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Comment by exratione | Hacker News Reader

Not enough, I'd imagine.

It has always been a stronger thread in the tech community than elsewhere, but it is still only a thread. Take a survey of your office and you'll find few people who put any thought into radical life extension, mind uploading, and the rest of the visions of the future that were ideas in search of advocates in the 80s and are now in the very early stages of actual development.

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It's interesting to mind experiment with the idea of governmental development of these major, huge time span projects, similar to the way space exploration is undertaken.

I think eventually this will be the way into the sci-fi future we all imagine. A Manhattan project scale plan that would allow them to focus specifically on solving the hardest problems we know and not having to worry about profitability.

I do not think the government would be willing to research this. Despite how expedient this sound, I think that it is best driven by capitalists who wants to profit from it. History has proven to us time and again that innovation is the fastest when there is a monetary incentive. The governments around the world would not be willing to invest in this as this is one of those researchs with a low chance of returns, in addition, it would create a nightmare of political problems due to overcrowding etc. If the transhumanism movement was to pick up momentum among the non-profits, there is a high chance that governments and politicians might try to stop simply because of the problems it might cause, not to mention the opposition by religion organisations. As the saying goes, aurum est potestas, if this was to take off, it is inevitable that there must be huge financial backing by the higher end of the financial spectrum.

As a counter-example, the moon landings were not driven by monetary incentive. In fact, I would say innovation is driven much more by survival and fear. Otherwise I agree.

> and are now in the very early stages of actual development

Can you give some examples? I am curious.

Google telomere regeneration, nanorobotic advancements, regenerative medicine, eliezer yudkowsky. Kurzweilai.com is a good place to start too.

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