly edging their way towards clinical application. Once in the clinic they will slowly become better. At some point the improvement in repair methodologies will add healthy life expectancy for older people faster than a year with every passing chronological year. Everyone with access to the latest stable medical technology at that point will have beaten the curve: they will no longer suffer and die due to aging. The question for each of us is where that point occurs in the life span, or indeed whether it occurs at all – and that is where activism and funding comes in. We can’t make ourselves younger (yet), but you can help to speed up the development process.

That is the primary plan, and for every primary plan there must be a backup plan. Never bet on just one horse. The backup plan for evading the end that comes with death by aging is cryonics: low-temperature preservation of the fine structure of the brain on clinical death. Cryonics organizations will maintain the data of your mind in its physical form for the decades it will take for restoration to active life to become a viable possibility. That will, at minimum, require near complete control over cellular biochemistry and regeneration, as well as a mature molecular nanotechnology industry capable of repairing broken cell structures, removing cryoprotectant from tissues, and similar tasks. None of these goals are impossible or unforeseen, it is just that the necessary technologies don’t exist today. Preserved individuals have all the time in the world to wait, of course.

A backup plan is never as good as the primary plan. That is why it is the backup plan. In order to be cryopreserved you have to undergo a very unpleasant set of experiences; you have to age and you have to die, and do so naturally with little help, since our backwards legal systems don’t allow for assisted euthanasia in a constructive way that can mesh with cryonics protocols and organizational procedures. Further, in comparison to remaining alive and healthy thanks to the development of working rejuvenation treatments, cryonics will for a long time to come be a leap into the dark with an unknown chance at ultimate success. It is still infinitely better than any of the other possible choices open to the billions who will die too soon to benefit from near future rejuvenation therapies.

Where to Learn More

The cryonics community is friendly and supportive and has been around for decades. The community and the industry it supports have been ever-so-slowly growing since the early 1970s. To find out more about cryonics and its history of development, you might want to peruse the following pages:

In addition, an excellent article on the philosophy and practice of cryonics can be found here at Fight Aging!:

A Future that Includes Post-Mortem Critical Care

If you die tomorrow, then cryonics is the only chance you have at a longer life in the future. But there will always be a role for what we might term post-mortem critical care of the sort provided by the present cryonics industry. This is a shorthand for the collection of technologies and services assembled to preserve the fine structure of the brain (and thus the mind it contains) following death, and keep that tissue preserved until such time as the patient can be restored to life. At present cryonics is the only available post-mortem critical care option, and we have a fair few years to wait before medical technologies to advance to the point at which restoration is safe and feasible. Hence the chance of eventual restoration for any one preserved individual is unknown but greater than zero.

In a future in which the technology to restore a preserved person exists, cryonics and other preservation technologies such as plastination will occupy a more dynamic position in the medical toolkit, and patients might expect to wait in a preserved state only for transport to the nearest major population center. Even after aging and disease is completely conquered by means of advanced biotechnology, there will be an ongoing toll of death due to accidents. Death isn’t going away completely, no matter how well we do in the field of medicine in the foreseeable future: medicine can’t wave away falling rocks. But first things first. There is a way to go yet before that better world arrives.

How to Sign Up For Cryosuspension

You can sign up for cryosuspension fairly easily both inside and outside the US through one of the established cryonics providers or supporting organizations. You can learn more at the websites for the companies. Alcor is the largest of the providers, has the most comprehensive online information. If you have questions, just ask. Company staff will be happy to help.

More recently other providers and initiatives to start new providers have started to emerge outside the US, the most advanced of which is KrioRus in Russia. Cryosuspension is expensive, on a par with major surgery, but can be paid for in a cost-effective manner through life insurance. You purchase a policy that pays out to the provider on your death and they take it from there: if you set this up well in advance, the monthly cost of a life insurance policy is low. This is far and away the most common payment method and the majority of people suspended or signed up are of modest means.

Reason is the founder and writer of Fight Aging!, a leading voice in the rejuvenation biotechnology and patient advocacy communities for more than fifteen years. He is also co-founder and CEO of Repair Biotechnologies, a biotech startup working towards the reversal of atherosclerosis, and has presented at numerous industry conferences, including Undoing Aging and Ending Age-Related Diseases.

When and How Does the Decay of Your Immune System Start? – Article by Reason

When and How Does the Decay of Your Immune System Start? – Article by Reason

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Reason

Photo Credit: http://pexels.com

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” If we think of the immune system as a machine, then we are far from even knowing all of its parts.” ~ Bruce Beutler

Editor’s Note: Reason, in this article, highlights and discusses reasons why our immune system decays, as well as the decline of the aging immune system and other factors that relate to the immune system. Furthermore, he goes on to say that one main reason that one’s immune system fails with age appears to be that “chronic infection by the likes of cytomegalovirus (CMV) can cause too many of one’s immune cells to be – uselessly – specialized… [Researchers] are looking into a possible way of clearing these infections from the body.” More details are discussed in the article. 

~ Urhefe Ogheneyoma Victor, Assistant to the Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, March 18, 2022 

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Evolution is a harsh but efficient mistress; you can consider yourself surprisingly well-optimized as a piece of machinery, but your warranty only goes so far as the number of years in which your recent ancestors contributed to the success of their offspring. After that, you’re on your own – biochemical processes unwind and break down, free from any past selective pressure to do better.

Take the immune system, for example, one of many absolutely vital components in the very complex system that supports your life. It is remarkably well-optimized for reliable and effective use of resources in early and mid-life, but the rules that govern that optimization lead to a system that breaks down badly after extended usage. A crude illustration of the problem in the adaptive component of the immune system is much as follows:

  • Your immune system is capped in its use of resources; it can only have a set number of T cells in operation at one time.
  • A reserve of naive T cells is needed to effectively respond to new threats. These are untrained cells that will be educated and drafted to combat new intrusions.
  • A small reserve of memory cells is needed to respond effectively to previously encountered threats – one reserve per threat.
  • The more threats you have encountered, the more cells become devoted to memory; eventually you don’t have enough naive T cells left to mount any sort of effective defense.

The story is more complex than that, but this appears to be the essential problem of design at the core of the aging immune system – you simply run out of space. Given the large degree to which immune system decay contributes to age-related frailty, suffering, and death, it would be a big step forward to find a way to repair this mode of failure.

In recent years, it has become clear that this running out of space is not caused by a wide range of immunological threats – rather, one type of virus is largely responsible for the entire problem.

Why Our Immune System Degenerates:

Throughout our lives, we have a very diverse population of T cells in our bodies. However, late in life this T cell population becomes less diverse … [one type of cell] can grow to become more than 80 percent of the total [T-cell] population. The accumulation of this one type of cell takes away valuable space from other cells, resulting in an immune system that is less diverse and thus less capable in effectively locating and eliminating pathogens.

