 Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Gennady Stolyarov II. I'm the chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party and the chief executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. Today I will be giving some brief answers to interview questions that were emailed to me by Francesco Sacco. The first question is, what is transhumanism and what inspire you to follow it? Transhumanism is the philosophy and movement that holds that through science and technology, the hitherto fundamental limitations of the human condition could be overcome. Those limitations include the finitude of human life spans, human's tendency toward frailty, disease, psychological flaws and biases, conflict, as well as the constraints imposed upon us externally by the natural world, including the scarcity of material resources, which exacerbates a lot of the psychological flaws that drive suboptimal human behavior. So ultimately the human condition up until now has been shaped by these limitations, but in extremely deleterious ways. Humans have many positive attributes and potentialities that have only been partially realized, but can be more fully realized through scientific and technological progress and their consistent application and widespread dissemination. What inspired me to follow transhumanism is that I see the philosophy of transhumanism as well as its practical applications as being the way out of virtually all of the problems that afflict contemporary societies. We live in an era where there have been many improvements relative to the past, but where many challenges and deep tragedies remain. The principal tragedy is that of our own mortality, but we can look everywhere in the world, just turn on the news and see the plethora of suboptimal human behaviors as well as the wide variety of diseases and material limitations that still prevent humans from living the kinds of lives which I believe are eminently attainable, but they require sustained technological innovations and a focus on accelerating the rate of progress, essentially pushing our species into its next great era. The next question is, what are the long term goals of the transhumanist party? The US transhumanist party holds three core ideals. These ideals were framed in a broad way so as to unite those individuals who consider themselves transhumanists even though there are many different flavors of transhumanism and transhumanists. The first core ideal is that the transhumanist party supports significant life extension achieved through the progress of science and technology. The second core ideal is that the transhumanist party supports a cultural, societal, and political atmosphere informed and animated by reasons, science, and secular values. The third core ideal is that the transhumanist party supports efforts to use science, technology, and rational discourse to reduce and eliminate various existential risks to the human species. So ultimately what the transhumanist party seeks to achieve is a world where politics would play an extremely different role from the role it plays today. Today it seems that politics is used primarily as a divisive forum to split people needlessly into competing tribes that vie for resources and status and sometimes the sheer perverse gratification of denigrating or pushing down somebody. And that is destructive politics. What the transhumanist party seeks to achieve is a world of solely constructive politics where politics is used as an arena to frame policy in order to render innovation as easy as possible. Innovation in a variety of scientific and technological fields from medicine to biotechnology to nanotechnology to artificial intelligence to space colonization to automation including autonomous vehicles to vertical farming to technologies that can help reduce the deadly toll of warfare. We also seek to advance policies that are consistent with a more peaceful and prosperous world, policies that lead people in the direction of more peace as opposed to more war. So for instance we support complete nuclear disarmament, policies that embrace individual freedom and civil liberties. For instance we support an end to the costly and destructive war on drugs and the legalization of mild recreational drugs such as marijuana. We are strong supporters of individual privacy rights. We are strong supporters of the concept of morphological freedom which means essentially that individuals have the sovereignty over their own bodies and their own modes of living and they should be free to pursue science and technology to enhance themselves if they so see fit. And in a variety of ways seek to overcome the limitations of their current biological organisms. Ultimately what the transhumanist party wishes to achieve is a world where every sentient entity is able to live for as long as it chooses and have the kind of quality of life that it chooses and has access to an indefinite abundance of resources which can be brought about through continued scientific and technological progress just as the typical standard of living of an average person in a so-called developed country today would be seen as improbably prosperous to the typical resident of say an ancient Greek city-state or the Roman Empire or a medieval fiefdom. Likewise the kinds of prosperity and opportunities that would be available to individuals in a future transhuman era may not even be conceivable to many people today but good policies can get us there. The next question is what are your thoughts on death and eternal life through technological enhancements? So first of all it's important to make the clarification that the continued progress of science and technology is not going to lead to anything that could be called eternal life right away. Rather progressive improvements in our ability to cure diseases and hopefully rejuvenate cells that currently succumb to the process of senescence or biological aging will be able to essentially attain increases in incremental life expectancy for people. So if somebody who is biologically 60 goes in for a series of first generation rejuvenation treatments that person might come out being biologically 40 but what that enables that person then to do is live long enough for the next generation of rejuvenation treatments to be developed. And then when that person is biologically 