Entries Tagged 'Transhumanism' ↓

From Next Big Future:

A new class of DNA-like oligomers made exclusively of nonnatural, stable C-nucleosides. The nucleosides comprise four types of nonnatural bases attached to a deoxyribose through an acetylene bond with the ?-configuration. The artificial DNA forms right-handed duplexes and triplexes with the complementary artificial DNA. The hybridization occurs spontaneously and sequence-selectively, and the resulting duplexes have thermal stabilities very close to those of natural duplexes. The artificial DNA might be applied to a future extracellular genetic system with information storage and amplifiable abilities.

While I’m a neophyte when it comes to manipulating DNA, my understanding after reading the article is that this is the first time DNA has been created from nonnatural nucleosides. I wonder what the potential applications are, if any.

I am a cryonics adherent, since it is the best chance I know of to return from the dead. My personal experience with open discussion of my arrangements to be frozen when I die, instead of buried or burned, is that it makes most people slightly uncomfortable. Many of them feel the need to condemn, dismiss or at least display incredulity. Most people fear anything that doesn’t fit into what they have been taught.

Aschwin de Wolf has written an article called Why is cryonics so unpopular? wherein he speculates that perhaps it is the very fact of thinking about one’s own mortality makes most people so uncomfortable that keeps the rolls of those signed up to be cryogenically preserved so low. He speculates other reasons as well:

In his 1998 essay “The Failure of the Cryonics Movement” (part 1, part 2), Saul Kent stresses that cryonics has remained so unpopular because nobody thinks it will work. One observable implication of this view is that we would expect to see broader acceptance of cryonics as its technical feasibility increases. Unfortunately, there is not much evidence that this is the case. During its existence a number of research and technical breakthroughs have been achieved in areas such as normothermic and hypothermic resuscitation, cryopreservation, and long term care, that should strengthen the case that cryonics will work. In particular, the change from conventional cryopreservation to vitrification should have appealed to critics who questioned whether the neurological basis of identity can survive freezing. But the transition to vitrification did not have any noticeable effects on membership growth at Alcor, or later at the Cryonics Institute. In 2007, researchers at 21st Century Medicine announced that they were able to observe long-term potentiation (LTP) in vitrified brain slices, further supporting the claim that current cryonics procedures should be able to preserve the physical basis of memory.

De Wolf makes a great point in noting that terminally ill people are often willing to undergo experimental treatments, sometimes of very dubious nature, in order to extend their lifespans, or just in hopes of doing so. If people saw cryonics as an experimental treatment for extending life, maybe they would react differently to the idea.

Meanwhile, I figure being frozen is better than being burned up or rotting in the ground.

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Lots of people are looking for long life and health, including Dan Buettner. The answers are really simply if you are willing to make some lifestyle adjustments.

If you are looking for a Fountain of Youth, forget pills and diet supplements. Adventurer Dan Buettner has visited four spots on the globe where people live into their 90s and 100s and outlines how they add years of good life in his new book, “The Blue Zones.”

The answer, Buettner says, includes smaller food portions, an active lifestyle and moderate drinking.

“If someone tells you they have a pill or hormone (that extends life), you’re about to lose money,” Buettner says.

Buettner identifies four hot spots of longevity: the mountainous Barbagia region of Sardinia, an island off the coast of Italy; the Japanese island of Okinawa; a community of Seventh-day Adventists in Loma Linda, Calif., about 60 miles east of Los Angeles; and the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, in Central America.

[amazonify]0345490118:right[/amazonify]The Blue Zones book has received positive reviews, enough for me to add to my Amazon.com wish list. I will be shocked however, if I find more useful information in it than I have taken from Healthy at 100 by John Robbins. I’ve already made several dietary adjustments based on advice from that book, and I will review it here in the near future.

The long lived Okinawans are mentioned in both of these guides to healthier life - it is unfortunate that the virus we call modern culture is infecting younger Okinawans and ensuring that their elders are going to outlive many of them. In our modern memewars, Western civilization is winning. Unfortunately, Western eating habits contribute to a bunch of drooling ignorant slobs roaming aisles of abundance in motorized carts and making the worst possible choices. I’m not sure why it has taken me 37 years to wake up to the fact that we eat terribly in the United States, but I finally have. Now I am busy investigating what adjustments I should make.