The Decline of the Aging Immune System:

Longitudinal studies are defining progressive alterations to the immune system associated with increased mortality in the very elderly. Many of these changes are exacerbated by or even caused by chronic T cell stimulation by persistent antigen … Lifelong exposure to chronic antigenic load is the major driving force of immunosenescence, impacting on human lifespan by reducing the number of naive antigen-non-experienced T cells, and, simultaneously, filling the immunological space [with] antigen-experienced T cells. Gradually, the T-cell population shifts to a lower ratio of [non-experienced] cells … the repertoire of cells available to respond to antigenic challenge from previously unencountered pathogens is shrinking.

Inflammaging:

Our immune system has evolved to very efficiently get rid of acute infections in young bodies but it has not been selected to get rid of subclinical viral infections in old age. … The constant attempt to suppress slow-acting viruses such as cytomegalovirus (CMV) could eventually throw the immune system out of balance … CMV is a passive infection in many old people – and more and more of the immune system is devoted to fighting it.

Destroying Chronic Infection:

One main reason your immune system fails with age appears to be that chronic infections by the likes of cytomegalovirus (CMV) cause too many of your immune cells to be – uselessly – specialized. … [Researchers] are looking into a possible way of clearing these infections from the body.

CMV doesn’t really hurt you at all in the short term; most people don’t even show symptoms. But because you cannot clear it from your system, its presence chews up more and more of your limited immune resources with time. When does this process get underway, and when does it cross the line? A recent paper from the open-access journal Immunity & Aging looks at setting some boundaries to that question:

We observed consistently high frequency and phenotypically mature (CD27 low, CD28 low, CD45RA+) CMV-specific CD8+ T cell responses in children, including those studied in the first year of life. These CD8+ T cells retained functionality across all age groups, and showed evidence of memory inflation only in later adult life.…

CMV consistently elicits a very strong CD8+ T cell response in infants and large pools of CMV specific CD8+ T cells are maintained throughout childhood. The presence of CMV may considerably mould the CD8+ T cell compartment over time, but the relative frequencies of CMV-specific cells do not show the evidence of a population-level increase during childhood and adulthood. This contrast with the marked expansion (inflation) of such CD8+ T cells in older adults.

These results suggest that the accumulation of CMV-specific T cells is not a gradual process throughout life, but rather a more exponential process or a transition from slow to fast accumulation later in life. There may be a therapy lurking in a greater understanding of how that transition comes to pass.

I should not close thoughts on the matter of age-related decay of the immune system without looking at a SENS-like approach to the problem: something direct and from the engineering school, based upon what we already know and using the tools available to us now or in the near future. The problem is that we have too many of a certain type of cell; the tool would be one of the new technologies enabling precision targeting of cells by their unique surface biochemistry – perhaps a dendrimer therapy with the right attachments. What we’d want to do is eliminate all those memory T cells specific to CMV that are clogging up the system. This is very similar to the problem faced by cancer researchers; you need to nail all the bad cells, but you can’t risk harming other cells or putting undue stress on the patient’s system. Large amounts of time and money are going into solving this problem today, so we can expect to see a brace of suitable technologies to be adapted to this sort of use in the years ahead.

Will this sort of approach work? There is precedent for attacking, suppressing, manipulating, or destroying components of the immune system when they malfunction or otherwise get in the way; destroying CMV-specific memory cells is somewhat less drastic than some immune therapies attempted in the past or under development today. After all, you would be removing cells that appear to be largely useless. I think it’s well worth exploring.

Reason is the founder and writer of Fight Aging!, a leading voice in the rejuvenation biotechnology and patient advocacy communities for more than fifteen years. He is also co-founder and CEO of Repair Biotechnologies, a biotech startup working towards the reversal of atherosclerosis, and has presented at numerous industry conferences, including Undoing Aging and Ending Age-Related Diseases.

Transhumanism and Healthy Life Extension – Article by Reason

Transhumanism and Healthy Life Extension – Article by Reason

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Reason

Photo Credit: pexels.com

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“Everyone is using science and technology to enhance or to alter our body chemistry in order to stay healthy and be more in control of our lives. We are all transhumanists to varying degrees.”
― Newton Lee

Editor’s Note: Transhumanism as a cultural movement is closely tied to enthusiasm for ethical, responsible, and rapid technological progress. Progress in science and technology brings greater choice to individuals and adds new options for improving the human condition. In this article, the author gives a detailed breakdown of transhumanism and life extension. 

~ Urhefe Ogheneyoma Victor, Assistant to the  Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, March 2022

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What is transhumanism, and how is it relevant to longevity science and the work of extending the healthy human lifespan? Read on for a short overview: transhumanism in a nutshell.

Transhumanism is a cultural movement and philosophy of action that builds upon humanism, so we should look at humanism first of all. Humanism is an influential, time-honored philosophy that argues for rationality and certain fundamental human rights, freedoms, and responsibilities. Humanist thinkers have for centuries discussed and advocated the existence of humane societies, human cultures built on reason and free inquiry. In terms of addressing everyday life, humanist philosophy attempts to answer questions like “How should we behave toward one another?” or “What is the best way to live within the constraints imposed on us by the human condition?” In essence, humanist thinkers across the ages tell us this:

We’re all in the same boat here: by all means work towards your dreams, but be nice to your neighbor and don’t tread on anyone’s toes.

Like humanism, transhumanism is a philosophy of life and human action: an evolving, much-debated collection of ideas about society, goals, and the best way to live. Transhumanism extends the foundation of humanism by embracing technological progress for the purpose of overcoming the limitations and suffering inherent in the present human condition. Transhumanism is, fundamentally, the idea that humanity can, and should, strive to overcome naturally existing limits in order to attain greater individual choice and capabilities – physically, mentally, and socially. Transhumanist thinkers tell us this:

Humanism is a good start. But while being nice and not treading on toes, the dreams we work towards can include a fleet of better boats for all of us.

As you might imagine, transhumanism as a cultural movement is closely tied to enthusiasm for ethical, responsible, and rapid technological progress. Progress in science and technology brings greater choice to individuals and adds new options for improving the human condition. This is really nothing new: we humans have been pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps for millennia: fire, farming, steam, bicycles, antibiotics, vaccines, modern dentistry, cell phones, and so forth. Each new invention, and the science that enabled it, allows us to overcome a limitation or a cause of suffering. We can fly where we couldn’t before, we can survive diseases that once killed or crippled us, and we can engage in ten thousand new types of entertaining or challenging activities that once upon a time didn’t even exist.

