From the very beginning of the space age, marked by the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957, space travel has been constrained by the fact that rockets are single-use instruments. A rocket’s job is to carry a spacecraft beyond Earth’s atmosphere, at which point the spacecraft detaches from the rocket and fires its own engine designed for the vacuum of space. Once its job is done, the rocket tumbles back down to Earth, burning up as it re-enters the atmosphere. Any surviving pieces sink to the ocean floor. For this reason, each journey into space requires building a new rocket, with its short lifespan in mind. Predictably, sending humans and cargo into space has retained a prohibitive cost – currently $7,000 per kilogram. As long as the cost remains this high, space exploration will be limited to exorbitantly priced excursions conducted by a handful of astronauts. Until recently, at least, this was the status quo for space travel.

Now there is a new hope for humanity’s future in space. On December 21, 2015, the longstanding obstacle to space travel was finally surpassed. For the first time in history, a rocket landed back on Earth, fully intact, after detaching from its spacecraft. The rocket landing was achieved by SpaceX, a space exploration startup with a mission to radically reduce the cost of space travel. SpaceX’s CEO, Elon Musk, most famous for being the CEO of Tesla, has long argued that the ability to reuse rockets is “the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space.”

The rocket – called a Falcon 9 – lifted off from a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a spacecraft containing 11 commercial satellites. The rocket achieved a top speed of 5,000 kilometres per hour, one kilometre per second, during its upward flight before detaching from the spacecraft, which went on to deploy the satellites into orbit. The rocket then executed what Musk describes as a “screeching U-turn” in space. During its descent back down to Earth, the Falcon 9 rocket fired its engines to decelerate and finally slowed to a hover just before delicately touching down on the landing zone to the cheers of hundreds of SpaceX employees gathered at the mission control centre.

[With a reusable rocket] the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred.

Driven by a vision of reusable rockets, SpaceX has attempted eight rocket landings since 2013. The first seven rockets were all destroyed on impact. The seventh attempt, on April 14, 2015, came tantalizingly close to success. SpaceX’s self-sailing ship — called Just Read the Instructions — served as a mobile ocean landing zone for an incoming Falcon 9 rocket. Ocean landings provide more flexibility in a rocket’s trajectory back to Earth, which is a requirement for higher velocity missions, even if the ship is a smaller target that rocks with the waves, posing a greater challenge than touching down on land. The seventh rocket reached its target with perfect accuracy, but came down too hard and broke one of its landing legs. It stood askew for a few seconds before toppling over, exploding spectacularly as it hit the ship’s deck. As SpaceX’s repeated failures attest, landing a rocket leaves little margin for error.

SpaceX’s successful landing of a rocket was the first, crucial step toward reusability. The next milestone is launching a landed rocket to prove that it can be used a second time. SpaceX will most likely make an attempt to re-launch a rocket this year if it can successfully land a second rocket; the first successfully landed rocket will be kept as a historical artifact. On January 17, SpaceX again attempted to, unsuccessfully, land a rocket on Just Read the Instructions.

To understand the significance of SpaceX’s achievement, compare space travel to air travel. “Imagine if aircraft were thrown away after each flight,” Musk said at an event at SpaceX headquarters in 2014. “No one could afford to fly.” A non-reusable rocket is like an airplane without any landing gear. At the destination, the passengers parachute off, allowing the plane to crash safely into the ocean. Tickets are exorbitantly priced, since tickets for one trip have to cover the full lifetime cost of the plane. This absurd wastefulness — and expense — has been the reality in space travel for nearly sixty years.

Reusable rockets open up the possibility of a new era of commercial space travel at the scale of present-day commercial air travel. Everything up until now has been a dress rehearsal.

Putting the numbers in context, the cost of commercial airplanes often exceeds the cost of a Falcon 9 rocket. For instance, a Boeing 747 airliner sells for $540 million, enough to buy six Falcon 9 rockets at $90 million each. At $300,000, the cost of refueling a Boeing 747 and a Falcon 9 are the same. A “single-use” airplane would cost several times over a standard rocket, it is only because of the airplane’s reusability that relatively affordable flights are possible. If, according to Musk, when rockets are no longer thrown away after every launch, “the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred.” That is to say, the cost of sending objects into space will drop from $7,000 per kilogram to as low as $70 per kilogram: the economic barrier to space that has persisted since Sputnik will be drastically reduced.

Reusable rockets open up the possibility of a new era of commercial space travel at the scale of present-day commercial air travel. Everything up until now has been a dress rehearsal. It is now that we can finally say that the real space age has begun.

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Divestment doesn’t work as an economic tactic because it doesn’t actually limit fossil fuel companies’ access to capital. Imagine that the divestment movement is hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that it causes the share price of fossil fuel companies to drop. As economics writer Matthew Yglesias explains in an article for Slate, that price drop “simply creates an opportunity for other value-hunting investors to pick up some shares at a discount. In fact, in the age of algorithmic trading, the entire process will run its course in the blink of an eye. Nobody will even notice it happened.” Financially, divestment makes no difference.

