I've redone some classic speeches by incorporating an indefinite life extension theme into them. There was, "I have a dream", and Ikes dday letter. I have now redone one of the best most parallel and motivational ones that I know of. This one is Kennedys Rice Stadium speech about going to the moon.
John F. Kennedy's Rice Stadium moon speech, re-written with an indefinite life extension theme
We meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.
Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that the worlds scientific manpower is doubling every few years in a rate of growth many times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.
No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.
Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if the movement for indefinite life extension succeeds in informing the world with in 5 years, we will have literally stepped into the ring with the Grim Reaper before midnight tonight.
This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of indefinity (indefinity is a word used that means indefinite life extension) promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this world was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This world was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will indefinite life extension.
William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. Indefinite life extension will go ahead, whether we all join in it or not, and it is one of the great gateways of all time, and no world that has pioneered its way this far can be a planet of cosmic revolutionaries and expect to stay behind on traversing this MILE to this great goal.
Those who came before us made certain that this world rode the waves of the industrial revolutions, the waves of modern invention, the wave of nuclear power, the wave of space and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of indefinite life extension. We mean to pioneer it. For the eyes of the world now yearn for, look to the faltering gates of aging that lead to the future, to things like the singularity and to the big picture of existence beyond. We have vowed that we shall not see it governed by negativity and greed, but by a banner of prosperity and discovery. We have vowed that we shall not see the future filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.
Yet the vows of this world can only be fulfilled if we in this world step up again to this plate we have prepared so long and hard for and hit it out of the park again. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for understanding and fulfillment, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world that releases humans with indefinite life extension into the universe.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For indefinite life extension science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only humanity occupies a position of pre-eminence where we can help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of destruction. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of indefinite life extension any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of technology or industry, but I do say that indefinite life extension can be researched and mastered without feeding the fires of destruction, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in the united common bond of working to secure more of the future for ourselves. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, indefinite life extension? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 72 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why, 42 years ago, fly to the moon? Why does Green Bay play Chicago?
We choose to obtain indefinite life extension. We choose to inform the world about indefinite life extension in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that we regard the decision on 11-11-2011 to shift our efforts in indefinite life extension awareness from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during our stay here in this incredible existence.
In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex biological advance in man's history. We have felt the headlines electrify and the air waves shattered by Geron’s announcement of the Immortal Cell and seen Geron transform into the even larger and more sophisticated BioTime where they continue to make headlines with stem cell advancements. We have seen the 7 forms of aging damage emerge to the recognition of the minds eye, each one part in a series of killers that altogether cause our deaths, we have gone through the time where the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Foundation have laid them out and put them into labs, the first influxes of funding launching the program to the next level by the great philanthropist and visionary Peter Thiel and others.
Within these last 19 months 1,000s of articles, all the first of their kind, have filled scientific publications around the earth. Many of them produced by places like BioTime and the SENS Foundation, many more of them by Institutes and independent labs, and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than all of the research papers of the 19th, to the mid 20th Century combined.
Michael West, Bill Anderson, Pedro Magalhaes, Cynthia Kenyon, Michael Rose and others, all on their way to the understanding of telomeres, the most mythical of the aging mechanism in the recent history of aging research. Finding the telomere is comparable to Edison finding the filament, that it will throw off light in a bulb, and going to work to get it right.
Prognostication and ethics organizations are helping our cause to steer a safer course. Lifeboat and IEET have given us unprecedented insight and support of dangers and pitfalls, and will do the same for each avenue of research as they advance.
We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public.
To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in this quest for indefinite life extension. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.
The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our bodies and brains, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school. Research Institutions, such as Stanford and Cambridge, will reap the harvest of these gains.
And finally, the movement for indefinite life extension itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies, and many new jobs, fulfilling jobs of meaning and purpose. MILE and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this world will share greatly in this growth. What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and life. Our world will become the heart of a large movement, war on aging, and eventually an entire Transhuman era. During the next 5 years the movement for indefinite life extension expects to gain world support for this critical mission, so that it can increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to hundreds of billions each year; to invest hundreds of millions in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new research efforts in the billion’s from this globe that we call home.
To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year¹s National Institute of Health budget in the US is billions more than what it was just a few years ago, and it has more than quadrupled since the 1970s.That budget now stands at around $450 billion a year--a staggering sum, though somewhat less than what the world still pays for cigarettes every year. Indefinite life extension expenditures will soon rise, we spend 20 cents on every dollar spent by every person in the US, on defense, every year, and as a united world, focused on one common cause, we will be able to do away with much of that negative spending and exchange it for 20, 30, 40 cents on the dollar for every person in the world to be spent on indefinite extension every year. For this movement will give this program a high global priority--even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.
But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall defeat the mechanisms of disease and aging, thousands of reductions in size down past the micron lengths within our cells, with cutting edge microscopes magnitudes of order more powerful than those of just a few decades ago, examining mitochondria and tim tom complexes, ribosomes and proteins, some of which haven’t even been understood yet, these components capable of amazing feats of replication and preservation, resistance and persistence and fortitude, working together with a precision better than the finest watch, being managed with all the equipment needed to unveil their mechanisms, functions, compositions and other secrets, in unprecedented research, in unknown territory, toward uncharted rejuvenation and maintenance, and bring us out of it stronger, better, longer lived and safely, emerging into these stronger forms through a complex process more complex than the computation power of computers, almost as complex as Ray Kurzweil and Steven Hawkings brains are today, and do this, and do it right, and do it in our lifetimes, reaching world support before this Century has reached its 18th year, then we must be bold.
Aubrey de Grey is the one who is doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute. [joke]
However, I think we're going to get world support, and I think that we must pay what needs to be paid. I don't think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job. And this will be done in the decade of the 2010s. It may be done while some of you are still in college. It will be done during the term of office of some of the people who currently serve. But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade.
I am delighted that so many of you are playing a part in reaching indefinite life extension in our lifetimes as part of a great world effort.
Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."
Well, the future is there, and we're going to climb it, and the mechanism of biology and the tools and insight to work with them are there, and new chances to live and know the future and the entire big picture of existence are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask life's blessing on the most grand and prospect filled and greatest challenge on which mankind has ever embarked.
Thank you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouRbkBAOGEw
Edited by brokenportal, 04 November 2011 - 11:06 PM.
