Fight Aging!

This year's Project for Awesome runs from December 15th to 17th. It is a short and energetic festival of fundraising and video creation in which people give and vote on which causes to distribute the funds to. The event has been growing from its modest start for the past decade. The world could use more such initiatives, and I encourage you to join the festivities and vote for videos that take your fancy at Project for Awesome before the end of the week.

The very first Project for Awesome was organized in 2007, and has been held each December since. This year, Project for Awesome is December 15th (beginning at 12:00pm EST) to December 17th (ending at 11:59am EST). During Project for Awesome, thousands of people post videos about and advocating for charities that decrease the overall level of world suck. As a community, we promote these videos and raise money for the charities. In 2016, the community raised over $2,000,000, including several generous matching donations. The donations were split between two organizations chosen by John and Hank along with twenty charities chosen by the online video community.

This year supporters of the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation and SENS Research Foundation have assembled a fair few video submissions to put forward the case for charitable funding of rejuvenation research programs. Vote for them! This continues a fine tradition for our community, as the best of the organizations involved in advocacy and research to have emerged over the past twenty years were built atop the collaborative philanthropy of ordinary folk. Great progress has been achieved because we came together to give individually modest amounts, and then persuade others to do the same and more. We have led the way. The reason that we can celebrate sizable donations to the cause of defeating age-related disease, such as the one announced earlier today, is that our activity has made this a plausible and noted cause.

The defeat of aging makes sense. The overwhelming majority of the pain, illness, and death in the world is caused by aging: more than 100,000 lives lost every day, while tens of millions more suffer with little hope of help. Beyond the human toll, the economic cost of this constant, massive wave of debility and loss is staggering. Our societies tie themselves in knots attempting to pay the vast sums it would require to merely cope with the consequences of aging - not do anything about it, just cope. Yet for less than the cost of a sports stadium, or the latest stealth bomber, or twelve months of the US National Institute on Aging budget, a complete set of biotechnologies to control aging by repairing its causes could be realized in just a handful of years. This is the promise of the SENS rejuvenation research programs, a very cost-effective approach to the problem of aging. Take the known causes of aging, the cell and tissue damage that causes aging and age-related disease, and repair them.

We would be foolish not to work towards this goal.