So, divestment from fossil fuel companies is really just a symbolic gesture, rather than an effective economic tactic. However, there is another catch. Even if divestment actually could curb global fossil fuel production, it would be a deal with the devil. The world needs more energy, and as it stands, fossil fuels are the most affordable way of providing that energy. There are 1.3 billion people on the planet who don’t have access to electricity. Curbing global energy production would leave them in the dark. They shouldn’t be forced to choose between energy poverty and climate change, or have that choice made for them.

The only way to solve both energy poverty and climate change is to create a shift toward alternative energy production, using technologies such as solar power. This can only happen if alternative energy is cheaper than energy from fossil fuels and can be produced in enough abundance. To get to that point we need investment. We need both private investment (i.e. capital) from individuals and companies and public funding from governments to flow into alternative energy research at a much more aggressive rate. More persistent research will more rapidly bring the cost of alternative energy down below the price of coal, oil, and natural gas – a drop toward which the energy market is already heading. Research can also allow us to overcome scalability issues. For example, solar panels and wind turbines don’t produce a constant stream of energy – they only work when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. New energy storage systems are one way this problem could be solved. Accelerated research alone can provide a solution to climate change that avoids condemning over a billion people to energy poverty.

Climate change activists should complement fossil fuel divestment with the inverse approach. We should start a movement for investment in alternative energy research, which would achieve a far greater impact. The best way to end the use of fossil fuels is to make them obsolete, and investment in alternative energy research is the only way to make that happen.

Trent Eady is a U4 Philosophy student. To reach him, please email commentary@mcgilldaily.com.

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Today, technology no longer gives the appearance of standing still. It changes before our eyes. In the same way that its stillness made it as inscrutable as the sea, its movement makes it exciting and strange. After millennia of quiet and dutiful service, technology has finally caught our attention. Now we are led to wonder what technology really is and what it all might mean.

These are the questions Kevin Kelly hopes to answer in his unique and tantalizing book What Technology Wants published in 2010. Kelly’s arrival at these questions was unexpected — in his youth, he eschewed all material possessions except for his bicycle and sleeping bag. Kelly spent his time visiting Amish communities and editing the Whole Earth Catalog, a resource for those seeking to build self-sufficient communes. He was uncomfortable with cars and television, which to him exerted an unseemly level of control over people. But a revelation occurred when Kelly tapped into an early version of the internet. “There was something unexpectedly organic about these ecosystems of people and wires,” Kelly writes in his book. “Online networks unleashed passions, compounded creativity, amplified generosity. […] Cold silicon chips, long metal wires, and complicated high-voltage gear were nurturing our best efforts as humans. […] For me, this gave a very different face to technology.” In 1992, prior to the publication of his book, Kelly went on to become the founding editor of Wired magazine and has sought a deeper understanding of technology ever since.

When the human brain evolved, biological evolution produced a new medium for information flow. It in fact produced a new evolutionary process.

Even though technology affects every aspect of human life, there hasn’t been any major effort to develop general theories about how it operates, in the way that biologists have for living organisms or that economists have tried to do for national economies. There is not even a word for Kelly’s area of study – the study of technology as a general phenomenon. Kelly writes that until recent history, technology was “virtually invisible” to us. It “could be found everywhere […] except in the minds of humans.” The word ‘technology’ itself only appeared for the first time in 1802, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. Until that point, the closest thing to the contemporary concept of technology had been the concept of craft – skilled manual work like carpentry, weaving, or metalworking.

What Technology Wants revolves around a central theme: the way we currently think about technology is too narrow. When we think about technology, we tend to think of individual – and typically recently invented – technologies like computers. Kelly hopes to persuade us to instead imagine technology as a cosmic phenomenon like biological life, and as one that shares a common basis with life. “Both life and technology,” Kelly writes, “seem to be based on immaterial flows of information.”

The information flows of biological evolution occur in the genes of organisms that undergo natural selection. The process moves along slowly, requiring many cycles of birth and death before even an incremental change can occur. Not all of the products of biological evolution can be found within organisms. Beehives, birds’ nests, and beaver dams – artifacts whose blueprints are encoded in those species’ genes – are as much products of evolution as the creatures they belong to. Human technology is also a product of biological evolution, but in a more indirect sense. When the human brain evolved, biological evolution produced a new medium for information flow. It in fact produced a new evolutionary process. Now information flows could occur in the more nimble medium of ideas in human brains undergoing an intelligent selection process, allowing for much more rapid change. Thus, technological evolution is a product of biological evolution.

The characteristics we associate with living things – such as flexibility, hardiness, self-repair, and replication – can be integrated into technology, making it as ‘organic’ as life.

Biologists have spent over 150 years studying how biological evolution works, but little is known about what general principles might drive technological evolution. To use Kelly’s metaphor, little is known about what technology ‘wants.’ There are two notable similarities between the two evolutionary processes: a trend toward greater diversity and a trend toward greater complexity. The trend toward greater diversity has the same cause in both processes. The evolution of new species – of life or technology – occurs within the context of an ecosystem, and the diversity of the ecosystem leads to greater diversity over time. Kelly writes, “Each new invention requires the viability of previous inventions to keep going. There is no communication between machines without extruded copper nerves of electricity. There is no electricity without mining veins of coal or uranium, or damming rivers, or even mining precious metals to make solar panels. There is no metabolism of factories without the circulation of vehicles. No hammers without saws to cut the handles; no handles without hammers to pound the saw blades. This global-scale, circular, interconnected network of systems, subsystems, machines, pipes, roads, wires, conveyor belts, automobiles, servers and routers, codes, calculators, sensors, archives, activators, collective memory, and power generators —this whole grand contraption of interrelated and interdependent pieces forms a single system.”

