Lifespan’s President Attends Alcor’s 50th Anniversary Conference
Carrie Radomski (Wong), the President of The Lifespan Society of BC attended Alcor’s 50th Anniversary Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was one of the most well-attended conferences in the past decade. Alcor’s organizers managed to secure some higher-profile speakers including George Church and David Chalmers. George Church is a Harvard-educated professor famous for his work in both personal genomics and xenotransplantation. He drew controversy when he used CRISPR gene editing to modify a pig’s heart to be used in humans for the first time. David Chalmers is one of the most influential 21st-century philosophers known for advancing philosophical understanding of the mind in relation to all the advances we have made in neuro and cognitive science. David Chalmers is best known for formulating the “hard problem of consciousness”.
David Chalmers posted about our event on his social media.
The “hard problem of consciousness” is the lack of explanation of why we have personal subjective experience also known as “qualia”. A scientist can understand all the processes of a mind’s function including synapses, neurons and observe all the physical processes without having any insight into the phenomenal experiences of any subjective sensations (like pain). Chalmers spoke about personal identity for cryonics patients waking up in the future.
The conference was also a great opportunity to meet like-minded individuals shaking up the world of cryonics. I got to meet Kai Micah Mills, a 23-year-old serial entrepreneur who is creating a new start-up called cryopets which aims to operate out of pet hospitals in offering the most timely and effective preservations for animals. Cryonicists have long known that a rapid cooldown is of utmost importance for effective vitrification and effective preservation. In an ideal world, cryonics would be completely accepted by the mainstream. There would be no delay between the time someone gets declared legally dead and the time the first responders would get to the hospital to move the patient into a cryonics response vehicle to get preserved. Instead, someone who cannot be saved by modern medicine could be wheeled into another, separate wing of the hospital where they would immediately get cryoprotection perfusion by medical doctors and the cooling would be overseen by the nurses and other medical professionals. All the infrastructure and personnel that currently exists could in theory help with the entire process. With the amount of training that medical professionals get in their career, the cryonics procedure would just be another protocol.
Cryonics Underground host, Daniel Walters, Max Marty. Cryosphere discord members/mods Chris, Daniel, Max, Nikki, Jordan, Dan, Carrie, and Whit.
The creators of the popular podcast, Cryonics Underground were also present. Max Marty and Daniel Walters were helping host various panels and recording a live session at the conference. Max, Daniel, Nikki and others have made the cryosphere discord the most successful social media platform for cryonicists. In the past we had antiquated vehicles of communication such as yahoo mailing lists or forums but they have really upgraded our social spaces.
Lifespan President Carrie Radomski and the industrious founder of Tomorrow Biostasis, Emil Kendziorra.
I also got to meet Emil Kendziorra, successful serial entrepreneur and MD who created the fastest-growing cryonics organization in history. He has some challenging ideas to shake up the status quo in the cryonics world, he believes there are many orders of magnitude more people that would sign up for cryonics if it was presented in a different way. Emil is completely mission-driven, he had been successful at his two other companies and he has no financial motive in making cryonics a success. He works relentlessly 60-80 hours a week to achieve institutional excellence in cryonics. I asked him how he works so hard and he said no anti-aging therapies currently work and he doesn’t want to be dead.
For myself, I care about not dying and I would very much like to wake up in the future. I am also extremely motivated to help others survive. It would be a tragedy if no one from the 21st century made it into the future because of our shortcomings. I have been volunteering for life-extension and cryonics causes for 8 years and there is no financial motive. I find we are fundamentally misunderstood by society as a whole. Ultimately, we have some goals that everyone could understand, which is to give hope to our future generations, reduce human suffering and to survive.