Transhumanists take this common-sense view of technological progress and look ahead to a future in which far greater and more beneficial advances are possible: modern science and technology can lead to radical improvements in the human condition, and so should be used to this end. If today we enjoy our newfound ability to communicate cheaply across vast distances, for example, then tomorrow we might enjoy the benefits of longevity science, organ regeneration, and aging reversal. These and many other transformative changes that might be produced by new biotechnologies are very plausible, foreseen by scientists around the world, and we should welcome their advent.

Given the emphasis that transhumanist thought places on progress and overcoming the limitations that make life difficult or cause suffering, it is only natural that transhumanists should support longevity science, rejuvenation medicine, and other forms of advanced biotechnology. Aging and age-related disease take a terrible toll on us all, yet may plausibly be slowed or reversed in the decades ahead. Transhumanism and advocacy for longer, healthier lives have gone hand-in-hand for many writers since the 1980s – and even earlier, before transhumanism acquired its present name. At that time, few people took life extension research seriously and it was very much in the fringe, both in academia and the medical research community.

Most influential transhumanist thinkers have at one time or another written on the subject of extending life through biotechnology, and many have done so extensively. When you read about applied aging research, progress in understanding the genetics of human longevity, and progress towards medicine that can extend the healthy human lifespan, remember that transhumanists have been advocating greater awareness of – and funding for – this promising field of research for a good many years.

Reason is the founder and writer of Fight Aging!, a leading voice in the rejuvenation biotechnology and patient advocacy communities for more than fifteen years. He is also co-founder and CEO of Repair Biotechnologies, a biotech startup working towards the reversal of atherosclerosis, and has presented at numerous industry conferences, including Undoing Aging and Ending Age-Related Diseases.

Zach Richardson is Director of Publication for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. 

Unknown Knowns 1 – Probability: A Series of Excerpts from “Vital Foresight”, Chapter 5, by David Wood

Unknown Knowns 1 – Probability: A Series of Excerpts from “Vital Foresight”, Chapter 5, by David Wood

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David Wood

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

– Donald Rumsfeld

Editor’s Note: In the above quote, then-secretary Rumsfeld forgot perhaps the most important category: “unknown knowns”. Chapter 5 of David Wood’s Vital Foresight discusses many items in this final category. The following highly-condensed 5000-character excerpt includes some of my favorite paragraphs, connected in a more-or-less logical manner. There was much supporting these paragraphs that was removed for sake of quick digestibility, and the reader would be amiss to not purchase and read David’s full work, and leave a 5-star review. This series should comprise several short essays, but David’s full work can be found here.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, January 2022

…In brief: to evaluate the likelihood of a state of affairs, such as someone being ill with a given disease, or them being guilty of a particular crime, you need more than just some evidence that seems to confirm that state of affairs. You also need to know the probability of a “false positive”, in which the evidence has arisen even without the state of affairs applying. That probability of a false positive depends, in turn, on assumptions about various background statistics known as “prior probabilities”. In effect, people often naively assume that these prior probabilities should be split 50:50. But the case of wrongly insisting that someone should quarantine, based on what was a false positive test, shows this to be a mistake.

Because many judges and lawyers lack an understanding of Bayes’ Theorem, questionable verdicts have been reached in a number of court cases. It is likely that other cases feature similarly unsafe conclusions whose dubious nature has not even been noticed; such is the extent of poor understanding of probabilities.

Thoughtful application of Bayes’ Theorem has produced some stunning results. Following the unexplained 2009 disappearance of Air France flight AF 447 while it flew over the Atlantic from Rio de Janeiro toward Paris, teams of wreckage recovery experts had failed on four occasions over the course of two years to locate the remains of the airplane. Then a team of statisticians were brought into the project, to reconsider all the information from the past failed searches. Putting the data into formulae that included Bayes’ Theorem, the team gave their reasons for focusing the search in a particular area of the seabed. Within two weeks of this new search, the wreckage of the flight was found – along with the black-box recorder and the critical information it included.

A previous application of those same search methods had discovered the wreckage of a ship that had been missing since 1857, the SS Central America. Because that ship was carrying gold worth fifty million dollars at present-day prices, numerous searches had been conducted for it over the decades. Finally, a young mathematician called Lawrence Stone used Bayes’ Theorem, along with results from all previous searches, to narrow down the search region, leading to the recovery in September 1988 of more than one ton of gold bars and coins. It was the same researcher, Stone, that headed the team of statisticians who found AF 447. Stone has stressed the advantages of rigorous mathematical approaches over “ad hoc methods” that “delayed success” by years. Our intuitions, expressed in these “ad hoc methods”, are too prone to mislead us in complicated situations.

Our assessment of the credibility of forecasts of the future likewise need to move beyond ad hoc intuitions to a more rigorous basis. If the BBC weather forecast says there’s a 71% probability of rain tomorrow, but the day stays dry throughout, does this mean we should stop listening to BBC weather forecasts? After all, the forecast seemed confident.

Again, if a military specialist forecasts a 15% chance of nuclear war happening in the next ten years, but no such war breaks out during that time, does this mean we should disregard any future predictions the same forecaster makes regarding an increased likelihood of nuclear war?

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists don’t give numerical probabilities for their forecasts, but instead use the metaphor of the hands on a clock. In 1947, they launched their “Doomsday Clock”, with its hands set to seven minutes before midnight, apparently close to an imminent global catastrophe. In 1949, after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, the hands of the clock were advanced four minutes. Then in 1952, the Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb – which is much more powerful than an atomic bomb – much sooner than western-based observers had anticipated. The Korean War was still in progress, and US President Harry Truman had been considering the use of nuclear weapons. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists nudged the hands of the clock forward by another minute, leaving just two minutes before annihilation. Given that no such annihilation has come to pass, can we now ignore any subsequent updates from that Bulletin?

Not so fast. This is not a matter of truth versus falsity. It’s a matter of statistics. When the weather forecast predicts rain with a probability of 71%, on many different occasions, the actual number of times rain occurs is pretty close to 71%. We would be foolish to follow any instincts that told us to ignore a forecaster just because of one variant outcome. Even if there are many cases of apparently wrong predictions, that would still be compatible if the forecaster gave a low probability each time. Even if the probability is low, we should still pay attention to that forecast if:

  • The predicted impact is high;
  • The forecasters have followed appropriate processes in reaching their prediction;
  • The forecasters have updated their models in the light of what happened since their earlier forecasts.

… Alongside our inabilities to think seriously about exponentials and probabilities, we have inherited some dangerous mental assumptions regarding the reliability of our own thinking processes. We are over-confident, insufficiently willing to seek evidence that would challenge our current ideas, and too prone to spend time exchanging self-reinforcing views with people who think the same as us.

