“Becoming immortal – VPRO documentary – 2018”
“Am I afraid of death? You bet I am, death sounds boring, I mean it’s just like it’s the end of everything, death there’s no way back from, with cryonics we’re talking about stopping death, so that we have a chance of living vastly extended lifespans, but death, real death means all the information that was once in your body, all that information is gone, irretrievably, maybe fear isn’t the right word, because obviously you’re not experiencing anything when that happens you’re not feeling anything, maybe a better word to say is a protest or detesting the idea of just going out of existence. (Linda Chamberlain)”
“Certainly it’s sort of frustrating to imagine that there is this ticking clock that we have in ourselves shortening of the telomeres with every cell division and some ultimate limit that we’re approaching, but I don’t actually believe it’s the ultimate limit, I think 80 years or 100 years or 120 years is far too short in a universe with so many things to learn and to do and our brains don’t lose their ability to learn, even late in life, so if we could just take care of the rest of the body and also prevent neuro degeneration, I think there are many other lifetimes that we could happily fill with activity and fun and excitement. (Hannu Rajaniemi)”
“by definition restore the function both mental and physical of the body but that’s very different from the way that
people have historically thought about how to address aging, either by directly attacking the symptoms of old age as if they were normal diseases like infections or alternatively by trying to clean up the way the body works, so that it just ages more slowly in the first place, so I think there’s a good chance, maybe a 50/50 chance that people in their thirties or forties will be able to avoid the ill health of old age, however long they live and then of course the correspondingly better chance that people who are let’s say kids today now if you are actually more than 40 now, if you’re 60 or 70 then of course you’ve got less chance, but again it depends who you are as well, not every one of the same chronological age has the same biological age, I’m 54 but I still think I’ve got a pretty good chance of benefiting from all of this, because I’m biologically about 40. (Aubrey de Grey)”
because the ideas that I put forward were very radical very different from the approaches that people thought were realistic before I came alone and you know that’s perfectly normal if you’re pioneering you know that by
definition that means you’ve got new ideas and those new ideas are not going to be obviously right to everybody who immediately then so you know I feel that if if you’re not pissing anybody off in this life then you’re probably not making much of a difference. (Aubrey de Grey)”
“Silicon Valley is the Olympus of our times where the gods and demigods of Tech have gathered and now make decisions that affect the entire world, so maybe it’s not surprising that they are also thinking about life extension and immortality you can see this kind of Hubris as a consequence of the way Silicon Valley has evolved, because you have had sort of these enormous successes, created by people who started almost from from from nothing who sort of built incredibly successful companies around around technological innovations that that are now worth hundreds of billions of dollars and and effective lives of billion literally billions of people, so if you see that happening in a very short span of time it’s quite natural to say well I’m not going to be constrained by the limits of biology just like we we disrupted taxis or disrupted search or social networks we can do the same for biology but I think there are also examples that kind of show that perhaps people who come from a tech background are not always good at judging the risks and the difficulties associated with biology. (Hannu Rajaniemi)”
“so we can already rejuvenate improve and optimize our cells and DNA or replace entire body parts that no longer function properly
but if our bodies are already simply do-it-yourself kits and you can just
rebuild yourself in anywhere you want what will the people of the future look like, especially if for example you have only had your head frozen at Alcor.”
“Many of our members want to come back in a physical human body that looks pretty much like, maybe they named the age 25, that seems to be a very popular age for people to aspire to, but many like me also would really rather come back in something more glamorous than the biological body, for me personally, I don’t really want to come back as a biological entity, it’s nice, but it’s very limited, it’s very fragile and so my preference is to bring me back, give me a body that’s made up of nanobots, sometimes called nanobots warm, just as the human body is made up of trillions of biological cells that work together, the swarm can work together to create the body that you want and it can be changed anytime you want, unlike a biological body, so if I want to go skiing on mars, on olympus moons, I don’t have to worry about the fact that there’s no oxygen there, I can have a body that can function without oxygen, that kind of thing is what I’m more interested in, personally. (Linda Chamberlain)”
“When I do so I’m a lot more careful than most people to take into account the uncertainties that are involved. What people go wrong is they’ll say, well, okay, so supposing we fix aging , there might be this problem in particular, they’ll often make a completely crazy assumption, which is that everything else is just not going to happen … that the rest of the world or other technology they’re going to be more or less what we have today you know people forget but we’ve got all this automation coming and they’ll say oh dear a bit not do this we’ll never be able to pay the pensions. I mean that’s just so brain-dead when you think you know the guy – the idea of pensions is just gonna have to go away completely, where and hardly anyone even who needs to have a job at all and you know where are we gonna put all the people yeah people will say that but hello you know overpopulation we have it today it’s bad today we’ve got climate change and everything but we’re already fixing that problem by developing ways to make people pollute less, especially of course renewable energy to minimize use of fossil fuels, but also you know desalination, artificial meats, all those things, so the carrying capacity of the Planet absolutely certain to rise far faster than the population of the planet Rises. I mean what’s going on!
Certainly in Silicon Valley there are lots of people who are more like me more I would say rational about this kind of thing you know they understand that their own efforts may help, they make a difference for their own chances or other people’s chances of actually making the cruve, it’s very important for people to have understand that this really is humanity’s biggest problem and furthermore that it’s a problem that we are in striking distance to solving. (Aubrey de Grey)”
“So when we look at the u.s. we look at a country that has the longest life spans and the shortest life spans in the same country due to the lack of access of Health due to insurance companies and their really criminal policies and so you know this is something that gene therapy will give us the opportunity to do is equalize health across everyone, if gene therapies can give be given like immunizations are given today at a very low cost but they have very high value of keeping people healthier longer, the great thing about gene modulation in the future is not just to eradicate the diseases of aging but to actually allow humans to work together to modulate the hormones that drive us to war and disaster and terrorism to take those type of things and actually create genetic profiles that will create people who just work towards the bigger goal and can work together in happiness, in harmony. (Liz Parrish)”