Meet the Vitalists: the hardcore longevity enthusiasts who believe death is “wrong” (MIT Tech Review)

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They argue we need a revolution—and more and more influential scientists, funders, and politicians are taking them seriously.

Nathan Cheng has been delivering similar versions of this speech over the last couple of years, so I knew what was coming. He was about to try to convince the 80 or so people in the audience that death is bad. And that defeating it should be humanity’s number one priority—quite literally, that it should come above all else in the social and political hierarchy.

“If you believe that life is good and there’s inherent moral value to life,” he told them, “it stands to reason that the ultimate logical conclusion here is that we should try to extend lifespan indefinitely.”

Solving aging, he added, is “a problem that has an incredible moral duty for all of us to get involved in.”

It was the end of April, and the crowd—with its whoops and yeahs—certainly seemed convinced. They’d gathered at a compound in Berkeley, California, for a three-day event called the Vitalist Bay Summit. It was part of a longer, two-month residency (simply called Vitalist Bay) that hosted various events to explore tools—from drug regulation to cryonics—that might be deployed in the fight against death. One of the main goals, though, was to spread the word of Vitalism, a somewhat radical movement established by Cheng and his colleague Adam Gries a few years ago.

No relation to the lowercase vitalism of old, this Vitalism has a foundational philosophy that’s deceptively simple: to acknowledge that death is bad and life is good. The strategy for executing it, though, is far more obviously complicated: to launch a longevity revolution.

Interest in longevity has certainly taken off in recent years, but as the Vitalists see it, it has a branding problem. The term “longevity” has been used to sell supplements with no evidence behind them, “anti-aging” has been used by clinics to sell treatments, and “transhumanism” relates to ideas that go well beyond the scope of defeating death. Not everyone in the broader longevity space shares Vitalists’ commitment to actually making death obsolete. As Gries, a longtime longevity devotee who has largely become the enthusiastic public face of Vitalism, said in an online presentation about the movement in 2024, “We needed some new word.”

Full story: Meet the Vitalists: the hardcore longevity enthusiasts who believe death is “wrong” (MIT Tech Review)

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The problem is that the question of priorities is more complex. So if you are say living in Ukraine and the Russians are invading then what happens in 20 years has a lower priority. Similarly if you don’t have enough food to eat or accommodation then that is a priority.

At the same time this is a scientific question as not therefore necessarily something that the solution of which is entirely linked to the magnitude of the sums allocated.

My personal view is that it is worth spending time looking at the science. I am not so inclined to focus on the arguments as to whether or not is worth looking at the science or whether the priority should be lifespan or healthspan is a good use of time.