As just mentioned, the second similarity between the two evolutionary processes is the trend toward greater complexity – specifically maximum complexity, the complexity of the most complex species. In biological evolution, the increase in maximum complexity is due to a tiny minority of species that grow more complex over time. Since most species on Earth remain simple single-celled organisms, the overall complexity of life doesn’t change much. With technology, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The overall complexity of technology seems to rise over time. In both evolutionary processes, however, maximum complexity increases.

If these trends continue, technology – which evolves at a much faster rate – will eventually surpass life in diversity and complexity. Life will cease to be the most interesting thing in the universe, just as inanimate matter ceased to be the most interesting thing in the universe when life evolved. The characteristics we associate with living things – such as flexibility, hardiness, self-repair, and replication – can be integrated into technology, making it as ‘organic’ as life. This perspective puts us not at the end of natural history, as most people imagine, but right in the middle.

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Henry Markram, a neuroscientist based in Geneva, passionately laid out his vision for the future of neuroscience. Markram leads the Human Brain Project, an ambitious global effort to create a full, biologically realistic simulation of the human brain using a supercomputer. The Human Brain Project was launched in 2013 after being chosen as one of the European Union’s flagship science projects for the decade. With a budget of $1.3 billion, the goal is to complete the simulation by 2023. Although based in Europe, the Human Brain Project has attracted the participation of research institutions around the world. BigBrain, the first major accomplishment of the project, was a joint effort between the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Jülich Research Centre in Germany.

Among philosophers who think about the mind, the majority view is that any sufficiently advanced computer simulation of the brain will be capable of all the same experiences as an actual brain — including thought, emotion, pleasure, and pain. A simulation of a human brain would be, for all intents and purposes, human.

BigBrain is the world’s most accurate 3D map of the human brain to date. A team of researchers co-led by McGill Neurology and Neurosurgery professor Alan Evans created the 3D map by slicing the healthy brain of a deceased 65-year-old organ donor into ultra-thin layers of brain tissue. The researchers then took extremely high resolution images of each slice and used the images to reconstruct the brain in 3D. The map is nearly detailed enough to see each individual brain cell. This 3D map, and future maps that capture the brain in even greater detail, will be used in the Human Brain Project’s simulation.

BigBrain helps to illustrate why the Human Brain Project is unlike anything that neuroscientists have attempted before. The tools that exist today allow the biology of the brain to be modelled at an unprecedented level of detail. Markram is insistent about capturing all the biological richness of the brain. He sees each individual neuron within the brain as a complex machine made up of thousands of parts, all of which have to be simulated.

Among philosophers who think about the mind, the majority view is that any sufficiently advanced computer simulation of the brain will be capable of all the same experiences as an actual brain — including thought, emotion, pleasure, and pain. A simulation of a human brain would be, for all intents and purposes, human. In that case, it would be unethical to use the simulation for its intended purpose — to perform scientific experiments — without consent, just as it is unethical to perform experiments on fleshy human beings without consent. During the conference, the former director of the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre Albert Gjedde asked Markram, “If your simulated brain ultimately gets to the level where it becomes conscious, are you allowed to turn it off?” Markram responded that the rights of a future brain simulation is “a topic in the ethics part” of the Human Brain Project.

There is a rationale behind thinking about the ethical issues concerning these beings, which may someday gain consciousness, before these issues actually arise. History is cause for concern. Human beings don’t have a good track record with beings outside of our species boundary. Until the twentieth century, animals were routinely vivisected — dissected while alive — either because they were considered incapable of pain or because their pain wasn’t believed to matter.

“Maybe it would be better if the human race, instead of transmitting itself forward by means of biology, transmitted itself forward by means of artificial creation and left as its successors these beings[…]”

Today, it is still common for humans to treat animals with the same indifference that they treat inanimate objects (on factory farms, for example). Moreover, there are countless examples of humans treating their fellow humans with shocking cruelty simply because they are slightly different from themselves. It is not a stretch to imagine that biological humans might fail to respect the rights of their computer-based counterparts. With artificial humans, there is the opportunity for the first time to ensure the rights of a group before they are oppressed.

During the conference’s panel discussion, conversation turned toward the ‘Singularity,’ which is, as Markram put it, a predicted point in the future when “technology will surpass the human capability.” One version of the Singularity is that computer-based humans will quickly surpass biological humans in intelligence, ending humanity’s tenure as the dominant life form on the planet, and perhaps ending the human species itself. Not everyone despairs at this prospect. In an interview for the documentary Victim of the Brain, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter mused about the potential upside of such a change.

“Maybe it would be better if the human race, instead of transmitting itself forward by means of biology, transmitted itself forward by means of artificial creation and left as its successors these beings. We want things to be good, but on the other hand we aren’t so good ourselves. […] If it turns out that the creatures we created were creative, and very, very altruistic, and gentle beings, and we are people who go around killing each other all the time and having wars, wouldn’t it better if the altruistic beings just survived and we didn’t?”