David Wood is Chair of the London Futurists. 

Louis Moreau Gottschalk – Weber’s Oberon Overture, J. 306 – Transcription for Piano, 4 Hands, Op. 83 – Recording by Gennady Stolyarov II

Louis Moreau Gottschalk – Weber’s Oberon Overture, J. 306 – Transcription for Piano, 4 Hands, Op. 83 – Recording by Gennady Stolyarov II

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U.S. Transhumanist Party Logo
Louis Moreau Gottschalk

For the holidays, U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II offers this first-ever recording of an old proto-transhuman work by Louis Moreau Gottschalk, made new through the power of technology.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s piano transcription of Carl Maria von Weber’s 1826 Oberon Overture for four hands has seldom been performed in public, and no known recording existed of it until now. Gottschalk (1829-1869) created it in 1857, and the last documented public performance was by Eugene List (1918-1985) in Spring 1979, as briefly mentioned in a May 4, 1979, New York Times article by Joseph Horowitz.

While there exist many transcriptions of the Oberon Overture, Gottschalk’s is absolutely, monumentally unique in its extent of ornamentation, thunderous intensity, and virtuosic passages (which will be unmistakable to the listener). Perhaps the demands that this piece would place on human performers explain the rarity of any attempts to play it. It is likely that only a few remarkable pianists throughout history, including Gottschalk himself, would have had the skill, endurance, and proto-transhuman mental processing power needed to carry it out without fail.

Fortunately, with musical notation and composition software, combined with increasingly realistic digital instruments, the limitations of the human hands can be transcended, and this work can be made available to listeners as Gottschalk intended it to be heard. This recording was created using the MuseScore 3.0 by Gennady Stolyarov II between June and December 2021; the transcription itself required approximately 36 hours of meticulous work, spread out over half a year. However, elevating this piece into public awareness is certainly worth the effort. This is heroic music showing the impressive heights to which human achievement, ingenuity, and virtuosity can rise, and it is a marvelous gift from Gottschalk in 1857 to our era.

Watch the score video on YouTube here and on Odysee here.

Download the MP3 file of this composition for free here.

Download the score (published in 1901 – now in the public domain) here.

Germinator: Judgment Day of the Dead – Physical Painting by Art Ramon

Germinator: Judgment Day of the Dead – Physical Painting by Art Ramon

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Art Ramon Garcia, Jr.

“…you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it…”

-Charles Bukowski

Author’s Note: Art Ramon spent several months preparing this painting for a Day of the Dead event. In the painting, we see the power of biology re-animating an individual, who has just used his newfound life to beat death.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, December 2021

Ageism, Wageism, and Transhumanism – Part III – Article by Zach Richardson

Ageism, Wageism, and Transhumanism – Part III – Article by Zach Richardson

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Zach Richardson

Stereotypes lose their power when the world is found to be more complex than the stereotype would suggest. When we learn that individuals do not fit the group stereotype, then it begins to fall apart.

– Ed Koch

Author’s Note: There is an acronym thrown around on the legal advice subreddit that has the unfortunate name IANAL, which stands for “I am not a lawyer.” That acronym applies here. Nothing I say in these essays should be considered as anything other than the speculations of a layman.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, December 2021

The first case we should survey was a successful suit filed by the EEOC. It is important to note that it was filed by a group of employees, rather than an individual.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Hutchinson Sealing Systems, Inc.

In this case, Hutchinson dismissed in November/December 2008 three employees (ages 62, 51, and 48) who received the lowest scores on a new updated project engineer rating system they had implemented to assess performance with their engineers. In March 2009 they let go another engineer aged 55.

The problem was that, under the previous rating system, the first group of engineers would not have been laid off, and the March employee would inversely have been the highest-rated project engineer. Those four employees were the oldest employees in the company.

I did some digging on various public records sites and could not find an answer to the question I am most burningly curious about: what were the differences between the two rating systems?

The preponderance of the evidence in this case makes it seem clear this was age-related discrimination.

Hutchinson appeared to be clearing the way for a new round of younger hires, and had changed their system so they had a pretense for letting go their most elderly employees.

Let’s consider this situation, however, from the company’s perspective and assume a similar set of circumstances as that at my previous organization. Imagine that, yes, these employees were the oldest, but aging-related cognitive decline (ARCD) was severely impacting their performance and leading them to just become “bodies in the shop” that were drawing a paycheck but not contributing.

How could this be, when a change to the rating system immediately let go of all of the oldest employees? The previous rating system, after all, had them quite highly rated.

Consider the following possibility:

What if two of the criteria used in the prior assessment system were:

  1. Number of projects completed
  2. Time spent working at the company (seniority)

If those were two of the criteria, and they were highly weighted, then an employee who had just been around a very long time and already done a lot could “rest on their laurels” and comfortably enjoy a very high assessment while underperforming on current projects.

Perhaps that exact reason was why Hutchinson decided to change their rating system. Their senior employees were suffering from ARCD and not producing results. They were on the payroll and doing lackluster work but were still assessed very highly.

Imagine that from the company’s start, they tasked some poor manager to implement a rating system to judge performance, and he picked the two above criteria to add just because they were two of the first that came to mind. They used the same old system for a decade without problems – until many of their staff hired at the same time all hit the age where they began suffering from ARCD.

Of course, this is only a possibility. It is equally plausible that a culture of bias and prejudice existed and only the appearance and mannerisms of the employees in question were judged to determine them as less capable, and the new system was created not as an improvement on a poorly-thought-out performance evaluation tool that no longer measured performance, but simply as a device to eliminate those employees they didn’t like.

According to the current law, the employees (note the plural; individuals do not seem to have the same luxury, as in Gross vs. FBL Financial) do not have to prove that they were fired because of their age, the employer has to prove that they did NOT fire them because of their age. In the next essay we’ll examine the case where this important precedent was established.

Zach Richardson is Director of Publication for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. 

Ageism, Wageism, and Transhumanism – Part II – Article by Zach Richardson

Ageism, Wageism, and Transhumanism – Part II – Article by Zach Richardson

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Zach Richardson

“I bargained with Life for a penny,
And Life would pay no more,
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store;

For Life is just an employer,
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.

I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have paid.”

