<HTML><BODY STYLE="font:10pt verdana; border:none;"><DIV> </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <DIV style="FONT: 10pt Arial">----- Original Message -----</DIV> <DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt Arial; COLOR: black"><B>From:</B> Reason</DIV> <DIV style="FONT: 10pt Arial"><B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, June 09, 2004 9:49 PM</DIV> <DIV style="FONT: 10pt Arial"><B>To:</B> ExI chat list</DIV> <DIV style="FONT: 10pt Arial"><B>Subject:</B> RE: [extropy-chat] How are we going to do this?</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <P><BR>--> Michael Howell<BR>>I've got a question, I've seen numerous scenarios about amazing<BR>>possibilities the future holds for expanding human potential:<BR>>Intelligence Amplification, Uploading, Immortality, etc... But<BR>>how are we actually going to DO this. It seems to me that there<BR>>are two main obstacles:<BR>><BR>>1) Financial: The above technologies are going to be expensive.<BR>>Unless you volunteer to be a lab rat, you're going to have to<BR>>consider how to acquire the money.<BR><BR>I've written briefly on this topic:<BR><BR>http://www.fightaging.org/archives/000057.php<BR><BR>As medicine improves - and improves faster thanks to the efforts of<BR>researchers, educators, businesspeople, advocates and other pro-research<BR>folks - we will have access to ever more options for living longer, healthy<BR>lives. Those options are unlikely to be free, however, especially in the<BR>early years of availability. The cost of any given medical treatment drops<BR>as marketplace competition sets in and the technology is improved, but most<BR>medical expenses require planning.<BR><BR>That said, what sort of medical expenses should you plan on for a future<BR>that involves real anti-aging medicine? If I knew the answer, I'd go into<BR>business as a fortune teller (and make a killing on the stock market). I<BR>think, however, that there are some useful guesstimates that we can make<BR>based upon possible events down the road, the plausible future of<BR>regenerative medicine, and the way in which medical pricing has behaved in<BR>the past.<BR><BR>...<BR><BR>Reason<BR>Founder, Longevity Meme</P> <P> </P> <P> Interesting idea, except for one thing as far as I see. A number of Transhumanists have written and talked about the Singularity, I'll assume everyone knows what I'm talking about, it's possibilities and it's dangers. If the Singularity is approaching as fast as some theorists say, are we going to have enough time to wait for the cost to go down?<BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>extropy-chat mailing list<BR>extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org<BR>http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat<BR></P></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>