The panelists agreed that the Singularity is not on the immediate horizon. Evans expressed his view that “we’re a long way from any organized computational system reproducing the human brain at the level of consciousness.” Markram elaborated on the same point. In the near-term, he said, “the detail” of brain simulations will be “still by a factor of billions simpler than what there is in biology.” He added, “I’m not afraid of the Singularity.”

However, Markram also stated that at some point in the future, all the biological detail of the brain will be simulated. “In terms of implementing that [detail] in technology,” Markram said, “eventually yes, in 100 years, it will be.” That point will be the beginning of the end of humanity. Some people fear that end as a form of apocalypse. Evans, for example, joked about Skynet, the artificial intelligence from Terminator bent on exterminating all humans. Others foresee a happy ending, like the scenario Hofstadter imagines: humanity passing the torch to beings better than ourselves.

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Not long after, I was exposed to the ideas of Judith Butler, a bold and penetrating mix of third-wave feminism and queer theory. I saw truth in Butler’s radical perspective on gender, and it felt liberating. My lifelong discomfort with being put in a box — a binary gender category — was vindicated. This is when my passion for feminism began in earnest. I put a bumper sticker on my car that said “Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History.” I bought a subscription to Bitch magazine. When it came time to graduate and move on to McGill, I eagerly enrolled in a class on feminist theory, as well as a class in Sexual Diversity Studies, the subject that would later become my minor.

My world only kept expanding from there. In Montreal, I was exposed to a greater diversity of people and perspectives than ever before. The same sort of transformation that had occurred in my mind about gender happened with race and disability. I learned about classism and capitalism. At Rad Frosh, a workshop by the high-profile activist Jaggi Singh gave me my first real introduction to anarchism. My first year at McGill was a whirlwind of new people and new revelations.

In my second year, I dove in. I became heavily involved with a variety of queer, feminist, generally anti-oppressive, and radical leftist groups and organizations, in every combination thereof (Mob Squad is one example of many). I read books like Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? and The Coming Insurrection. I shouted my lungs out at protests. So many protests. Marching down the street carrying a sign that said “Fuck Capitalism” became my main form of exercise. That was the year of the tuition protests. There was a lot of excitement in the air. I thought maybe, just maybe, there would be a revolution. A girl can dream.

2012 was the year I hit peak radicalism. Things I did that year included occupying a campus building (for the second time), bodychecking a security guard, getting rammed at low speed by a cop on a moped, sitting through an entire SSMU General Assembly, and running from flashbang grenades hurled by police. (I wasn’t nearly as hardcore as most of the people I knew. “I love how pepper spray clears out your sinuses,” one said. Some participated in black blocs. At one point, a few spent the night in jail.)

Since then, my political worldview has steadily grown and evolved and refined itself. I no longer pine for revolution. I don’t hate capitalism or the state as if those were the names of the people who killed my dog. My politics still lean to the left, just not quite so far, and now I view economic and political systems with an engineer’s eye, rather than in the stark colours of moral outrage. I am just as passionate about queer activism and feminism as I ever was, and aspire to be an ally to other anti-oppressive movements just as much as I ever did. I feel like I have a richer and more nuanced understanding of anti-oppressive politics and ethics than ever before. I’ve held onto all the lessons that I’ve learned. I am grateful to the many people who shared their insight with me.

There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this particular brand of politics.

I’ll be graduating soon, and I’ve been thinking about my years in Montreal with both nostalgia and regret. Something has been nagging at me for a long time. There’s something I need to say out loud, to everyone before I leave. It’s something that I’ve wanted to say for a long time, but I’ve struggled to find the right words. I need to tell people what was wrong with the activism I was engaged in, and why I bailed out. I have many fond memories from that time, but all in all, it was the darkest chapter of my life.

I used to endorse a particular brand of politics that is prevalent at McGill and in Montreal more widely. It is a fusion of a certain kind of anti-oppressive politics and a certain kind of radical leftist politics. This particular brand of politics begins with good intentions and noble causes, but metastasizes into a nightmare. In general, the activists involved are the nicest, most conscientious people you could hope to know. But at some point, they took a wrong turn, and their devotion to social justice led them down a dark path. Having been on both sides of the glass, I think I can bring some painful but necessary truth to light.

Important disclaimer: I passionately support anti-oppressive politics in general and have only good things to say about it. My current political worldview falls under the umbrella of leftism, although not radical leftism. I’m basically a social democrat who likes co-ops and believes in universal basic income, the so-called ‘capitalist road to communism.’ I agree with a lot of what the radical left has to say, but I disagree with a lot of what it has to say. I’m deeply against Marxism-Leninism and social anarchism, but I’m sympathetic to market socialism and direct democracy. I don’t have any criticism for radical leftism in general, at least not here, not today. What I feel compelled to criticize is only one very specific political phenomenon, one particular incarnation of radical leftist, anti-oppressive politics.

There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this particular brand of politics. I’ve thought a lot about what exactly that is. I’ve pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism. I’ll go into detail about each one of these. The following is as much a confession as it is an admonishment. I will not mention a single sin that I have not been fully and damnably guilty of in my time.