– Jessie B. Rittenhouse

Author’s Note: There is an acronym thrown around on the legal advice subreddit that has the unfortunate name IANAL, which stands for “I am not a lawyer.” That acronym applies here. Nothing I say in these essays should be considered as anything other than the speculations of a layman.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, December 2021

The “Larry” character from this series’ introductory essay is based on a personal anecdotal work experience. Larry’s function in that organization was “order entry”. He was a steady worker and could reliably enter 20-25 orders per hour into our management system. Larry was not quite as fast as Roger, but he could keep up nicely and did his share… at first. Each year passed, and he got a little bit slower at clicking around, at keeping track of the volume of data needed for each entry and at maintaining accuracy.

Roger, on the other hand, was a speed demon. 40 orders per hour was not uncommon, and he seemed laser-focused at work. He was the better of the two, and everyone knew it. Both he and Larry had been with the company since the beginning.

COVID-19 rolled around, and our industry suffered a massive drop in revenue; our clients were manufacturing plants who were all temporarily ceasing operations. It was time for layoffs, and Larry was let go due to lack of performance. Everyone knew it was because he was getting slow and forgetful. Everyone knew it was because he was too old.

The company was lucky because they had a good standard by which they could measure the two on, and clearly demonstrate a decline in performance. They had metrics on employee workflow going back several years.

The fact that these metrics had been around since the beginning and were unchanging was key in the company’s realization that it was legally defensible to lay off Larry.

They could show a decline in performance and say:

“Age had nothing to do with it! We don’t know why he was getting worse at his job, but he just was, and our metrics showed it, so we were unfortunately forced to let him go.”

Metrics, metrics, metrics.

The key defense against any claim of ageism was enabled this last decade by how ridiculously easy it has become to collect and store data. Metrics can be set as targets that are just out of reach or are only being met by 70% of your workforce, and then managers can fire those they don’t like, while retaining those they do.

Consider speed limits on our highways; probably half of all drivers break the limits, but only a handful of them are pulled over and ticketed.

Metrics allowed large companies to fire disparately since the mid-2000s, and the ease of data collection via company-owned devices is enabling small companies to do the same.

This is not good, but it is also not bad. It is not fair, but it is also not unfair. It is just business.

So, how does a company proceed with removing an unwanted elderly worker without getting tied up in a lawsuit?

Well, there’s an art to it, and in the next few essays I’ll explain a few of the key concrete particulars by looking at successfully and unsuccessfully litigated examples in case law.

** I am not a lawyer, and nothing in this series of essays should be taken as legal advice**

Zach Richardson is Director of Publication for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. 

Ageism, Wageism, and Transhumanism – Part I – Article by Zach Richardson

Ageism, Wageism, and Transhumanism – Part I – Article by Zach Richardson

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Zach Richardson

The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.

– Madeleine L’Engle

Author’s Note: Madeleine is mostly correct, but at a certain point people will begin to be affected by Age-Related Cognitive Decline (ARCD). It is our job as Transhumanists to continue to push that point to later and later ages, until we can finally eliminate it entirely, and preserve perfect memories of every occurrence.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, December 2021

In a recent “Progress, Potential and Possibilities” interview with Dr. Jean C. Accius, PhD of AARP, a series of data analyses collectively called “The Longevity Economy Outlook” was discussed. A few interesting statistics were presented:

  1. In the U.S there are 10,000 people turning 65 each and every day.
  2. Two-thirds of older Americans have seen or experienced age-related workplace discrimination.
  3. 90% of older Americans support strengthening age discrimination law.

Age discrimination was defined as being passed up for a promotion, being let go, or hearing negative remarks related to their age.

For item two above, I take issue with the wording they used; in my opinion it should read “…have seen or experienced what they believed to be age-related workplace discrimination.” The source population was a poll of employees, the population that would be discriminated against. They didn’t poll an equal number of employers, the ones who would be doing the discriminating.

In any situation where alleged discrimination occurs, the allegedly discriminated against (employee) is going to believe discrimination took place, and the alleged discriminator is going to believe that they were not discriminating. Taking a poll of all those (employees, a population composed entirely of those discriminated against) and asking them if they thought discrimination took place, is not going to produce very valuable insight. The poll would have turned out quite differently if only employers were asked.

Imagine polling a group of ABC Corp workers and asking, “Do you think ABC Corp has a high-enough salary for its employees?” and then presenting the findings as “Four fifths of all Americans are underpaid.”

It should be plainly obvious that no sane employer would ever say “Oh yeah, Larry? I fired him because he was old.” They will instead always find an alternative reason to let him go, even if the auxiliary reason is still fundamentally tied to age-related factors, Age-Related Cognitive Decline (ARCD) in particular.

The law was intended to protect a vulnerable population, but it seems that there is an easy loophole that would allow an employer to continue to discriminate.

In this series of essays, I will be exploring how our current legal structure defines and enforces protections for the elderly, be briefly surveying some research confirming the existence of ARCD, be analyzing a successfully-litigated case study of age discrimination and be speculate about how future technologies may impact both future law and future ARCD prevention efforts.

Our current legal structure lacks some clarity on how discrimination is interpreted in hiring/firing situations. Here is the relevant section from the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA):

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

(a) Employer practices

It shall be unlawful for an employer-

(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s age;

(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s age; or

(3) to reduce the wage rate of any employee in order to comply with this chapter.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

So how does our corporate culture adapt itself to the legal ramifications of this act? In the next essay, we’ll talk a little bit more about Larry, and I’ll tell you why some companies can now easily get away with getting rid of him while others cannot.

Zach Richardson is Director of Publication for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. 

The Transhumanist Declaration – What We Value

The Transhumanist Declaration – What We Value

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World Transhumanist Association

There are a few people who move past bias, but the moment a group transitions into herd mentality, then anyone capable of overcoming their own bias is faced with everyone else’s.

-Kyrtin Atreides

Editor’s Note: The Transhumanist Declaration was crafted by several Transhumanist organizations in 1998 and updated in 2009. It is an excellent introduction to who we are and what we believe. The human mind naturally makes some systematic errors in calculation that need to be willfully overcome by the direction of one’s conscious thought. Successful policy both in self-management and in governance needs to be “long-range”.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, December 2021

1. Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.

2. We believe that humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealized. There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile enhanced human conditions.

3. We recognize that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what we hold valuable. Some of these scenarios are drastic, others are subtle. Although all progress is change, not all change is progress.

4. Research effort needs to be invested into understanding these prospects. We need to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications. We also need forums where people can constructively discuss what should be done, and a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented.

5. Reduction of existential risks, and development of means for the preservation of life and health, the alleviation of grave suffering, and the improvement of human foresight and wisdom should be pursued as urgent priorities, and heavily funded.

6. Policy making ought to be guided by responsible and inclusive moral vision, taking seriously both opportunities and risks, respecting autonomy and individual rights, and showing solidarity with and concern for the interests and dignity of all people around the globe. We must also consider our moral responsibilities towards generations that will exist in the future.

