Though we are in the VitaDAO space right now and I did a reference about our current conversation and campaign, this was just a mere example of what’s happening in the field in general. I actually don’t expect more interest and expertise from within the existing community and don’t expect the movie to work for that cause. We are all stretched pretty thin already. The question is how to grow the field in general.
We’re in desperate need of exponential growth of fundamental research. Meaning governmental funding. Meaning a massive shift in distribution of budgets. Meaning life extension has to win as an idea above any other. Win over the public, win over the people in power. Also, not only should we talk about “life extension is good”—this reasoning doesn’t seem to be working—but also about New Normal. Spending your lifetime trying to conquer death is the new normal and the only reasonable thing to do. Anything else is not cool. How does a life of such person look like? Here, the movie will show you (and hopefully many other movies and other engaging and immersive media will follow). It just seems like a waste not to put on camera the people who are already doing what everyone else is supposed to be doing with their lives (not being researchers necessarily but being part of the movement).
And yes, I absolutely agree that we need a measurement system, a KPI for popularization. And I suggest to work out an index for the life extension field in general: does it grow or not? Does the current fuss serves our goal of life extension? Do our efforts in enlarging the field work? Should we be optimistic about the current state of things or not? Different specialists in the field vary in their estimations, and all of them rely on their intuition. But I don’t want for it to be a competition of “I told you so” (which it comes down to eventually). I need to know properly in advance. I need the metric—our lives are at stake here. The metric could be a combination of different indexes or something fun like The Big Mac Index. A number of startups plus the budget of Buck Institute plus the number of TV shows, which portray radical life extension positively plus a number of politicians standing for the growth of research budgets plus… I’m just randomly naming things here, obviously we can’t just summarize it all. But I hope you get my point.
So my proposition (not within this research proposal but since we’re discussing this) is to work out the index for the field, create content on the new ethics, and see how one effects the other.
Going back to the video content: people tend to believe what they understand. And visa versa. If they don’t understand how life extension research work, they ignore it. If they see it and it looks doable, it inspires them to take part, to sponsor, to start their own research, to learn more. And the video made from within is just more sincere and more accurate. And yes, of course, not the researchers themselves are to be making the production—there are specialists to hire (director, editor, camera people…). It’s just we should be in control of the end message here.