First, dogmatism. One way to define the difference between a regular belief and a sacred belief is that people who hold sacred beliefs think it is morally wrong for anyone to question those beliefs. If someone does question those beliefs, they’re not just being stupid or even depraved, they’re actively doing violence. They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity. In this mindset, people who disagreed with my views weren’t just wrong, they were awful people. I watched what people said closely, scanning for objectionable content. Any infraction reflected badly on your character, and too many might put you on my blacklist. Calling them ‘sacred beliefs’ is a nice way to put it. What I mean to say is that they are dogmas.

Thinking this way quickly divides the world into an ingroup and an outgroup — believers and heathens, the righteous and the wrong-teous. “I hate being around un-rad people,” a friend once texted me, infuriated with their liberal roommates. Members of the ingroup are held to the same stringent standards. Every minor heresy inches you further away from the group. People are reluctant to say that anything is too radical for fear of being been seen as too un-radical. Conversely, showing your devotion to the cause earns you respect. Groupthink becomes the modus operandi. When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues. Internal disagreement was rare. The insular community served as an incubator of extreme, irrational views.

High on their own supply, activists in these organizing circles end up developing a crusader mentality: an extreme self-righteousness based on the conviction that they are doing the secular equivalent of God’s work. It isn’t about ego or elevating oneself. In fact, the activists I knew and I tended to denigrate ourselves more than anything. It wasn’t about us, it was about the desperately needed work we were doing, it was about the people we were trying to help. The danger of the crusader mentality is that it turns the world in a battle between good and evil. Actions that would otherwise seem extreme and crazy become natural and expected. I didn’t think twice about doing a lot of things I would never do today.

There is a lot to admire about the activists I befriended. They have only the best intentions. They are selfless and dedicated to doing what they think is right, even at great personal sacrifice. Sadly, in this case their conscience has betrayed them. My conscience betrayed me. It was only when I finally gave myself permission to be selfish, after months and months of grinding on despite being horribly burnt out, that I eventually achieved the critical distance to rethink my political beliefs.

Anti-intellectualism was the one facet of this worldview I could never fully stomach.

Anti-intellectualism is a pill I swallowed, but it got caught in my throat, and that would eventually save me. It comes in a few forms. Activists in these circles often express disdain for theory because they take theoretical issues to be idle sudoku puzzles far removed from the real issues on the ground. This is what led one friend of mine to say, in anger and disbelief, “People’s lives aren’t some theoretical issue!” That same person also declared allegiance to a large number of theories about people’s lives, which reveals something important. Almost everything we do depends on one theoretical belief or another, which range from simple to complex and from implicit to explicit. A theoretical issue is just a general or fundamental question about something that we find important enough to think about. Theoretical issues include ethical issues, issues of political philosophy, and issues about the ontological status of gender, race, and disability. Ultimately, it’s hard to draw a clear line between theorizing and thinking in general. Disdain for thinking is ludicrous, and no one would ever express it if they knew that’s what they were doing.

Specifically on the radical leftist side of things, one problem created by this anti-theoretical bent is a lot of rhetoric and bluster, a lot of passionate railing against the world or some aspect of it, without a clear, detailed, concrete alternative. There was a common excuse for this. As an activist friend wrote in an email, “The present organization of society fatally impairs our ability to imagine meaningful alternatives. As such, constructive proposals will simply end up reproducing present relations.” This claim is couched in theoretical language, but it is a rationale for not theorizing about political alternatives. For a long time I accepted this rationale. Then I realized that mere opposition to the status quo wasn’t enough to distinguish us from nihilists. In the software industry, a hyped-up piece of software that never actually gets released is called “vapourware.” We should be wary of political vapourware. If somebody’s alternative to the status quo is nothing, or at least nothing very specific, then what are they even talking about? They are hawking political vapourware, giving a “sales pitch” for something that doesn’t even exist.

Anti-intellectualism also comes out in full force on the anti-oppressive side of things. It manifests itself in the view that knowledge not just about what oppression, is like, but also knowledge about all the ethical questions pertaining to oppression is accessible only through personal experience. The answers to these ethical questions are treated as a matter of private revelation. In the academic field of ethics, ethical claims are judged on the strength of their arguments, a form of public revelation. Some activists find this approach intolerable.

Perhaps the most deeply held tenet of a certain version of anti-oppressive politics – which is by no means the only version – is that members of an oppressed group are infallible in what they say about the oppression faced by that group. This tenet stems from the wise rule of thumb that marginalized groups must be allowed to speak for themselves. But it takes that rule of thumb to an unwieldy extreme.

Let me give an example. A gay person is typically much better acquainted with homophobia than a straight person. Moreover, a gay person has a much greater stake in what society does about homophobia, so their view on the matter is more important. However, there is nothing about the experience of being gay in itself that enlightens a gay person about the ethics of sexual orientation.

To take a dead simple case, you don’t have to hear it from a gay person to know that homosexuality is ethically just fine. If you’re a straight person and a gay person tells you that homosexuality is wrong, you can be confident in your judgement that they are full of shit. In this situation, the straight person is right and the gay person is wrong about homosexuality and homophobia. Gay people have no special access to ethical knowledge, in general or about sexual orientation specifically. Gay people do tend to have better ethical knowledge about sexual orientation than straight people, but that is only because of how our life circumstances move us to reflect on it.

