[ExI] Amortality? (Nick Bostrom quoted in Time)

[Christopher Whipple]

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1884779_1884782_1884758,00.html

Amortals don't just dread extinction. They deny it. Ray Kurzweil
encourages them to do so. Fantastic Voyage, which the futurist and
cryonics enthusiast co-wrote with Terry Grossman, recommends a regimen
to forestall aging so that adherents live long enough to take
advantage of forthcoming "radical life-extending and life-enhancing
technologies." Cambridge University gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is
toiling away at just such research in his laboratory. "We are in
serious striking distance of stopping aging," says De Grey, founder
and chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, which awards the Mprize to
each successive research team that breaks the record for the life span
of a mouse. It is "bleeding obvious," he adds, that it is possible to
extend the human life span indefinitely. "Most people take the view
that aging is this natural thing that is going on independently of
disease. That's nonsense. The fact is that age-related diseases are
age-related diseases because they're the later stages of aging."

.....

"The important thing is not how many years have passed since you were
born," says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute
at Oxford, "but where you are in your life, how you think about
yourself and what you are able and willing to do." If that doesn't
sound like a manifesto for revolution, it's only because amortality
has already revolutionized our attitudes toward age.

.....

Earlier in the article the author claims to have coined the term
"amortality" - but a quick Google search seems to show otherwise.  The
article doesn't have anything we haven't seen before, but it's always
nice to see more attention in the MSM (err, I think?).

-c.