Lifeboat Foundation

by RHIANNON EDWARD

a TREATMENT to cure or halt dementia by 2025 is “within our grasp”, Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday, as he announced a doubling in UK funding for research.

Mr Cameron was addressing scientists, politicians and campaigners from around the world who have gathered in London for a dementia summit called by the UK as part of its year-long chairmanship of the G8.

With the World Health Organisation (WHO) forecasting that the number of dementia sufferers will almost double worldwide every two decades, Mr Cameron has said he wants UK government investment in dementia research to rise from £66 million in 2015 to £122m in 2025, with similar increases from the commercial and charitable sectors.

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Applied Omniscience in Transformative and Integrative Risk Management! By Mr. Andres Agostini

This is an excerpt from the presentation, “…Applied Omniscience in Transformative and Integrative Risk Management!…” that discusses some management theories and practices. To read the entire piece, just click the link at the end of article:

Please see the graphic at http://lnkd.in/dUstZEk

This is an excerpt from the conclusion section of, “…NASA’s Managerial and Leadership Methodology, Now Unveiled!..!” by Mr. Andres Agostini, that discusses some management theories and practices. To read the entire piece, just click the link at the end of this illustrated article and presentation:

In addition to being aware and adaptable and resilient before the driving forces reshaping the current present and the as-of-now future, there are some extra management suggestions that I concurrently practice:

1. Given the vast amount of insidious risks, futures, challenges, principles, processes, contents, practices, tools, techniques, benefits and opportunities, there needs to be a full-bodied practical and applicable methodology (methodologies are utilized and implemented to solve complex problems and to facilitate the decision-making and anticipatory process).

The manager must always address issues with a Panoramic View and must also exercise the envisioning of both the Whole and the Granularity of Details, along with the embedded (corresponding) interrelationships and dynamics (that is, [i] interrelationships and dynamics of the subtle, [ii] interrelationships and dynamics of the overt and [iii] interrelationships and dynamics of the covert).

Continue reading “NASA's Managerial and Leadership Methodology” »

Whenever I talk about indefinite life extension, the science and tech behind its development, and the desire for individuals to have the ultimate choice of when and how long they wish to live and die, the radical left almost always resorts to the argument, “Yeah, that sounds great, but then the rich aren’t going to provide it for the 99%. They’ll only keep it for themselves and let us die off.” How is this not equivalent to the conspiracy theory that the 1% are withholding the cure for cancer to the general populace?

It’s a bullshit viewpoint, in my opinion. Yes, the 1% are greedy fucks who care more about profits than anything else, but then, I ask you, how do they expect to earn profits from an extinct species?

While you’re trying to figure out an answer for that, I also find the idea that nothing would result from this kind of oppression to be asinine. Why? Here’s a good example: Black Friday. Every year Black Friday customers gather in the hundreds and thousands in each city, literally rioting, fighting, and killing people, just so they can get their hands on consumer products that’ll be outdated by next year. So if the cure for aging is being withheld from the masses, what the fuck do you think the masses are going to do? Just go home and sob? Ha! There’d be warfare on the streets the next morning.

Continue reading “Life Extension on sale for Black Friday? RIOT!” »

Procreative sexual activity has been at the heart of the evolutionary process for millions of years. Until recently, the situation was simple: a male and a female had sexual intercourse in order to produce offspring and thus ensure survival. But, in humans, there are certain signs that something profound may be happening, signs which may be pointing to the beginning of Radical Life Extension. I argue that reproduction is a tactic used by natural evolution in order to increase complexity and thus, survival. Reproduction equals aging. But, as we now may have the capability to increase complexity through technology, the reproduction stratagem may be downgraded and thus aging will also decrease.

Here, the term ‘Radical Life Extension’ specifically means the abolition of aging. Without the process of aging, however it is defined, people will not suffer age-related degenerative conditions, and they will not die of old age. Therefore, the terms ‘Radical Life Extension’,’ Indefinite Lifespans’, and ‘cure of age-related diseases’, all convey the same meaning: a life without aging. It is important to emphasize that I consider the process of aging to be directly related to that of reproduction. I argue that the process of reproduction is necessarily implicated in the process of aging (in other words, aging happens because we need to reproduce), as explained in my argument number 3 below.

