Fight Aging!

I note that the Russian community behind the well-backed 2045 initiative are trying their hands at launching a political party to further the cause. There is a website for the Evolution 2045 party concept; at this point it would seem to be chiefly worthwhile as a way to gain some additional insight into the thinking of those steering the 2045 initiative:

The Initiative 2045 announces the creation of its own political party - "Evolution 2045" - in order to advocate for a new strategy for human development. This is a Russia-based party, but its goals are international and global. Our ultimate goal is to inspire other countries to follow suit, and compete not in the arms race, but in the race for building a bright future for mankind.

There is a fair amount of money behind this project, so they can certainly afford the luxury of trying a great many different approaches in the course of gathering greater support for their cause. In this sense a nascent political party falls into exactly the same bucket as the series of international conferences being organized: outreach, education, advocacy.

This all seems to be an idea very much in the air at the Russian end of the longevity advocacy community. See this recent and unrelated item, for example:

we made the first step towards the creation of the Longevity Party. The initiative group of 10 people gathered together in Moscow to establish the first political party aimed at extending human lifespan using technological advances. ... . This is the very first step in the long and hard process of legally registering a political party. ... The next big thing we need to do is to finalize the Program of the Party. Then we have to have at least 2 people in 42 regions of Russia as representatives of the Party and have the founding meeting after which the Party can be registered and eventually appear in the voting ballots. Our goal is to influence the authorities to support life extension technologies and increase funding for research aimed at improving people's health and extending longevity.

Single issue political parties are a long-standing and widely used methodology for advancing particular causes in Europe and further East, far more so than across the pond in the US, though they do exist there as well. In most European countries you'll find a range of these organizations, some more successful than others. The Green parties are perhaps the exemplar of the type, formed around a movement and grown to staid success in terms of delivering their message, with the Pirate parties as another, younger and still dynamic example.

Either way, radical optimism about what can be achieved in the near future - if we just worked at it - is in comparatively short supply in our culture. Visionaries who talk about the path to humanity ascendant are a small minority in comparison to the masses and the talking heads who are blinkered by the present and look little further than the bounds of what is. So more vision and more optimism are very welcome, even if harnessed to a program that isn't my first choice for how to proceed towards engineering greatly extended lives.