60 again he or she can come in for the next set of treatments and perhaps become even biologically younger than 40 so those treatments would be more advanced by that time that person would have an improved outcome. And this may potentially continue indefinitely at the point at which a person's remaining life expectancy increases due to the progress of science and technology more rapidly than the passage of time. This is called longevity escape velocity and somebody who benefits from a society that has reached longevity escape velocity essentially does not have a fixed upper limit to his or her lifespan. So that person may potentially live indefinitely without any upper bound at any given point in time that person may still be technically mortal in the sense that he or she or it could succumb to an accident or an infection that might not have been anticipated. However, the probability of that will also decrease and hopefully asymptotically approach zero over time so the longer you live in a technologically progressing society the greater your probability of not dying. So if the concept of so-called eternal life is understood this way as indefinite life rather than indestructibility then this is an eminently attainable goal, obviously not tomorrow but hopefully within the next several decades to benefit many individuals who are alive today. There are many scientists who are working on this goal. Some of the more prominent individuals include Dr. Aubrey de Grey who has formulated an approach called SEN's, strategies for engineered negligible senescence which identifies seven principle types of damage at the cellular level that contributes and constitutes biological aging and proposes an engineering approach to reverse each of these kinds of damage to essentially rejuvenate cells back to a youthful state. There's also the work of Dr. Bill Andrews of Sierra Sciences a telomere biologist. Telomeres are the end caps of the chromosomes of human DNA and as the chromosomes replicate the telomeres shorten over time and when the telomere length becomes critically short the cells stop being able to function and in an individual with many cells with short telomeres like that that individual will die. So essentially Dr. Andrews is seeking ways to slow down and ultimately reverse telomere shortening in humans. There are many other possible approaches that are being discussed within the life extension community and ultimately the key is to have sufficient funding and public support for research into how exactly effective rejuvenation can be achieved. The moment that this becomes as popular and widely supported a cause as are the wars on specific diseases or types of diseases like heart disease or cancer are today that will be when we have a clear shot at victory. So when people start organizing running races to cure aging just as they do to cure heart disease or particular types of cancer today when people donate at their workplace for their selected charity and have the donations go to a research institution that explores ways to regenerate and rejuvenate the human organism and reverse biological aging that is when we will be well on our way to achieving this goal. This can be done within our lifetimes and this can be done with the support of ordinary people. In order to make these causes popular one does not oneself have to be a trained biologist or scientist one just has to be passionate about this cause and persuade as many people as possible that this is a worthwhile undertaking. The last sets of questions pertain to whether I feel there are any disadvantages to having access to the cure for death and I will interpret that as referring to indefinite life extension and also what advantages are there. I'll address the question of advantages first. The advantages are numerous in fact the victory over involuntary death will be the greatest victory that human beings could ever win because ultimately we have so much potential each of us as an individual is a precious irreplaceable mental universe. We have so many thoughts so many goals and aspirations so many memories so many abilities to perceive the world in beautiful and remarkable ways and have all of that extinguished without even a trace of it remaining is a colossal tragedy at that tragedy happens on the order of one hundred and fifty thousand of these precious irreplaceable universes being extinguished every single day. And the sooner we put an end to that the better so what are the advantages you could do anything you want that is peaceful and respectful of others with those added years of life you could pursue activities that enrich you that inform you about the world that you enjoy that benefit other humans and other living beings. Essentially the field of possibility is wide open right now so many humans make suboptimal choices because of their woefully short life spans if your time in this existence is going to pass so quickly then you may feel pressured to do certain things right away or do so many of them in close succession that each of them is not done particularly well or done at a great cost that really should not be incurred I expect that with more time available to them more people will be prudent and foresighted in how they plan their lives they will look at the consequences of their actions not just tomorrow or a year from now or ten years from now but many decades or even centuries from now people will become more responsible with regard to the world around them they may become more concerned about pollution or long term natural cataclysms for instance the recurrence of another ice age or the possibility of a large asteroid hitting the earth or long term projects for instance sending spacecraft to colonize another world or another planet which will likely take centuries even the voyage to many potentially habitable planets will take many more of today's human lifetimes then anyone today would be comfortable with undertaking that voyage for so ultimately having indefinite life spans will be the greatest benefit that human beings have ever experienced and will transform each of us if we would like to become those beings into the equivalent of super humans we would be creators of amazing beautiful works in our lives we will be wiser more productive more foresighted more considerate of other people than any of us is today