[amazonify]0345490118:right[/amazonify] I cannot understand why some Americans are so afraid to be happy and healthy in their old age. As an avid reader, I am constantly reading self-help books. As an avid transhumanist, I am constantly reading books about living healthy and living long. As an avid seeker, I am constantly trying new ways of doing things, including reassessing and changing the things I put into my mouth each day and the exercise regimens I follow.

I realize that many people are brought up in belief systems that espouse that existence here on Earth is just a game God plays with us all. If you practice a belief system that runs along these lines, I respect you. However, I do not understand why it is so hard for some of you to respect me.

I am in Dallas this week (my job takes me around the country to various corporate offices). I was standing in the hallway waiting on an elevator to take me down to lunch today when I was accosted by a co-worker who asked me what I was reading. The mere title of the book Healthy at 100 was enough to cause her eyes to glaze over.

She looked at me as if I had told her the book was an instruction manual for gang raping her entire family while forcing her to watch. I could see an immediate flash of hostility and she quickly blurted out something to the effect of “Never mind, I don’t want to know anymore.”

Is it so wrong to want to be healthy at 100 years of age? Just because most people don’t achieve that I should give up on the idea and resign myself to a short life with a few miserable decades at the end? I can understand that people get set in their reality and resign themselves to whatever mystical set of rules they believe the universe will follow. It still makes me sad.

So few of us want to explore the boundaries of what it means to be human.

If you want to be Dead at 80, then by all means, don’t read books like Healthy at 100. But don’t judge me for wanting a more appealing outcome.

It took me quite a while to realize that many people are very offended by the idea of living forever. Many are offended by the idea of living beyond a natural lifespan. I often find myself asking these people how many years they think it is OK to exist? 100? 500? 1,000? The answers vary but the most amazing thing, to me, is the amount of unrecognized hubris these people harbor because of the flawed memes they have been taught. So many of us are products of our environment.

Why should we only live 75 years? Because God intended it? Because it is programmed into our genes? Because that is how all previous generations lived? Such narrow thinking is silly and condemns us all to death. I do not wish to be a part of staid fatalism.

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor. He is also a transhumanist, and wants to live as long as possible. Wired ran an article on Kurzweil today Futurist Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity. Besides being an extremely long titled article, author Gary Wolf’s screed is a great example of the ire many death cult believers hold for those of us who wan to exist as long as possible. The comments run the gamut, but many of them are disparaging and outright dismissive of the idea of a longer than natural lifespan and the man who wants it.

I’m sure many of these same people believe they are headed for an eternal reward in some sort of ethereal afterlife on an imagined plane of existence none of us can prove. As far as I am concerned Kurzweil is just betting on a different horse, so to speak.

If there is a soul (and I think there is), then the sheer audacity of believing we might one day be able to transfer it to another, longer lasting vessel is not a sin, not in my opinion. God helps those who help themselves. Every visionary throughout history has been mocked. Some of them have needed bodyguards. If Ray Kurzweil ever does, I’m his man. In the mean time, I’ll tip my glass to his immortality. I’d rather party with dreamers and die trying to live than resign myself to a mere century of life on this plane of reality.

So you’re a blogger huh? Maybe even a semi-popular blogger who gets a lot of random e-mail queries from the public.

You may be interested in MyCyberTwin, a tool that lets you “clone yourself” on your blog. Visitors can then ask your clone questions and get responses that reflect what you might really say. The service is a free beta for now, but you should read the fine print carefully before you sign up. Imagine the marketing value of all that data you’ll have to give away to create a realistic virtual copy of your personality online.

Here is an in-depth article:

“We wanted to build software clones of humans that learn about you and effectively function on your behalf,” says Liesl Capper, cofounder and CEO of RelevanceNow. “The problem with creating a chat AI is that it’s very laborious, trying to think of variations on what people will say and then creating responses. Building one has always been a labor of love that takes months, if not years. What we have built is the ability for people to make a cybertwin really quickly.”

One small step in the quest for AI.

I imagine the logical conclusion to projects like MyCyberTwin being a full personality clone; an idea which amounts to virtual immortality. How long will it be before we have methods to either upload or realistically simulate a human personality? I predict between two and three decades.

For the deep thinkers with time on your hands, I’ve included a fascinating list of AI projects, including human-machine interfaces, a critical component of the personality clone concept.