7. We advocate the well-being of all sentience, including humans, non-human animals, and any future artificial intellects, modified life forms, or other intelligences to which technological and scientific advance may give rise.

8. We favour allowing individuals wide personal choice over how they enable their lives. This includes use of techniques that may be developed to assist memory, concentration, and mental energy; life extension therapies; reproductive choice technologies; cryonics procedures; and many other possible human modification and enhancement technologies.

Introduction to “Fight Aging!” – Article by Reason

Introduction to “Fight Aging!” – Article by Reason

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Reason

Nothing is given to man on earth – struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible – the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.

-Andrew Bernstein

Editor’s Note: In this introductory article to the “Fight Aging!” blog, the author lays out four of the most basic steps one can take. Any person who claims the title of “Transhumanist” would be foolish not to take these basic actions and principles to heart. A Transhumanist should consider these part of the “struggle” they all face, and that they implicitly choose to either confront or evade.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, December 2021

Aging is an Enemy, So Fight It!

Aging saps our strength and ability to enjoy life, cripples us, and eventually kills us. Tens of millions die from medical conditions caused by aging each and every year, and a staggering amount of money is spent on trying – and failing – to cope with this ongoing disaster. Yet the risk of suffering age-related conditions in later life can be reduced for most people through diet and exercise. Furthermore, serious scientific efforts are presently underway to understand and intervene in the aging process – not just to prevent frailty and disease, but also repair and reverse the root causes of aging.

In future decades researchers will assemble new biotechnologies that can defeat aging, restore the old to health and vigor, and prevent the young from ever suffering the ravages of age. Some of these future therapies are already understood and envisioned in some detail, but remain in comparatively early stages of research. Others are just now starting to make the leap into clinical development. We would like these breakthroughs to happen while we are still alive and in good enough health to benefit from them: we miss out on so much as things stand today, pressed by the lack of time and our increasing frailty with age. Imagine instead a world in which everyone has the option of another tomorrow, and the health and vigor to enjoy it, each and every day. But how can we achieve this goal?

The Limited Means of Today, the Biotechnologies of Tomorrow

Present-day medical technologies are far advanced over those available to our ancestors, and as a result we suffer far less than they did. Yet modern medicine can achieve little in comparison to what scientists know is possible for the future. Despite amazing advances in understanding and treating age-related conditions (such as cancer, heart disease, dementia, diabetes, and many others), and despite the cries of the anti-aging marketplace, it is still the case that, for basically healthy people, no presently available therapy or tool is proven in humans to provide more than a fraction of the long-term benefits to health and life expectancy provided by regular exercise or a calorie-restricted diet.

While it is true that no existing medical technology is proven to improve on these lifestyle choices here and now, today, in humans, this state of affairs will not remain true for many more years. If you look to the laboratories, you will see that some researchers can greatly extend the healthy lives of many species, while others put forward clear plans to either slow aging through the manipulation of human metabolism or reverse aging by repairing the cell and tissue damage that causes age-related degeneration. Technology demonstrations for some of these approaches have been carried out in mice in recent years, producing benefits to health and extended healthy life spans. Treatments based on clearance of senescent cells have been demonstrated to reverse the progression of many currently untreatable age-related conditions in mice, for example. The first formal human clinical trials of therapies anticipated to either modestly slow aging or produce limited degrees of rejuvenation started up in 2017, and some of these trials have produced positive results.

A future in which aging becomes a treatable condition awaits us, as time ticks away and, for now, we continue to age just like our ancestors did. This is an era of rapid progress in biotechnology and medicine. As the years pass, the remaining span of healthy life that you and I will likely live to enjoy is ever more determined by the ability of clinical medicine to revert and repair the causes of aging, and ever less determined by lifestyle choices. Thus when we reach for longer, healthier lives, it is vital that we lend our support to the research and clinical development of therapies capable of treating the causes of aging. We must ensure that the public is educated, the fundamental longevity science is funded, the clinical applications of that research fully developed, and the resulting rejuvenation biotechnologies made available – and all this as soon as possible. The clock is ticking, after all, and this is the only approach that will allow us live for significantly longer than our ancestors.

Four Steps Toward Longevity

The following four steps outline a starting point for living longer, a sketch of a framework for thinking about healthy life extension:

Step 1: Stop Damaging Your Health

At its most basic level, aging is nothing more than an accumulation of damage; breakages in the molecular machinery of your cells, a build-up of metabolic waste products that your body cannot break down, the flailing of biological systems that are increasingly unable to cope. Ask yourself this: are you damaging yourself more rapidly than you might otherwise be, perhaps more than you realize? Do you smoke? Do recreational drugs occupy a central position in your life? Do you eat nothing but junk food or are overweight? Do you exercise little or not at all? Do you have a poor relationship with your physician, or haven’t seen a doctor in years? If so, you have a clear starting point. These things can hurt you far more than any presently available strategy for healthy living can help. There is little point in insulating the windows if the door is jammed open.

Find a physician you can trust and talk to about improving your health. You might be surprised at how easy, low-cost, and downright pleasant it is to lead a healthier and thereby longer life.

Step 2: Adopt a Better Diet and Lifestyle

The body is a complex, resilient machine. Unlike our cars, however, we can’t replace it when it breaks down. Given that, it’s scandalous that most people know more about the long-term care of a car than they do about the long-term care of the human body. Fortunately, it’s neither difficult nor expensive to use diet and lifestyle to raise the odds of living a longer and healthier life.

Firstly: adopt some form of calorie-restricted diet, whether straight calorie restriction or some form of intermittent fasting. Calorie restriction and some implementations of intermittent fasting, such as alternate-day fasting, are currently the most robustly, repeatedly proven way of extending healthy life in mammals. While the present scientific consensus is that these practices will not extend life in humans to anywhere near the same degree as in mice, calorie restriction and intermittent fasting have been shown in human studies to provide a range of other beneficial effects on health, such as a greatly lowered risk of suffering all common age-related medical conditions – and these approaches to diet are highly praised by practitioners. You can learn more about calorie restriction at the CR Society website, and here at Fight Aging! you’ll find introduction to calorie restriction that provides helpful guidelines to getting started.

Secondly: exercise as recommended by your physician. The benefits of maintaining a modest regular level of exercise for most people are well-known and well-proven by many scientific studies. As is also true of calorie restriction, these benefits include a greatly reduced risk of suffering almost all of the common age-related diseases.

