Indefinite Life Extension:
Bigger Than Civil Rights and Revolutions Combined
Join humanity’s most ambitious movement. You need your help.
G. Stolyarov II
Eric Schulke
What movement can change the world more than any other?
What cause is bigger than all the revolutions of history; the great Greek, Macedonian, and Mongolian conquests; the Industrial Revolution; the Great Depression; all the strangling famines, all of history’s wars? What cause is bigger than the Civil Rights Movement and the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr.? What cause is bigger indeed than all of these world-changing events – both creative and destructive – combined? The movement for indefinite life extension is here. It affects us all. It can give us all life.
You cannot have peace unless you have your life to enjoy it with. You cannot feed the starving unless you are alive to do it. You cannot help resolve issues and improve any aspect of the world unless you are alive to think and act. All of those causes are great and needed, but this cause is the root of them all.
The movement for indefinite life extension is picking up steam and making an ever greater mark upon the world. It is your choice to contribute to it now or later, but we sure could use you now.
Imagine that, in the year 2090, an oppressor is burdening a society and its economy. There is need of a revolution, but it can only happen if enough people care. Does it happen? Is there enough support? Well, you and hundreds of thousands of people like you are dead; a force this potential revolution could have had on its side is instead squandered. Not only that, but what does it matter to you whether it is successful or not? You are dead.
This thought experiment illuminates the essence of why the movement for indefinite life extension is more crucial than all the others combined. Without this one, other life-affirming movements lose all the would-be helpers who perish needlessly. With this one, all future successes of other causes can continue to mean something to you, because you will be alive to experience their outcomes.
Other causes have saved money, saved resources, saved freedom, saved the world from ecological or man-made disasters, and – most importantly of all – saved people’s lives. However, even the combined values that these causes saved would not come close to what could be preserved by a successful movement for indefinite life extension.
The movement for indefinite life extension can save resources, freedom, and knowledge. Most importantly, of course, it can save unprecedented numbers of lives. All of these values can be preserved to an indefinitely greater extent than possible through all other causes combined. If all the other causes combined are a lake of water, this movement is a river, giving its bounty without end.
The consequences of indefinite life extension would not just exceed all the other movements’ outcomes in magnitude; they would also solve many of the problems the other movements attempt to overcome. Problems rooted in disease, poverty, frailty, short-term thinking, unhappiness, and conflicts over resources would rapidly be resolved once humans become empowered with indefinitely sustainable good health. The renewed vigor and increased time made possible by indefinite life extension would lead people to make more intelligent, long-term-oriented decisions, instead of seeking to scrape out an uncertain existence from one day to the next. All of us would be enabled to grow and learn, to become wealthy through sustained hard work, to innovate technologically, to pursue lasting and fulfilling relationships, and to respect the inherent rights and dignity of fellow human beings. Wars and crime would dwindle and eventually disappear altogether; when life is so good, why squander it over petty grievances and prejudices?
The movement for indefinite life extension unites people. It invites them to reach out to others, irrespective of race, ethnicity, gender, class, creed, or lifestyle choices. We need all the help we can get. Indeed, as this movement gets underway, the potential for generating peace and goodwill is tremendous. History shows that, when there are common causes and interests to unite people, infighting among them diminishes dramatically. The growth of free markets and international commerce in 18th-century Europe helped quell centuries-long religious hatreds, as people found that they could gain more from trading and cooperating than from killing one another. As a result of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th-19th centuries, scientists exchange knowledge and engage in discourse with one another without regard for national boundaries. The desire to explore space and advance humankind’s frontiers led to a mellowing of the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, to the point where these countries cooperated in their space endeavors by the end of the Cold War. The movement for indefinite life extension can unite all of humanity against its oldest common enemy, death itself.
This movement can help retain the wisdom that is otherwise lost in our dying generations. This invaluable treasure would diminish many humans’ urge to fight. It would keep innovative ideas fresh so we can continue to explore them. How many great ideas are lost today because the people interested in them lack the time to pursue them and wither away in the process? The lessons of the past would have much greater staying power, as those who learned them would remain alive to act on their knowledge. New generations would not have to constantly go through and repeat so many of the same mistakes. How much faster would the rate of our progress become, if we do not stumble and falter against the same obstacles over and over again?
A world with the time to settle in and pursue the big goals in life is a world that is less uptight, anxious, and rushed. People would be less apt to strike out in frustration for the want of squeezing life in before being herded in through the cemetery gates, like so many sheep, and forced to go to sleep for eternity.
Imagine now that, in the year 3010, terrorists are holding children hostage as blackmail so they can obtain a deadly virus held safe in a high-security laboratory. Fighting this terror, working out the solutions to it, is a worthy cause. It’s a great, meaningful, fulfilling, urgent cause, like so many others of the past and present. You are still dead, though. Your bones continue to lie prostrate in a hole while the oppression goes on, sometimes right outside your cemetery. What does it matter? You are dead. You cannot help. One of the terrorists sneaks away into the cemetery with one of the kids during a negotiation. For a time they sit there, right on your grave, the terrorist holding a gun to the child’s head, waiting for the right time to try to make this negotiation. What are you going to do about it? The kid is killed; the hostage-taker escapes, but still dies of time’s ravages 30 years later. Time moves on, and new situations arise. Had history taken a different path, the child might have survived, the hostage-taker might have instead become a peaceful and respectable individual, and you could have influenced the situation for the better. But what does it matter to all of you who lived in the early 21st century? You are all dead. You could all still be there, working for life-affirming organizations, developing and pursuing more of your goals. You could receive accolades for the help you contributed to the defeat of terrorists and tyrants. With more virtuous people like you alive, the kidnapped child would have had greater odds of being saved; the terrorist would have had a greater chance of being brought to justice, and would have had a harder time becoming a terrorist in the first place.
There are many causes that need people like you in the future, many that rise or fall depending on the aid they get. Progress can be made or broken depending upon the numbers, experience, insight, and support available. Our deaths harm every worthy cause, but our continued lives bring about greater odds for the success of every single one of them. This is why this cause is bigger than all of the others combined: it is all of those other causes combined. For this reason, it is vital for you to stand up with the movement for indefinite life extension.
One person can do one year’s worth of work in one year, but one billion people can do one billion years’ worth of work in one year.
Don’t be the naysayer on the sidelines, telling John F. Kennedy that his aspiration to send people to the moon by the end of the decade is too big. Don’t be that pessimist in the crowd, talking about how Martin Luther King, Jr., will never be able sway the bigots.
Get on the front lines and keep charging forward with the Ending Aging cavalry. With the weight of the world, the shackles of death and decay are going to break. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when. Don’t let indefinite life extension happen the week after you die. Get on board and help us make it happen a decade ahead of schedule.
The world is waiting. Join the network through ImmInst.org.