If I said the same thing about another context that isn’t so simple — when the correct opinion isn’t so obvious — I would be roundly condemned. But the example’s simplicity isn’t what makes it valid. People who belong to oppressed groups are just people, with thoughts ultimately as fallible as anyone else’s. They aren’t oracles who dispense eternal wisdom. Ironically, this principle of infallibility, designed to combat oppression, has allowed essentialism to creep in. The trait that defines a person’s group membership is treated as a source of innate ethical knowledge. This is to say nothing about the broader problem of how you’re supposed to decide who’s a source of innate knowledge. Certainly not someone who innately “knows” that homosexuality is disgusting and wrong, but why not, if you’re simply relying on private revelation rather than public criteria?

Consider otherkin, people who believe they are literally animals or magical creatures and who use the concepts and language of anti-oppressive politics to talk about themselves. I have no problem drawing my own conclusions about the lived experience of otherkin. Nobody is literally a honeybee or a dragon. We have to assess claims about oppression based on more than just what people say about themselves. If I took the idea of the infallibility of the oppressed seriously, I would have to trust that dragons exist. That is why it’s such an unreliable guide. (I half-expect the response, “Check your human privilege!”)

It is an ominous sign whenever a political movement dispenses with methods and approaches of gaining knowledge that are anchored to public revelation and, moreover, becomes openly hostile to them. Anti-intellectualism and a corresponding reliance on innate knowledge is one of the hallmarks of a cult or a totalitarian ideology.

Anti-intellectualism was the one facet of this worldview I could never fully stomach. I was dogmatic, I fell prey to groupthink, and I had a crusader mentality, but I was never completely anti-intellectual. Ever since I was a child, the pursuit of knowledge has felt like my calling. It’s part of who I am. I could never turn my back on it. At least not completely. And that was the crack through which the light came in. My love for deep reflection and systematic thinking never ceased. Almost by accident, I took time off from being an activist. I spent time just trying to be happy and at peace, far away from Montreal. It had been a long while since I had the time and the freedom to just think. At first, I pulled on a few threads, and then with that eventually the whole thing unravelled. Slowly, my political worldview collapsed in on itself.

The aftermath was wonderful. A world that seemed grey and hopeless filled with colour. I can’t convey to you how bleak my worldview was. An activist friend once said to me, with complete sincerity, “Everything is problematic.” That was the general consensus. Far bleaker was something I said during a phone call to an old friend who lived in another city, far outside my political world. I, like a disproportionate number of radical leftists, was depressed, and spent a lot of time sighing into the receiver. “I’m not worried about you killing yourself,” he said. “I know you want to live forever.” I let out a weak, sad laugh. “When I said that,” I replied, “I was a lot happier than I am now.” Losing my political ideology was extremely liberating. I became a happier person. I also believe that I became a better person.

I’ve just said a lot of negative things. But, of course, my goal here is to do something positive. I’m cursing the darkness in the hope of seeing the light of a new day. Still, I don’t want to just criticize without offering an alternative. So, let me give a few pieces of constructive advice to anyone interested in anti-oppressive and/or leftist activism.

First, embrace humility. You may find it refreshing. Others will find it refreshing too. Be forceful, be impassioned, just don’t get too high on your own supply. Don’t drink your own kool aid. Question yourself as fiercely as you question society.

Second, treat people as individuals. For instance, don’t treat every person who belongs to an oppressed group as an authoritative mouthpiece of that group as a whole. People aren’t plugged into some kind of hive mind. Treating them like they are, besides being essentialist, also leads to contradictions since, obviously, not all people agree on all things. There is no shortcut that allows you to avoid thinking for yourself about oppression simply by deferring to the judgements of others. You have to decide whose judgements you are going to trust, and that comes to the same thing as judging for yourself. This drops a huge responsibility on your lap. Grasp the nettle firmly. Accept the responsibility and hone your thinking. Notice contradictions and logical fallacies. When you hear an opinion about a kind of oppression from a member of the group that experiences it, seek out countervailing opinions from members of the same group and weigh them against each other. Don’t be afraid to have original insights.

Third, learn to be diplomatic. Not everything is a war of good versus evil. Reasonable, informed, conscientious people often disagree about important ethical issues. People are going to have different conceptions of what being anti-oppressive entails, so get used to disagreement. When it comes to moral disagreements, disbelief, anger, and a sense of urgency are to be expected. They are inherent parts of moral disagreement. That’s what makes a diplomatic touch so necessary. Otherwise, everything turns into a shouting match.

Fourth, take a systems approach to the political spectrum. Treat the pursuit of the best kind of society as an engineering problem. Think about specific, concrete proposals. Would they actually work? Deconflate desirability and feasibility. Refine your categories beyond simple dichotomies like capitalism/socialism or statism/anarchism.

I am not going to let my disillusionment with my past activism discourage me from trying to do good in the future. If you find yourself similarly disillusioned, take heart. As long as you learn from your mistakes, no one can blame you for trying to be a good person. Don’t worry. We all get to come back.

