Yes, I operate the website, though it would be prudent for me to acknowledge the phenomenal contributions from my readers as well.

> The first thing I need to do is inform you that your websites name is a bit close that of a some friends of mine. Have you ever been to the Betterhumans website? It is at http://betterhumans.com. Pretty close, eh?

Uncomfortably close, and I'll explain over the remainder of my reply.

> You and they have much in common although you haven't, at least from what I can tell from what little I've readoso far and mainly the quote I'll place bellow from your site that I wish to discuss, quite yet made the leap of intellect that I know you're capable of just from reading your writing that they at Betterhumans have regarding the quest for betterment of humanity. Bare with me all will become clear.

> In your blog you wrote a nice piece regarding the purpose of humanity without a belief in magic bunnies and such. I agree with all that you wrote except for the following quote:

> You wrote, "The truth is, you are going to die some day, and then you will no longer exist, and there's nothing you can do about it."

> Myself and my friends of Betterhumans are all, perhaps you've heard the term, what is known as Transhumanists. Transhumanism is an ever wider and every day gaining more and more momentum, movement of people that feel like you and I. However, it has a little something just a little beyond what I've seen so far of your goals. We all for sure seek to improve human beings and our situation and most of us see it as a secular endeavor but...In our pursuit of a Better Humanity we are working diligently to banish death (yes I did say death) in as many forms as possible and along with it the so called, "natural process of aging". There is nothing natural, as the term is often used to denote "goodness" or "wholesomeness", at all about aging!

> We can now, as never was possible in the past, actually seek the goal of "Physical Immortality" (*see note below), we have the technology.

My friend, I know you believe you come to me with open arms and perhaps some wisdom to impart but I have some hard truths that you need to read. Before I begin however, please understand that I believe you are a good person and that you believe your intentions are noble, but I must attempt to expose to you the 'fallout' of what you and your society purports. I'll apologize in advance for the abruptness of what I write for I need to be very direct in my response. I will also utilize 'you' as the focal point of my diatribe, but please consider this more as a euphemistic term that addresses the 'transhumanism' paradigm as a whole, and not solely a personal assault.

I have perused your "betterhumans" (with an 'S') website, and the transhumanism website and I am very concerned with the approach your society takes in order to propagate its ideals. The most glaring point is that you utilize the word 'immortality' as a product. This, in and of itself, I'm afraid is quite unforgivable. Despite the caliber of scientific support you declare (be it scientists, inventions, knowledge, etc.), you have absolutely 'no' ability to give anyone immortality. Any usage of this word is simply fantasy, and any attempt to 'sell' fantasy (you do have a structure for paid membership, as well as various forms of sponsor advertising), is nothing more than a religion, and as such falls under our mission statement.

Now, you do exercise many other channels of value in your website, but I hope to make obvious to you and others just how inordinately valuable the concept of 'immortality' is, and how a great many of your inevitable members are going to be driven to join based upon this sole factor alone. Immortality is your product, no matter how much you cloud it with a plethora of other facets (longevity, science, MPrizes, etc.)

Let me describe what I see as your structure and please feel free to correct any misperceptions I may have about your establishment. Your people have become aware of the many genetic, environmental, and chemical techniques that can be applied to living cells (particularly in mice experiments) in order to radically increase their longevity (starvation, gene therapy, etc.) and have extrapolated this longevity concept far into the future when the technology could eventually mature to the point at which human aging can theoretically be halted.

Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this perception. It seems quite a logical extension from the pattern of increasing longevity we can demonstrate in science today, and for the most part, I'm not opposed to the conjecture that we might be able to phenomenally increase the length of our lives, 'however', there is an incredible chasm separating increased longevity, and the what people perceive as 'immortality'. The word 'immortality' itself conjures up notions of invincibility, if not the traditional affiliation with the super-natural; but even within 'your' definition of 'immortality' (that being simply not aging), none of the technologies you list can even 'begin' to approach accomplishing 'eternal life'.

