“It is foolish to do anything other than longevity issues, because we are all going to die, and this is so unpleasant ... And I would like to know why this is happening. It turns out that we are dying due to aging.
This process is not really synonymous with time. A set of biological processes. And it is interesting to figure out whether you can influence them, you cannot. It doesn't matter if you are a businessman, politician, blogger, journalist, milkmaid ... Aging poisons your life and death is the worst thing that will happen to you, regardless of your professional activity.
Therefore, it is interesting to know more about this. And 13 years ago I established the Science for Life Extension Foundation, a public organization, I have held a huge number of initiatives and projects, conferences around Russia and the world dedicated to what can be done in the field of life extension. I hope I will do more.
I agree that all this comes into conflict with "metaphysical misunderstanding", in fact, metaphysics is needed, when we do not understand anything, then let us think of something. It conflicts with the religious view that, for example, some kind of plague is a heavenly punishment. And then a scientist comes and deals with this matter and creates a medicine. The same will happen with covid.
And so, the fight against death is a human activity. This is written inside us. Right now the whole world is fighting death.
That is, scientists study the causes of death, and that's okay. The main ones are diseases of the cardiovascular system, cancer and about 17 age-related diseases, but vascular problems and cancer are in the first place.
The disease is often a late stage of age-related changes. But I wonder what is happening that a person, from a young and full of strength and energy, turns into an old one. And now this is our area of interest, researchers of aging.
... Humanity has been dealing with immortality for a long time, but basically this task was taken over by religion, which several thousand years ago said, listen, there is no death, but there is an afterlife and you just need to properly prepare for it and it will be fine. And this idea works well, it sells well and everyone is more or less happy.
But this transcendental story, going beyond the rational, it is quite a few years old, there were many secret organizations - such as catacomb Christians, Christianity was always in sight, Islam in plain sight, then from the 70s the wave of New Age, to which the Raelites belong ... All New Age is also the promise of eternal life. Warm greetings to Scientologists too, only 144 thousand people will be saved, give your money back.
The Raelites shoved an "alien spoon" into a good idea of cloning and turned into an unknown person.
In fact, human cloning is an incredible achievement.
The Vatican urged everyone on, "this should be prohibited." They perverted all bioethics, making a black box out of it, at the exit from which they always say “no!” To any idea! and knocked on the head for progress. But in this sense, the Raelites are great, they raise this topic in general.
In a word, all this is a long and understandable story, because for a person the thought of death is terrible and our brain really wants a simple solution: but there really is no death, there is an afterlife.
And in this sense, I, of course, oppose the belief in the afterlife: there were no facts, no messages came from there, and never once did the physical law cease to operate.
And if we proceed from the fact that physical laws have some kind of continuous nature in time and space, and if our picture of the world is materialistic - what can we do then?
Well, the first thing - then let's deal with aging, wear and tear, which lead to death.
Scientists see about nine, fifteen, twenty-six causes of aging associated with mitochondrial dysfunction, malfunction of one or another part of cells, loss of stem cells, etc.
The theory of dysfunction of the extracellular matrix, the epigenetic theory, is now active. In general, scientists are doing all this.
Received two thousand scientific studies on the extension of animal life. The biggest achievement concerns the worms, whose life has been extended tenfold.
These works are done mainly in US universities, there are some works in Europe, in Japan and a little bit in our country.
Another area is cyborgization and organ growing.
We can roll any cell to the state of pluripotent and theoretically grow it by the body. In fact, any DNA in each of the ten trillion cells or so knows how to be young.
Two middle-aged people can give a “young child” a new life, that is, immortality is in you, more in a woman.
... How can I convince you of the elementary: to be live better than dead.
There is no afterlife, it was invented because people go crazy with the thought that they will disappear and nothing will remain.
Isn't being healthy any better than being sick? How can you demand conviction in this? It amazes me.
At the School of Longevity we talk about the achievements of science, we motivate. Do not eat, move, sleep normally ... Many people will tell you about healthy lifestyles and the like without me, of course, but I would like to say that if you are interested in the topic of longevity, participate in transhumanist projects, projects of radical life extension, you need to join to any group and participate in projects and research, be an active participant.
The quintessence of my advice: become the right people so that people are interested in you, be needed by people in terms of life extension. And such cooperation is like a locomotive and will lead us to immortality".
You can listen to the full conversation with Mikhail Batin here.