aging

Transhumanism offers a (delusional, in my opinion) hope to blaze a materialistic path to immortality. Transhumanists yearn, for example, to upload their minds to computers, thinking that will do the trick. It won’t. Even if the “mind” could be uploaded, it would merely be software that mimicked a person’s beliefs. The “uploaded” subject would still be dead.

Now, according to an interesting story in the New York Times, China has apparently jumped onto this longevity train and is devoting much energy and many resources to the life-extension project:

China, eager to catch up with and, whenever possible, surpass the West in biotech, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, has made the longevity industry a national priority, pouring billions into research and related commercial spinoffs.

“They have improved very rapidly. A few years ago, there was nothing here and the West was still far ahead,” said Vadim Gladyshev, a Harvard Medical School professor who has done pioneering work on longevity, including an experiment that extended the expected life span of old mice by connecting their circulatory systems to young mice.

Chinese researchers, he said during a recent trip to China to attend two scientific conferences, “are rapidly catching up.”

Well, that sounds ominous. Are we really going to use the blood of the young to keep the old from dying? Why, yes. Some of the hyper-rich in Silicon Valley are already doing that, including Larry Ellison, who receives blood transfusions from his son. Imagine the exploitive possibilities!