You see, if your product was merely to demonstrate and educate how technology can increase the length of one's lifespan, then you'd be justified in collecting membership fees, since the people that sign up for your society would be getting exactly what they expect: longevity-related information. However, when you introduce the word 'immortality', you are now misleading people because this feat will 'always' be impossible to accomplish, at least within the contemporary understanding of eternal life (I will justify this statement below).

The bulk of your product is somewhat reasonable, but it's your claim of immortality that is going to hook people into your membership money-engine (as you are probably aware), even though there's absolutely 'zero' chance that immortality will ever be possible for those members. You offer a potential cure for people's fear of death (something that longevity alone doesn't address) and yet all you can give them is unfounded 'hope' (while making cash in the meantime). You are preying on the desperate and afraid, and that is evil. You need to recognize that you are employing the very same 'lewd' sales tactics that all religions utilize, and that is nothing short of selling the ubiquitously-desired 'eternal life', which is not yours to offer.

As for the rest of your product; you produce a nice website with much information showing various techniques of longevity and quality-of-life enhancement. It is my opinion that your society would be largely morally redeemed if it were to stricken usage of the word 'immortality'.

> So as you can see a very great many people with similar goals to your own fully believe we can re-engineer ourselves for Physical Immortality.

Again, it is ridiculous to assume that 'immortality' is the end product of the fully matured science of longevity enhancement. Longevity enhancement techniques require some type of 'slowing' or 'repairing' function in order to be effective. This may be practical on the cellular level, but what is missing from your equations are the more macro-scale side-effects that cannot be remedied. For example, starvation techniques for longevity are obviously very painful, and even if that pain could be usurped, there is still a net amount of energy required for the brain to function properly. It doesn't sound like a very high quality of life to be perpetually 'spaced-out' just to add a few more years to your life.

How about gene-therapy? The real benefit of this technology is to be able to remove, compensate for the lack of, repair, or regulate genes. Admittedly, gene-therapy will go a 'long' way to purifying the many defects that humans have evolved and it will cure a huge plethora of hereditary diseases as this technology progresses, but it still nowhere near addresses anything that could be construed as pursing immortality. Even the most 'perfect' human DNA will create an individual that will eventually die.

Death is not a 'disease' like your mantra would lead us to believe, it is how we are built. Claiming it to be a 'disease' conjures up notions of it being 'curable', which it's not. Every single facet of our makeup is made to expire, from the individual cell, to our continuously changing macro-physiological and psychological progression through our lives. Any belief that this progression can be 'suspended' completely fails in understanding the biological consequences of doing so. Immortality in the form that your website describes (that being 'not aging') can 'only' be accomplished via a 'perfect' cellular exchange, meaning that as one cell dies, another exact replica must 'precisely' replace it. Anything else just mathematically results in a changing (aging) human form, and this changing human form eventually ages too far from a working organism's design. We 'cannot' stop growing, and we are only designed to grow for so long before we degrade in function to the point of inoperation.

Even with longevity enhancement alone, there would be a plethora of side-effects that our current lifespans do not reveal to us. Physical problems aside, there are many psychological issues that arise from a long life, such as the brain's tendency to age into inevitable senility, or the maturing agenda of the instincts that represent themselves with different intensities at different times in our lives, more or less defining our personalities. Sure the body might last a very long time, but the brain's age can produce some quite undesirable age-related consequences, which means we'd also have to technologically address brain-age issues, which is entirely different than the much simpler cellular longevity issues. Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to this pursuit, but I'm trying to demonstrate the sheer complexity of longevity enhancement; it's not as simple as keeping the cells healthy.

Then there's 'stem-cell therapy' which effectively translates into organ replacement. This technology exists even today, where independent organs can be regrown in a lab to be used as a replacement for someone's aging innards. There's nothing wrong with this at all (though many people are so inappropriately horrified by the notion that they equate this to immoral or unethical) but it will be impossible to do this for the brain within which our precious consciousness is locked. Replace the brain, and you've killed the original person.

Then there's the technological 'replacement' approach. This concept is at least forgivable in that our technology is rapidly approaching a level of robotic prosthetics that we might be able to forego finding a biological solution to longevity, and just become cyborgs. I actually very much like this idea because it's quite possible as well as enchanting due to the whispers of 'super-human' powers that may be just over the technological horizon. That aside, we still have the same issue as above, you can't use a prosthetic brain to live forever (I'll support that statement next).