In this context, I would also like to remark that by ‘reproduction’ I specifically refer to sexual (i.e. genetic) reproduction. Evolution may still continue to use (or begin to use) other forms of reproduction such as memetic reproduction and reproduction of noemes.

The main thrust of my discussion is that we are now beginning to witness the first tentative steps leading away from the significance of procreative sexual intercourse and towards the global emergence of other, sustained, non-procreative sexual preferences.

Continue reading “Sexuality, Evolution and the Abolition of Aging” »

BOOK PROPOSAL

The Prospect of Immortality − Fifty Years Later
Editor: Charles Tandy, Ph.D.
Publisher: Ria University Press
Distributor: Ingram
Timeline: To be published in 2014 (fifty years after 1964)

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS

Please look at Dr. Tandy’s chapter-by-chapter summary of Robert Ettinger’s classic, The Prospect of Immortality or consult the 1964 volume directly. Notice that Ettinger’s book consists of eleven chapters devoted to the following eleven topics:

Continue reading “Call for Contributors: The Prospect of Immortality − Fifty Years Later (Ed. Charles Tandy Ph.D.)” »

In is now quite clear that aging is not a simple phenomenon and it will not be overcome by using simple approaches. We need to increase the complexity and sophistication of our efforts in order to be in a better position to develop strategies against it. For this reason, I set up the ELPIS Foundation for Indefinite Lifespans (www.elpisfil.org) which is a scientific research organisation aiming to study aging from a complex evolutionary perspective.

The foundation’s research methodology is based mainly upon the ELPIS hypothesis (www.elpistheory.info). The initials stand for ‘Extreme Lifespans through Perpetual –equalising Interventions’. I developed this hypothesis in 2010 whilst trying to examine the reason behind the presence of aging. It was clear that aging is not an essential component of our evolutionary development, and if we find ways to study why nature has developed it, we may then be able to eradicate it. Currently, the chances of us dying from aging are heavily against us. By developing suitable interventions, we may be able to equalise the odds against us dying (i.e. remove aging as a cause of death).

Our method is different from most existing approaches aiming to eliminate aging. We are mainly interested in the ‘connection-approach’ and not so much in the ‘component-approach’. We believe that it is important to study how the different components of the organism are interconnected and regulated, rather than just repair the individual components. It is the ‘why aging happens’ rather than the ‘how it happens’ that interests us most. In order to make this clear let me mention an analogy with poliomyelitis.

Polio
*How it happens? There is inflammation and necrosis leading to damage of motor neurons and, ultimately, muscle weakness and paralysis
* Why it happens? Because the poliovirus causes it

Continue reading “Defying Aging: The ELPIs Foundation for Indefinite Lifespans” »

By Avi Roy, University of Buckingham and Anders Sandberg, University of Oxford

Men who are unemployed for more than two years show signs of faster ageing in their DNA, according to a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

Researchers at the University of Oulu, Finland and Imperial College, London arrived at this conclusion by studying blood samples collected from 5,620 men and women born in Northern Finland in 1966. The researchers measured the lengths of telomeres in their white blood cells, and compared them with the participants’ employment history for the prior three years, and found that extended unemployment (more than 500 days in three years) was associated with shorter telomere length.

Telomeres are repetitive DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes, which protect the chromosomes from degrading. With every cell division, it appears that these telomeres get shorter. And the result of each shortening is that these cells degrade and age.

Continue reading “Do unemployed people age faster?” »

The Lifeboat community doesn’t need me to tell them that a growing number of scientists are dedicating their time and energy into research that could radically alter the human aging trajectory. As a result we could be on the verge of the end of aging. But from an anthropological and evolutionary perspective, humans have always had the desire to end aging. Most human culture groups on the planet did this by inventing some belief structure incorporating eternal consciousness. In my mind this is a logical consequence of A) realizing you are going to die and B) not knowing how to prevent that tragedy. So from that perspective, I wanted to create a video that contextualized the modern scientific belief in radical life extension with the religious/mythological beliefs of our ancestors.

And if you loved the video, please consider subscribing to The Advanced Apes on YouTube! I’ll be releasing a new video bi-weekly!