Radical Life Extension Conference, September, Washington DC
Supporters of radical life extension research are organizing a conference in Washington, DC, this coming September 22nd:
ImmortalLife.info is presenting a conference in the capitol of the USA on September 22. Space is limited to 300 seats. "Radical LIfe Extension - Are You Ready to Live 1,000 Years?" is co-sponsored by LongeCity and Maximum LIfe Foundation. LongeCity is an international, not-for-profit, membership-based organization (501-3-c status in the United States). It's mission is "to conquer the blight of involuntary death". LongeCity is providing ImmortalLife.info with airfare for speakers. Maximum Life Foundation, led by David A. Kekich, intends to "Reverse Aging by 2029." Maximum Life Foundation serves as ImmortalLife.info's fiscal sponsor.We will have 11 speakers discussing Immortality / Life Extension from a wide variety of perspectives: scientific, political, social, poetic, religious, atheistic, economic, demographic, moral, etc. Everyone who preregisters for the event will receive a free e-book titled "Human Destiny is to Eliminate Death - essays and rants on immortalism." Many of the 35 articles that it includes are written by speakers at our event.
Immortality is a potent word with many associations, as well as being the first resort of the lazy press when talking about longevity science, and there are those in the advocacy community who don't like it being slung around. Success in advocacy is accompanied by a move to moderation in message and a distancing from more radical opinions, for example, and this is just as true in aging research as anywhere else. But there is definitely a role for people willing to plant a flag out there and argue for the most extreme plausible proposal no matter how much it rocks the boat: without someone pushing the bounds of the conversation, how will there be progress?
Link: http://immortallife.info/articles/entry/tickets-on-sale-now-for-immortal-event-in-washington-dc1
How does one register for this conference? What is the cost? Venue?
@Rosemary Ennis: Click through and see, the link is right there:
http://immortallife.info/articles/entry/tickets-on-sale-now-for-immortal-event-in-washington-dc1
I bet some of the speakers will foolishly set dates for "becoming immortal." The idea makes no logical sense, because you can only tell retrospectively if you've succeeded in a longevity breakthrough after a whole lot of people have lived well past 120 years, and in good physical and cognitive shape. This nonsense has to stop because I can guarantee that every speaker at that conference will die according to actuarial expectations, just as Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson and FM-2030 did despite their predictions back in the 1970's that we would have "become immortal" by right about now. How has that "immortality" worked out for these guys lately?
By contrast, we can make dramatic improvements in brain preservation with current science and technology, and without having to postulate anything foolish like the singularity. This promises to turn death from a permanent off-state into a temporary and reversible off-state. Refer to the website of the Brain Preservation Foundation.
BTW, I wonder what Ray Kurzweil's obsessives will say when Ray dies on schedule. I looked up the actuarial tables and performed a calculation with a spreadsheet, and an American man Ray's current age (65) has odds of 22 out of 100 of dying in the next ten years. Think of it as playing Russian Roulette with a 5 chambered revolver, and pulling the trigger once.