Then there's your 'doppleganger' solution. Effectively your 'construct' (for lack of a better generic word) instructions are stored in some way such that should you meet with inclement injury and cease to exist, we can recreate you again from scratch. This may take on many conceivable forms, such as zygote DNA-replacement so that you'd grow again, or even the fantasical notion of atomic reconstruction so that you'd keep your memories up to the moment that your construct was recorded. Seems like immortality would be accomplished wouldn't it?..except that it wouldn't really be you, no more than if you had an identical twin. In this scenario, if you died, and then another one of you was created, it wouldn't be you. The best way to appreciate this would be if you didn't actually die, and yet they made another one of you anyway. Nothing says they can't do that, so there you are, and there you are. Are you both of them? Of course not. You are still the original, but now you have a perfect twin. Eerie, fascinating, but definitely not the form of immortality that people would invest in.

How about consciousness-transferral? Effectively moving your consciousness out of the brain, into a machine (obviously this technology is very far into the future). This seems logically the best way to keep your consciousness intact forever, by making the supporting apparatus indestructible. The first question you have to ask is, how do you get around just creating another twin of yourself as in the 'doppleganger' solution above? The answer is: you can't. I suppose the closest approach to trying to solve this 'twin' problem would be to painstakingly replace the brain, cell by cell, with the technological equivalent, such that over time the entire brain would eventually be entirely replaced with technology, and the consciousness of the person involved was completely oblivious to the transition (except perhaps for the gradual increase in thinking prowess that the growing artificial brain was granting). Once the entire brain has been replaced with technology, it seems a simple feat to virtualize this consciousness and not bound it to just one apparatus and it should theoretically be possible for this consciousness to bounce from apparatus to apparatus; the consciousness, after all, is now just a neural-net pattern in a computer.

Unfortunately, living as a machine cannot possibly be fulfilling because the instincts won't be naturally stimulated as they have now become obsolete by your new form. You may decide to remove that portion of your programming that requires instinctual placation but the second you start removing those instincts, you'll find that there's no way to feel pleasure, and without pleasure, there's no point in living. Perhaps instead we could just feed the instincts electronically. Now your entire existence has been reduced to that of a pleasure junkie that has no need for humans and is just a neural net in some machine playing out continuous orgasms. Death by pleasure.

Ok, I've probably gone a bit too far to make my point (love that sci-fi stuff), but what I'm getting at is that the brain itself is the perpetual barrier to immortality. The brain, like the rest of our bodies, is simply designed to die, and that cannot be changed, or effectively stifled in a way that does not adversely affect the quality of life of the person involved. Unlike our bodies that can have any piece of it replaced, there is no realistic replacement for our brains that doesn't somehow boil down to dopplegangerism.

What all of this means is that, sure, we have the potential to live very long lives, but our consciousness is what we are all ultimately looking to perpetuate infinitum. This pursuit cannot help but lead to the inevitable dehumanization of this consciousness, and it is at this point I volunteer that you are truly dead, and only your doppelganger consciousness lives on. I sincerely doubt that people paying membership fees to your organization are seeking this as a solution to death.

Your selling the notion of 'immortality' makes no more sense than selling real-estate on the Moon. The only thing I see of your society and its buzzword 'transhumanism' is a fantasy-based religion with a modern-day science hat, no less conspicuous than scientology's sinister attempt to mislead followers with science fiction psycho-babble that expands upon current understanding into the realm of fantasy.

I know that I am being somewhat antagonistic, but I hope it demonstrates the seriousness of your society's moral infraction.

> I hope you don't think we're all off our collective rockers.

Not at all. It takes a clever mind to leverage people's hopes and fears into a lucrative business.

> Now we can do so much better than merely make life a slight bit better than we had. We can and we will give our progeny the gift of Physical Immortality.

The only thing that will make life better for people is for them to learn to address their fears, not to invest in false hopes.

Kind regards,

Sean Sinjin