The people who have a desire to live forever are a varied bunch indeed. As different as they all seem to be, they have a shared passion and that is to be able to live if not forever than for an extended period of time at the least. They also share this belief with about two hundred other movers and shakers in the field of immortality research who attend the Alcor Extreme Life Extension Conference, an annual event to update the flock on the latest advances toward human life everlasting.
These attendees included an Internet entrepreneur, psychiatrist, an authority in the field of artificial intelligence, a nanotechnology researcher, a science fiction scribe, a nurse and the wife of a professional wrestler, to recognize only a small number of the devotees who were in attendance. These folks paid six hundred dollars a pop to be there so they are serious about their quests.
These individuals are part of what one conference speaker called the “beleaguered millennial faith.”
Most of the human race simply thinks it is wrong to want to live forever for any number of reasons. Remember the 1994 Miss America Pageant when Miss Alabama was queried “If you could live forever, would you want to and why?” The deep thinking Miss Alabama stated “I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.” Hmm…
The extreme life extension campaigners can answer any question in any form of debate – even one as vital as Miss Alabama’s. They will tell you that this kind of spherical thought process is due to a human’s natural and absurd fear of mortality.
The aforementioned psychiatrist is also a member of the medical advisory group for Alcor. He is a unique brand wearing a beret and sporting a pocket full of stogies, he thinks humans have such a fear of death that it is impossible to contemplate it with any form of rational thought. He believes that investigating mortality in an irrational manner is what gave us religion. Placing a bet on cryonics to achieve immortality is only just rational, but it is more lucid thinking than counting on Jesus to give us everlasting life, so says the good doctor.
A lot of immortality believers think age progression is a disease that requires a cure.
According to another attendee with credentials, if you are getting old physically and you are not in favor of it, than growing old for you is a disease and you deserve a cure for it as much as anyone who faces a disease.
The Internet entrepreneur is a youthful twenty something and joined up with Alcor, paying a fee of four hundred dollars annually and then making Alcor his insurance beneficiary to cover the expense. That would be the cost of freezing his body in a vat of liquid nitrogen, for a modest price of one hundred twenty thousand dollars for a full body freeze [Turning only the head into a Popsicle is fifty thousand dollars].
He was asked if he was concerned that Alcor would one day go out of business, that he would be left to thaw out and discarded, or that maybe the technical requirements to reanimate his body would never be discovered, he simply said he was not. He claimed when doing something so unique one had to take a certain leap of faith. The answers are not available just now, but things will eventually fall in line. If a person expects all the answers up front, nothing would ever get accomplished.
As for the wife of the pro wrestler, she was merely at the conference to throw her support behind the extreme life extension endeavor.
The nurse, who specialized in neurology, was part of the development of the Glasgow coma score in 1974; she attended the conference from out of state with her boyfriend, the eighty seven year old president and principal founder of the Curing Old Age Disease Society [COADS].
Miller Quarles instituted COADS who says he likes living and does not see any reason to acknowledge the genetic death sentence to the gallows before one hundred years of age. That at least is what it states on the Society’s website. The Society is searching to encourage the research necessary to halt age progression and support educating the masses regarding their stated goal.
Those gathered seemed in agreement that the saga of Hall of Fame ball player Ted William’s Head was unexpectedly good PR for their cause. They also acknowledged that they were a long way from gaining any real public approval. One immortality seeker suggested that the cryonicists are in no way crazy, that they are just really great and sexy optimists!
If one thing was consistent with these folks, it was their sense of humor about things. They take their quest very seriously but temper the issues with some humor. The vice president of Alcor, Michael Riskin, offered four potential reasons why immortal life is so important to them:
• They are all so astounded by their looming demise that they will attempt anything.
• They are narcissistic to the extreme and think the universe is meaningless unless they are able to experience it.
• They do not have any preconceived answer to mortality.
• They take pleasure in being a part of a mocked minority.
Though Michael Riskin was obviously pulling our leg, the folks at the conference are very serious about life everlasting in the physical sense. In point of fact, experienced investigators such as Aubrey de Grey have devoted their existence to locating the science based answers to death.
De Grey, the British research associate in the genetics department at Cambridge University, outlined a detailed vision for the future regarding discoveries to differing aspects of death and immortality that included metabolic issues and cellular death. He captured the room when he stated “it could be you whose lives we could save”
Fri, Jan 22, 2010
Anti Aging, Health And Aging, Immortality, Longevity