Fight Aging!

The next conference put on by the 2045 Initiative will be held in mid-June in New York. The initiative is backed by a wealthy Russian businessman and aims to move from biological bodies and minds to machine bodies and minds as rapidly as possible. This is not my favored path to greatly enhanced longevity - largely for reasons of efficiency and speed, as I've outlined in the past - but it is at least promising that the world's high net worth individuals are starting to see that they can do a great deal to change the state of human longevity. The costs of doing so have fallen to the point at which one billionaire could push the research and development community in the right direction by following the standard playbook for encouraging the foundation and growth of a research and development community.

Every movement has its quirks, and it remains to be seen where the focus on engineering of human culture and building bridges to religious communities, wrapped into the work on artificial bodies, will take the 2045 initiative. I'd certainly be more comfortable with more of a focus on technology and less on societal engineering involving religion. The latter has a lot of failure modes, amply demonstrated throughout history in many large and small groups:

The second international Global Future 2045 congress will take place on 15-16 June 2013 at the Lincoln Center in New York, and will be focused on discussion of a new evolutionary strategy for humanity aimed at overcoming the 21st century's civilization challenges. The strategy is based on carrying out two revolutions: spiritual and sci-tech. We believe this is the only way to overcome existing crises.

At the congress, a vision will be presented for the spiritual transformation of humanity, and new technologies will be demonstrated which are likely to form the basis of the sci-tech revolution. The congress will also showcase our Avatar science mega-project, aimed at accelerating the creation of technologies enabling a gradual transition from our biological bodies to an increasingly advanced artificial carrier of the human self.

The first GF2045 congress took place in Moscow in February 2012. Its main goal was a discussion of global threats and opportunities arising from the development of new technologies, and the formulation of recommendations for the realization of the optimal scenario for the future with regard to the expected usage of these technologies. In the world of international science, this was the first time at this level and in this form, that not only the key directions of innovations in the coming decades were examined, but also their ethical and philosophical aspects.

The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.

The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual's personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world's major spiritual traditions, science and society.

Link: http://www.gf2045.com/