or has the incentive to be today so in light of this the first part of the question was do I feel there are any disadvantages to having access to indefinite life extension my honest answer is no there are many common arguments against indefinite life extension but all of them are fallacious and they're very readily shown to be fallacious the reason why those arguments exist is that death is scary and it has been inevitable truly inevitable for the vast majority of human existence up until now and faced with this overwhelming fear of their own mortality humans through societal cultural and religious constructs developed elaborate rationalizations and coping mechanisms to essentially make peace with their eventual mortality so that they could go on living their day to day lives and common rationalizations may include the idea that oh there's an afterlife so in some form one continues existing and one doesn't have to worry about physical death in this world but many of these rationalizations are not religious at all especially in a world that is becoming increasingly secular a lot of people are using arguments like the overpopulation argument oh the world will get overcrowded there will be too many people there are so many problems with that overpopulation argument even without indefinite longevity human populations are essentially on a trajectory to stabilize by the middle of the 21st century because birth rates affect population growth far more than death rates and birth rates have been declining everywhere in the world they have declined to below two children per woman on average in most so-called developed countries and I put that term in quotes because all countries are underdeveloped today but in most countries in North America and Europe and even countries in the far east especially Japan the birth rate is now less than two children per woman so eventually that is going to lead the populations of those countries to stabilize or decline absent net migration from other countries but even in countries where the birth rate is significantly higher than that it has been declining over time with industrialization with increasing educational opportunities it so happens that people tend to have fewer children and furthermore even if all people stop dying tomorrow the population growth rate would be lower than it was during the baby boom of the mid 20th century so this ostensible problem which is not really a problem at all has already been dealt with by human societies fairly well in our recent history there is no overpopulation crisis there will not be an overpopulation crisis even in the unrealistic case of all death ending tomorrow which unfortunately is not what is going to happen with the arrival of indefinite life extension under even the most optimistic projections but nonetheless the overpopulation argument is simply another way in which people try to justify mortality so as to put the fear of death out of their minds and there are a lot of other spurious arguments like the boredom argument oh if you live such a long time wouldn't you get bored well consider the thousands of new books are published every single day and one does not have the ability to read them all so the longer one lives the more things there will be out there that one hasn't done as compared to what one has done think about this the longer you're alive the larger a proportion of existence you haven't experienced that is how vastly opportunities grow relative to the time to enjoy them so as the old adage goes the only people who get bored are boring people boredom should not be a problem for anyone in today's world or in the world of the future and especially not in a world of indefinite longevity there are other spurious arguments like well what if all of the people around the age of die but I do not that's not how medicine or science works if indefinite life extension is available to one person especially a person of ordinary means it's going to be available to other people around them or the so-called tithiness error which states that like the mythical Greek figure of tithiness one gets older and increasingly frailer that is impossible because the very sources of frailty in old age are also the reasons why people die in old age so the only way to live significantly longer than the longest life spans of today would be to rejuvenate the body and to be biologically young indefinitely there are arguments also along the lines of well wouldn't the world stagnate if the same people are around all the time because essentially you need new people to bring in fresh ideas well first of all nothing prevents new people or other sentient entities from being created if existing people continue to live indefinitely that would further increase the diversity of ideas bringing in the new without destroying the old second it is quite likely that the reason for any observed stagnation of individual people's thinking with age is that the brain becomes more rigid as its senesces so if the senescence is no longer a problem there may well be greatly improved neuroplasticity with age in any event there are many more very common surface level objections to indefinite life extension all of them can be refuted with a modicum of thought the only reason why those objections are deployed is because the problem of mortality seems so daunting and has been unconquerable during past eras of human history so people try everything they possibly can to reconcile themselves with death but it is time to stop doing that because now in our generation science and technology are finally within reach of victory over this age old foe and as a great illustration of the importance of a change in thinking to achieving that victory I encourage everyone to either read or find a video representation of the fable of the dragon tyrant by Dr. Nick Bostrom so thank you very much for allowing me to share my thoughts in response to these questions ultimately whether we achieve the goals of the transhumanist movement including the most important goal which is our continued existence depends on the extent of public support available for this greatest of all quests and perhaps the greatest of all challenges that our species will face but once we overcome these challenges the future is bright and we as individuals can be there to witness it thank you very much