This article was originally published under the pseudonym “Aurora Dagny.”

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The prize is split into two parts. $500,000 will be awarded to the first team who can successfully turn back the biological clock in the heart of an older mammal, such as a mouse. The teams will compete to restore the older mammal’s heart rate variability — how the duration of the pauses between heartbeats varies over time — to that of a young adult. The hope is that eventually the same procedure could be applied to humans, setting the heart of a senior citizen ticking like that of a sprightly twentysomething.

Another $500,000 will be awarded to the first team who can extend a mammal’s lifespan by 50 per cent through the same or similar methods. Since the average life expectancy in Canada is 81, a similar effect in humans would translate to the average Canadian living to be over 120 years old.

The search for a cure

The Palo Alto Longevity Prize reflects a turning tide in the way that doctors and scientists look at aging. For the most part, aging is perceived as a normal and natural part of life. However, a growing number of researchers are beginning to see aging as a disease, like cancer or Parkinson’s, and are searching for a cure. Most of us have lost someone we love to due to aging-related causes of death such as heart disease, and we are bound to lose more loved ones as time goes on. Aging touches everyone. This makes the search for a cure deeply personal.

Doris Taylor, the Director of Regenerative Medicine Research at the Texas Heart Institute, is leading one of the 11 teams competing for the prize. Her team plans to treat aging by replenishing the body’s supply of stem cells, the generic cells from which all the body’s specialized cells are formed. Taylor describes her mother’s passing as the moment she realized that scientists need to better understand the aging process. “When my mom passed away, she was healthy most of her life, until the last week or so of her life,” she recounts. “As I saw her deteriorate very rapidly in just a week, it became very obvious to me we have no idea what aging really does, or is, or how it happens.” Taylor is optimistic about the future of life extension research. In her team’s promotional video, she claims that “aging is both a failure of stem cell number and stem cell function.” The solution, then, is clear to her: “It’s really not that complicated. Replace stem cell number. Replace stem cell function. Prolong life.”

Living long enough to live indefinitely

Making 120 years old the new 80 years old is impressive, but it’s not “ending aging.” So how can Yun set such a lofty goal for Taylor and other competitors? The key is the potential runaway effect of life extension research. If those of us who are alive today live long enough to benefit from the sort of medical treatment that would extend life by forty years, we may end up living for hundreds or thousands of years. The idea is that during the extra decades of life that an initial treatment would give us, science and biotechnology would continue to progress and develop new treatments that would extend our lives even further.

Aubrey de Grey is a biologist and life extension advocate who sits on the advisory board of the Palo Alto Longevity Prize. He calls this runaway effect “longevity escape velocity,” an analogy to the speed a rocket needs to reach before it can break free from earth’s gravitational pull and sail through space indefinitely. Just like a rocket escaping the earth’s gravity, de Grey claims that we will escape death by aging when we pass a tipping point where every decade, new life extension research will be adding over a decade to our lives. Once we reach that point, the sky’s the limit.

If those of us who are alive today live long enough to benefit from the sort of medical treatment that would extend life by forty years, we may end up living for hundreds or thousands of years.

De Grey argues that aging is the accumulation of damage to our bodies, an inevitable byproduct of our bodies’ normal functioning. To reverse aging, de Grey claims, all we need to do identify and repair the different kinds of damage that occur. “Longevity escape velocity,” then, is the point at which damage can be undone faster than it accumulates. “Once we are really, truly repairing things as fast as they go wrong, game over,” de Grey says in the documentary The Immortalists. “We will have the ability to live indefinitely.”

De Grey believes that aging related deaths are “humanity’s worst problem” since it is responsible for two-thirds of deaths worldwide — 100,000 of the 150,000 people who die every day die of aging-related causes. He sees himself as on a mission to save lives. “Even if I bring forward the defeat of aging by just one day,” de Grey says, “that’s 100,000 lives that I’ve saved.”

Do we want to extend life?

Some people are alarmed about the social ramifications of life extension research. The two main concerns are overpopulation and unequal access to life extension medicine.

Perhaps counterintuitively, population has a lot more to do with the birth rate than with the death rate. Even if nobody ever dies, population growth will run into diminishing returns as long as couples have less than two children on average. A demographic study by Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova looked at what would happen to the population of Sweden if aging were stopped completely. They projected that the country’s population would only grow by 22 per cent, from 9.1 million to 11 million, over the next 100 years. As long as a majority of people are content with having no more than two children, population growth will decline over time.

What about unequal access? Although people commonly assume that medical treatments to extend life would only be available to the rich, they don’t explain why such treatments would be different from any other kind of medicine. Access to medical treatment is distributed more equally in some countries, less equally in others, and very unequally on a global scale, but the advancement of medicine has nothing to do with that. Nobody says we should be concerned about curing cancer because only the rich will be able to afford the cure. Whether or not treatments to reverse aging are equally available to everyone is independent of whether those treatments get developed in the first place.

