BNT interviews Jason Silva on radical life extension

Ian MacKenzie of Brave New Traveler talks to Jason Silva, a 26-year old film maker and outspoken immortalist.

MacKenzie asks, "You quote The Immortalist in your film - how did you come across it and why does it resonate with you?" Silver responds:

After watching the brilliant film Vanilla Sky, I spent hours on the internet researching Cryonic Suspension.

This idea that we could preserve ourselves until the technology was there to repair the wear and tear of aging and eventual pathology.

Like the lucid dream that was presented in the film, if we removed finitude from the human condition, life could be transformed into an eternal now- no more existential anxiety.

I started reading about Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey, brilliant thinkers who professed that through scientific engineering we would someday conquer death.

The philosophical implications and motivations behind this, however, were best described by Alan Harrington’s masterpiece, “The Immortalist”- a manifesto of sorts that dared to challenge our cosmic inferiority complex and complacent attitude about our “inevitable” demise, and instead challenged us to engineer (with SCIENCE) an ageless and divine state of being.

This is where science would satisfy the yearnings of existential man, who for too long was suffering as a consequence of being aware of his mortality.

Here's Silva's short film, "The Immortalists":