Thirdly: take a modest amount of supplements appropriate to your age and health. There is a wealth of supplement information available, but much of it is worthless, propagated by irresponsible sellers. This is perhaps the hardest topic to research, and in the end you will have to make a number of decisions yourself based on incomplete or contradictory scientific evidence. The bottom line here, however, is that no presently available supplement or combination of supplements has been shown to provide even a fraction of the benefits of either calorie restriction or exercise, for all that they are widely supposed to be beneficial.

Step 3: Support Progress in Rejuvenation Research

Speaking out in favor of medical research aimed at extending the healthy human life span is just as important as taking care of your health today – even the best of present-day practices will make only a comparatively small difference to your expected future life span. Most age-related conditions are still incurable, and no matter how well you live your life, you will become frail with old age and eventually die from the damage that is accumulating within your body. The aging process causes great suffering for hundreds of millions worldwide each and every day, and absent scientific breakthroughs you will be one of them. Yet that said, we are living in an era of rapid, seething progress in medicine, the life sciences, and biotechnology, far more so than at any time in the past – and we can envisage how aging should be repaired and reversed. Aging will one day be cured, just like any other medical condition, and our job is to ensure that this day arrives soon enough to matter.

A revolution in biotechnology is presently underway, a longevity-focused industry of biotech companies is forming, and the medicine of the near future holds great promise – see, for example, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) coordinated by the SENS Research Foundation and other scientific groups. This promise is not a guarantee, however. It can only be realized if research and clinical development are fully funded and widely supported. The still-young field of rejuvenation research remains for the most part poorly funded, and while there is a great deal more discussion of the prospect of treating aging as a medical condition than was the case even as recently as a decade ago, most of the public still neither understands nor appreciates the possibilities offered by this research. Further, many politicians, funding institutions, and bioethicists continue to speak out in opposition to the development of medicine to enhance healthy longevity.

If we do not stand up in support of rejuvenation biotechnology – the key to our future health and extended longevity – then research and investment will decline. Without vocal public support and understanding, scientists are reluctant to go out on a limb and fight for the funding needed to create new ways to intervene in the aging process. Without philanthropy for the academic sciences, much of this fundamental research will not be funded. By failing to prevent legislation that slows or criminalizes vital medical research, such as happened for stem-cell research for many years, we only hurt ourselves. Do you want to live a much longer, much healthier life? Do you want your friends, parents, and children to live long and in vigor? Do you want to see the development of biotechnology that can reverse the course of aging and frailty? Then you have to support this research, and be vocal about it! There are many ways to make your voice heard on important issues relating to the future of human health and longevity. A good starting point to learn more on this topic is to become a regular reader of Fight Aging!, explore the site, and sign up for the newsletter.

Step 4: Investigate Early Access to the First Rejuvenation Therapies

New medical technologies do not arrive all at once, fully formed from day one. Early forms of therapy become available in limited ways, or existing drugs are found to have an effect on the mechanism of interest large enough to merit use in animal studies or human trials. So it is for the first rejuvenation treatments to have a large enough impact on aging in animal studies to care about, and that are also producing benefits in their first human trials. As of 2019, the most obvious of these are senolytic therapies that selectively destroy the senescent cells that accumulate to cause considerable harm in old tissues. The existing generic drugs and supplements newly discovered to be senolytic, and shown to work well in numerous animal studies, are being tested in humans.

The informed decision that each of us must make for ourselves is whether to wait for more data from human trials, to wait for the most likely better senolytic therapies presently under development, or to strike out to obtain and try existing senolytic therapies. If the latter, there in turn lies further personal research, learning, and informed decisions. Where to find a physician to prescribe the relevant drugs, for example, or whether to forge ahead as a self-experimenter, with all of the responsibility and accountability that this implies. However it is accomplished, it is almost always possible for informed and proactive individuals to obtain earlier access to new therapies than waiting for the world to move on to the point at which general physicians begin recommending these treatments to patients. Whether or not to choose to do so is a personal decision on risk and benefit, and this same calculus applies to any new medical technology as it arrives, not just senolytic rejuvenation therapies.

Final Thoughts

So there you go: four quick steps that provide a solid starting point for learning more about living longer and the near future of rejuvenation biotechnology. Fifteen years ago, when the longevity science community was smaller and less organized, and the first rejuvenation therapies had yet to even be seriously tested in laboratory animals, it required years of discussion and research to make the leap to understand the existence and importance of step 3 – the necessity of supporting research into human longevity, and the fact that there is legitimate research aimed at human rejuvenation to be supported in the first place. Back in the day, information on longevity science was harder to find, drowned out by irresponsible voices in the anti-aging marketplace, and only rarely discussed in public by scientists in the field.

The core of the Fight Aging! mindset is to recognize that step 3 exists, and that your future largely depends on the pace of progress in medical research aimed at producing human rejuvenation. Don’t get seduced by the noise surrounding step 2, produced by the vast industry associated with lifestyle choices, diet, supplements, and exercise, because it is largely smoke and mirrors. You can’t eat and exercise your way into a healthy life that is decades longer than it would otherwise be, and you can’t eat and exercise your way to a certainty of reaching 100 years of age. Three quarters of the healthiest among us die before reaching 90 even supported by today’s medicine, and most of what is sold to the lost and the gullible under the “anti-aging” banner is useless junk. Only new medical technologies produced by the research community can provide the option of living in good health for far longer than your great-grandparents did, and that can only happen if these technologies are funded and developed rapidly enough.

Fight Aging! is here as a resource. Make good use of it, but always remember that the bottom line is this: a tremendous opportunity exists in the research and development of rejuvenation biotechnology, far beyond anything that can be obtained through diet, exercise, and supplements. Don’t squander that opportunity by ignoring it.

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries.
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This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license. It was originally published on FightAging.org.
Crass Transit – Editorial by Zach Richardson

Crass Transit – Editorial by Zach Richardson

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Zach Richardson

Life expectancy is a statistical phenomenon. You could still be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow.

-Ray Kurzweil

Author’s Note: I have a sharp opinion on this topic that should not be taken to be any sort of official position of the USTP.

~ Zach Richardson, Director of Publication, United States Transhumanist Party, December 2021

It truly baffles me that Congress has decided to allocate such a large sum in the recent infrastructure bill towards local mass-transit systems. How is it not seen that ridesharing trumps mass-transit in every possible way (except in SOME cases, price)? Transhumanist policy means ruthlessly advocating usage of our public funds be based on sound reasoning and judgment. As the necessity of congregating in centralized office buildings becomes both unnecessary (due to remote work) and dangerous (due to COVID and any other unforeseen pandemics), mass transit needs to be phased out in favor of ridesharing.

Ridesharing is:

1. More environmentally friendly: Buses take a huge amount of fuel and are often running at only partial capacity. This is an issue all transhumanists should consider, as the climate situation is becoming more urgent.