Yun, in an interview on Bloomberg TV, explains why medicine that keeps the body in a youthful state will ultimately reduce the costs of healthcare, giving all healthcare systems an economic incentive to offer that medicine to their patients. “Think about your body as having a homeostasis system,” Yun explains. “When we’re young, it helps our body self-tune, and as we get older, especially beyond the age of forty, the system starts breaking down.” Once the body loses the ability to self-tune properly, “we create this thing called a healthcare system to try to make up for the lack of homeostasis. But imagine if we could put the healthcare system back in the body, allow the body to self-tune. Then we can spend those $2 trillion [Americans] spend right now on healthcare on something else, such as education.” Since age-related chronic diseases take up most of the overall cost of healthcare, treatments that reverse aging would make healthcare less expensive. Rather than being exclusively for the rich, those treatments would end up being more affordable than the medical care that exists today.

A less serious, but perhaps sadder objection to life extension is that we’d all get bored living so long. But should weariness with life be treated any differently in a 200-year-old than in a 20-year-old? Is a desire for an end to life in a 200-year-old “normal” or is it a sign of depression? The thought behind this objection seems to be that the joy of living is a limited resource that can be used up over time. To life extension advocates, however, the joy of life seems unlimited. De Grey says he “can’t imagine ever running out of new things” he would “like to do”.

De Grey re-frames the issue of life extension by asking, “Why do you want to die?” The overarching argument of life extension advocates is that death caused by aging or ‘natural causes’ is no different from death caused by anything else. For them, the question ‘Do you want to live longer?’ is ultimately the same as the question ‘Do you want to live?’ The passion driving advocates like de Grey comes from the belief that passivity about life extension is passivity about life itself.

Is life extension a pipe-dream?

Since 2009, de Grey has been working toward that goal at the SENS Research Foundation, a non-profit organization in Mountain View, California that he co-founded to pursue his plan to repair all the different kinds of damage that are believed to constitute aging. He calls that plan SENS, or Strategies for Engineered for Negligible Senescence. The SENS Research Foundation now houses seven scientists working on research related to the SENS plan, and has funded or is currently funding studies at over a dozen universities and outside research institutions.

Since it began receiving public attention, the SENS plan has struggled to attain mainstream credibility. In 2005, the MIT Technology Review issued a challenge to biologists, offering a $20,000 reward to anyone who could demonstrate that the SENS plan is not “worthy of serious consideration.” Three written submissions were published and a panel of judges was convened by the Review. The judges concluded that none of the submissions successfully debunked the SENS plan. However, they awarded half of the prize money to biologist Preston Estep and his colleagues for its eloquence. Estep and his colleagues condemned the SENS plan as “pseudoscience” and a “pipe-dream.” The judges concluded that although the submission presented “many reasons to doubt SENS,” Estep and his colleagues were “too quick to engage in name-calling, labeling ideas as ‘pseudo-scientific’ or ‘unscientific’ that they cannot really demonstrate are so.” One of the judges was biologist Craig Venter, known for his key role in the Human Genome Project and his breakthroughs in synthetic biology. Venter summed up the judges’ opinion by writing, “Estep et al. in my view have not demonstrated that SENS is unworthy of discussion, but the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for it.”
The credibility of the SENS Research Foundation has since been boosted by the fact that it has attracted some prominent scientists to its research advisory board.

One such scientist is Anthony Atala, the Director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Atala made headlines in 2006 when he led the first-ever implantation of an artificially grown organ, a bladder, into a patient. Since then, under Atala’s leadership, the Wake Forest Institute has implanted lab-grown urethras and vaginas into patients and is experimenting with artificial kidneys, livers, and skin. In the future, techniques such as these could be used to replace body parts that have deteriorated from old age with new, healthy parts grown in the lab. Another prominent scientist who has joined the SENS Research Foundation’s advisory board is Harvard geneticist George Church, best known for his work in human genome sequencing, the process by which the complete DNA of a person can be examined.

The SENS Research Foundation remains relatively small and poorly funded. In 2012, its budget was under $3 million. Even so, the Foundation has managed to make progress. One of its greatest successes to date involves 7-ketocholesterol, a type of cholesterol waste product of the body’s normal processes. As it accumulates in the body over a lifetime, it reaches toxic quantities. 7-ketocholesterol is associated with atherosclerosis, an age-related disease where the walls of the body’s arteries thicken and harden. The Foundation’s researchers discovered a species of bacteria that consumes 7-ketocholesterol and isolated the enzyme those bacteria use to digest it. That enzyme could, one day, be used in a drug that would break down 7-ketocholesterol in the body. The build-up of 7-ketocholesterol is one tiny example of the naturally occurring damage to the body that de Grey claims is responsible for human aging. As studies like these add up, finding more solutions to more examples of damage, de Grey believes we will eventually have the solution to aging as a whole.

The dying of the light

Despite lambasts by critics, life extension advocates burst with optimism. Yun and de Grey believe it’s only a matter of time until aging is solved. Likewise, biologist Bill Andrews confidently predicts, “Hundreds of years from now, we’re going to look back and be shocked by this horrible world that we all used to live in where people used to get old and die.” The motto of Andrews’ company, Sierra Sciences, succinctly captures the spirit of life extension research: “Cure aging or die trying.” If this optimism proves to be justified, for the first time ever, people will be faced with a genuine choice of whether to go gently into old age or to rage against it.

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