More news for the socialists to rejoice in: fat people die younger. Great fodder for the crowd that believes they need to legislate what other folks do with their bodies.

If you’re a fat smoker, you stand to lose 13 years on the average:

Dutch researchers studying Americans found that there’s a lot to lose for those who don’t lose their extra pounds. Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the data from the Dutch study were gathered from more than 3,450 subjects between the ages of 30 and 59. The researchers categorized people according to their body mass index, or BMI. A BMI of 19 to 24 is typically considered healthy, while a BMI of 25 to 29 is considered overweight, and a BMI of 30 or more is clinically obese.

Among those subjects who were overweight but not actually obese, the study showed that 40-year-old female nonsmokers lost 3.3 years of life due to their excess weight. In this weight class, the 40- year-old male nonsmokers lost 3.1 years of life expectancy. For non- smokers who were clinically obese, the news only got worse for women, who lost about seven years of life because of their obesity, while the men of this size lost just less than six years.

Not surprisingly, the loss is much greater for overweight smokers. When we add the strain and damage of cigarettes to the body’s burden of obesity, the loss doubles, to around 13 years for both men and women.

I think your body belongs to you, but I’d encourage you to take good care of it. We all go through a phase where we think we’re invincible. That tends to fade as age catches up to us. Stretch the quality of your life out as long as possible. There’s no sense suffering any more than you have to in life, and many of us spend the last decade or two pretty decrepit. It’s senseless.

Modern societies produce new things that are simply amazing:

A team of researchers in the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has managed to imitate the complex structures found in ice and mollusk shells, and the ultra-strong material could lead to everything from stronger artificial bone to airplane parts.

Anyone who has had a hip replacement or other body modification done via surgery is a transhumanist, whether he or she knows it or not. By the time I need a replacement hip, I’m hoping it will be better than the original. Some call me a dreamer. I call those people pessimists. If you study what’s happening in biotechnology, nanotechnology or just look at how quickly the lump sum of human knowledge is growing, you cannot help but see that this century will usher in momentous changes.

Many are predicting a near future singularity event. I just want to live a very long, very fulfilled life and well managed technology seems like my best bet for doing that. I’m also absolutely fascinated by what human beings, working together in voluntary cooperation, can come up with.

Many transhumanists worry that the United States is losing its technology edge due to increasingly onerous and counterproductive government regulations. Including these guys:

The first meeting of the World Congress for Freedom of Scientific Research took place in Rome earlier this month. Heart in the right place, but shackling freedom to the modern (increasingly socialist, increasingly bloated, unelected, anything but free) structures of “representative” democracy seems to be a losing proposition these days. When was the last time you voted on the destructive policies - or existence at all - of the FDA? You are most certainly not free when unelected, unaccountable government employees have veto rights over everything you do and own.

This all goes back to the basic question of who owns you. If the U.S. government believes it does, as it has shown through word and deed for decades now, then people will either circumvent government or move elsewhere. They’re doing both. Do a little research on how many Americans live in Costa Rica if you doubt me.

Believe it or not, some small groups of humans spend their time constructively. They follow paths that benefit all of us or many of us. We call them inventors. They should be honored by society. They are such a minority, yet they give the greatest benefit to the rest of us of any group I am aware of.

Geron is a company that manipulates cells in hopes of helping people with spinal cord injuries. Of course, because we live in a society that is only mostly free, the company has to wait for federal approval to test stem cell injections on willing patients. Seems to me that the patients should be the ones to make the final decision about whether or not they should be allowed to receive stem cell injections. I’m not quite sure why the federal government gets to act as intermediary here.

For its test, Geron proposes to turn human embryonic stem cells into the precursors for specialized nerve cells, called oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. Surgeons then would inject the cells into the spinal injury with the help of a special stabilizing frame the company has developed.

If everything goes as planned, the progenitor cells would help form new axons and also turn into oligodendrocytes, which help form an insulating sheath for the axons, called myelin.

The test probably would involve a few dozen patients, all of whom would have irreversible spinal injuries. Initially, the idea would be to merely determine if the injections were safe. But Geron executives hope additional tests would demonstrate the procedure’s effectiveness in repairing damaged axons and restoring motor function in less severely injured people.

The 21st century offers much hope for vast quality of life improvements worldwide. If we can stop bickering for five minutes, great things can be accomplished. Evolve, people.