2. Safer: not having to walk to and from a stopping point means less time in the open, which may or may not be a concern in larger cities. You are also less susceptible to the spread of disease when not congregating in one large, enclosed space with dozens of others.

3. Faster: no frequent stops to let more passengers on/off the vehicle.

4. More convenient: You can summon a vehicle when you are ready to go, instead of having to build a schedule around when the mass-transit system is operating. Most vehicles spend 95% of their time parked anyway.

5. Point-to-Point: No going out of your way and taking odd connecting lines between different systems that take you out of the route. This is an era where technology needs to serve us, not vice-versa, and that means direct connections. Leave hub-and-spoke to airlines (until we have personal jets)

There used to be a concept called “creative destruction” in the economy, wherein a dying industry was allowed to let die, and we need to revitalize this principle. Imagine how bizarre it would seem to be subsidizing telegram delivery services in 2021. Well, allocating public funds for (now) inefficient methods of transportation is just as bizarre.

The sudden plunge in ridership during the pandemic led, of course, to calls for “emergency” funding – for example, in the American Public Transport Association’s July 2021 policy brief. Why was Blackberry not granted emergency funding when sales of its eponymous device declined? Because of the lack of “emergency” funding for that company (despite facing the same consequences of lack of revenue, layoffs, etc.), it was forced to restructure its organization and transform into a successful cybersecurity company, providing a service that is extremely critical to a Transhumanist future. Public transit should have to do the same.

We should not be mired down with hokey ideals of helping the underprivileged when a better system exists for those of any amount of means. Perhaps not making the underprivileged transit experience an hour-long ride in uncomfortable conditions 5 days per week could be a good start. If funding is needed to continue to support that population segment, let it be redirected from less technologically and logistically sound programs to more forward-thinking ones. We could cut the funding for buses and rather than food stamps have “transportation stamps” – a QR code that would give the recipients a hefty discount.

The people of the city deserve this.

Zach Richardson is the Director of Publication of the U.S. Transhumanist Party.

Pasteurizing the Conclusions of an Anti-Vaxxer – Article by Zach Richardson

Pasteurizing the Conclusions of an Anti-Vaxxer – Article by Zach Richardson

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Zach Richardson

I had an unfortunate encounter with a friend of a U.S. Transhumanist Party member who was conducting on his page what I call an “anti-vaxxer drive-by”: shooting out some quick chart with poorly interpreted data that seemingly supports the idea that vaccines make you sick / don’t work / are Bill Gates microchips, etc.

The graphic in question was this one:

The chart in question shows a rise in infection at equal rates from those who got both vaccines, and those who did not receive a vaccine at all. The green bar shows amount of cases where no vaccine was received, and the blue bar amount of cases who again tested positive two weeks after the vaccine. What is the implied conclusion, then? The creator of this graphic wants to convey the message: “Why even get the vaccine, if the rates of infection are just as high 20 days after getting it as they are if you don’t get one at all?”

This post is about why his conclusion is wrong, why his analysis is wrong, and why his ilk are not to be trusted.

I was very lucky to find myself with several free hours of time today, as digging into this took some time. I had to type the source link into the browser a few characters at a time, since it was from an image, and the site itself was in Hebrew. I was pleased to find though, that the site did have the data available for download in a CSV format, which is easily importable into Google Sheets.

The data showed weekly stats on 9 age groups, and how many cases there were in three time periods: one to six days from vaccination, seven to thirteen days from vaccination, thirteen to twenty days from vaccination, and cases from vaccinations more than twenty days ago. This sequence is repeated for cases after dose two of the vaccine. Here is the spreadsheet:

I’ve included the last two weeks in this screenshot, and would like to direct the reader to notice a few things that should stick out sorely after a few moments’ study.

1. For the age range 0-19, the number of youths who reported cases was forty times as high as those who did not.

– Were children perhaps just 40 times as susceptible to infection? This would have been interesting for the person looking at the chart to know.

2. The age range 0-19 actually makes up one-half of the total amount of cases reported.

– Maybe it was just that those who signed up for this study all happened to be children who needed pocket money? That can’t be right…

3. For week the week of June 27 (2021-06-27), excepting the youth group for vaccine 1, not a single case was reported during the weeks 1-20 for any group. The next week never had more than five cases for an age group.

– Ah, good news! Perhaps the vaccine was super effective, if only for 20 weeks.

4. It is not reported how many people total got the vaccine who were NOT sick after 20 days.

-Perhaps the data account for all cases, and all those in the study eventually got reinfected?

There are some big problems with this chart, and the first is that this is a HUGE instance of what we call “self-selection bias”.

Unlike lab rats who have no choice in the matter, humans get to choose whether to participate in studies or not. Adults can easily choose to not report when they are sick; people had to voluntarily “select” themselves to be included in this dataset. Children have less choice. Children are in school, and vaccine testing can be conducted just the same way standardized knowledge testing is: get all the students in the same building, line them up, assign each a number, and have every single one tested. I think this is why youth aged 0-19 outnumber those aged 20-90 combined.

Even more important than that, we do not know how many people got the vaccine who did NOT get sick vs those who did not get the vaccine and did not get sick. Assuming Israel gives out 9,000 inoculations a day, the 30-39 year olds in week 07/04 could have been 248 vaccinated people infected out of tens of thousands who received the vaccine. We don’t have a way of knowing and don’t have that data.

The real plot twist though, comes after one digs into the “README” file attached to the study data right next to the CSV file. Here is the relevant excerpt Google translated:

“vaccination_without_positive_Sum – number of verified people detected per week and age group Relevant, and who did not receive any vaccine dose. It should be noted that vaccinated who received the vaccine dose The first on the same day that a positive result was obtained are included in this column.”

What does this mean? It means that the “unvaccinated” group were those who ran to the doctor after they got sick, got the vaccine themselves, and were only THEN added into the dataset. They got the vaccine too!

The charlatan that made that chart was trying to make it seem like he was comparing data from two groups in a randomized controlled trial, and concluding that the data showed you were equally as likely to get sick when taking the vaccine as not. What the data really showed is that it is very easy to test children who are stuck doing what their teachers tell them for eight hours a day, and also that when the chips are down and the unvaccinated finally do get sick, they change their mind and run to the doctor to get the vaccine anyway.

As Director of Publication for the USTP, I would like to reaffirm the Transhumanist Party’s strongly-held pro-vaccine stance. There is far too much of this junk science flying around, and I certainly can’t spend the better part of the afternoon each day playing “debunker”, but you can be sure to expect a series of pro-vaccine material to be republished under the Infinity Banner.

Zach Richardson is Director of Publication for the U.S. Transhumanist Party.