Fight Aging!

Have I really been writing an engineered longevity advocacy blog for five years? It seems so. The raison d'etre remains the same as outlined in past years:

This is a game in which all who choose to win will win big, should enough of us choose to win - but otherwise we all lose, suffer and die far sooner than we might. Significant progress in healthy life extension science requires the widespread support and understanding necessary for large-scale funding, just as it requires the early advances in science and advocacy that encourage that support.

...

Life is good, and the future is golden - you stand a good chance of living to see far more of it if you step up to the plate and help support the scientists who will make it happen.

Present miseries and woes, economic or otherwise, are always transient. The overall trajectory of human endeavor is an accelerating upward slope, and this despite the procession of momentary pitfalls. We are all extremely fortunate to live in an era of technological progress that can provide many of us a chance at living far longer healthy lives - if we band together, seize the day, and make it happen.

The worst of all possible futures, to my eyes at least, is the one in which we let slip away the chance to develop the technologies capable of repairing aging. A golden future it would still be, but one we would not live to enjoy, and whose inhabitants would build the biomedical wonders we could have achieved had we but set our minds to it.

Our knowledge of what causes aging is far and away definitive enough for development to be moving far more rapidly than it presently is. This state of affairs is a grand shame in the making, that we could be working more aggressively towards alleviating the greatest cause of suffering and death in the world - but are not.

Let's look at the dimensions of the human holocaust that we call "natural death."

The death toll in the Year 2001 was worst in India. Almost 9 million casualties. The bodies were piled nearly as high in China. The United States fell in third, with 2.4 million fatalities. 21 nations lost over half a million lives, each. These 21 countries represented all cultures, races, creeds, and continents. The human death toll in the Year 2001 from all 227 nations on Earth was nearly 55 million people, of which about 52 million were not directly caused by human action, that is, not accidents, or suicides, or war. They were "natural" deaths.