Is Trump hampering SMI2LE?

Timothy Leary in 1970 (public domain photo).

Richard Hanania, apparently commenting on the Trump administration's attacks on research funding, science, the university system, etc., boldface mine: "The idea that 'let's just shake things up and see what happens' might have made sense at one point, but it's become increasingly clear that with a movement like this, the worst will rise to the top, as will those whose instincts and ideas are closely aligned to right-wing twitter and the uneducated and geriatric Republican TV watcher. This is not how you get to genetic engineering, radical life extension, and space travel." (Source, item 14).

The Peter Thiel interview Hanania references deals with SMI2LE topics. 

Timothy Leary's space migration plan

A space colony from Gerard O'Neill's book,The High Frontier. (Public domain image, via Wikipedia). 

In "Mine the Moon, Seed the Stars," the space migration part of Timothy Leary's SMI2LE proposal gets a nice writeup in the November 1976 issue of Mother Jones magazine. The writeup by  Don Goldsmith does a good job of covering the details of Gerard O'Neill's proposal for colonies in space. 

Goldsmith's article opens with a description of Leary talking to several dozen listeners in a house in Berkeley. "The man's name is Timothy Leary. Berkeley made him a PhD, Harvard a professor, LSD an ex-professor, the media a devil, the government a convict, prison a space-oriented philosopher. He is, perhaps, sane. But what is this elixir he is pushing? Space travel to other star systems? The aging process slowed by a factor of ten, halted entirely before long? Can you get behind it?" I thought the article would tell us more about Leary, but it shifts quickly to O'Neill and the pros and cons of his proposal. 

Goldsmith, 82, has written many space-related books and also is an astronomer.

Hat tip, Jesse Walker. 

Has 'life extension' arrived?

The SMI2LE formula endorsed by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson calls for space migration, intelligence increase and life extension.

You could argue that space migration is on the way, given that space exploration is becoming cheaper with the SpaceX reusable rockets and all of the new advances in AI would seem to argue for increased intelligence (even if following politics convinces you people actually are getting dumber.) But where is life extension?

That's arriving, too, according to Lifespan: Why We Age—And Why We Don’t Have To by Harvard Medical School professor David Sinclair. 

Here is a summary from Richard Hanania: "Sinclair, a professor at Harvard Medical School, all but guarantees the reader immortality. Again and again, he tells you the end of aging is coming. And not only that, it’s coming soon. And not only will we stop aging, but we’re probably going to reverse aging any second now, if we can’t already."

Hanania's piece is mostly about how he plans to apply Sinclair's advice, but Scott Alexander has written a long book review. 

William Shatner's SMI2LE experience

 

William Shatner moved to tears after his Blue Origin trip to space. (Blue Origin photo)

On Twitter, RAW Semantics writes, "Easy to be cynical, of course, but the experience he describes: S.M.I².L.E. encapsulated in many ways."

Tyler Cowen decides to SMI2LE

Tyler Cowen

It's an easy criticism to say that the space colonies and dramatic life extensions forecast by Robert Anton Wilson haven't arrived yet, but readers of this blog will notice that I like to point out indications that SMI2LE isn't dead, it's just not moving as quickly as predicted.  I recently mentioned Balaji Srinivasan and Zoltan Istvan; here is another example. 

Tyler Cowan has a project called Emergent Ventures, funded by donations, a "fellowship and grant program from the Mercatus Center" which "seeks to support entrepreneurs and brilliant minds with highly scalable, 'zero to one' ideas for meaningfully improving society." 

Tyler periodically announces Emergent Ventures grants on his Marginal Revolution blog; the latest announcement was published Sept. 10. It lists 13 winners; I want to quote what Tyler says about two of them:

"BeyondAging, a new group to support longevity research."

"Nina Khera, 'I’m a teenage human longevity researcher who’s interested in preventing aging-related diseases, especially those related to brain aging. In the past, I’ve worked with companies like Alio on computation and web-dev-based projects. I’ve also worked with labs like the Gladyshev lab and the Adams lab on data analysis and machine learning-based projects.'  Her current project is Biotein, about developing markers for aging, based in Ontario."

Here is an article on SMI2LE, and if you follow the link and read the whole announcement at Marginal Revolution, you will see some of Tyler's other announcements arguably promote increases in intelligence. There is a grant to "Zena Hitz, St. John’s College, to build The Catherine Project, to revitalize the study of the classics" and a grant to "for a project to make the Great Books on the web easy to read." I have bookmarked the blog of Sam Enright,  a university student studying in Scotland; some of you may enjoy Enright's blog post, "A Beginner's Guide to Miles Davis." 

The space migration dream remains alive

Jeff Bezos (Wikimedia Commons photo) 

The dream of space migration promoted by the likes of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson remains alive; Elon Musk is perhaps the best known exponent, but Jeff Bezos is further along with his own rocket company than I realized, according to this fascinating Wired magazine piece by Steven Levy.  (The Oct. 15 piece identifies the main leaders of startup space ventures as Musk, Bezos, Paul Allen and Richard Branson. Of course, Allen has just died, so who knows what happens to Allen's effort).

Bezos' Blue Origin rocket company is connected to one of my favorite writers besides you-know-who: 

After Princeton, Bezos put his energies toward finance, working at a hedge fund. He left it to move to Seattle and start Amazon. Not long after, he was seated at a dinner party with science fiction writer Neal Stephenson. Their conversation quickly left the bounds of Earth. “There’s sort of a matching game that goes on where you climb a ladder, figuring out the level of someone’s fanaticism about space by how many details they know,” Stephenson says. “He was incredibly high on that ladder.” The two began spending weekend afternoons shooting off model rockets.

In 1999, Stephenson and Bezos went to see the movie October Sky, about a boy obsessed with rocketry, and stopped for coffee afterward. Bezos said he’d been thinking for a long time about starting a space company. Why not start it today?” Stephenson asked. The next year, Bezos incorporated a company called Blue Operations LLC. Stephenson secured space in a former envelope factory in a funky industrial area in south Seattle.

When Bezos talks about space migration, he sounds not unlike Leary or Wilson:

The solution, as Bezos sees it, is to get off the planet to better exploit solar power, so that the sun’s abundant photons can support the fruitful existence of countless people. (We’d also grow real fruit in space.) “Wouldn’t your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s lives be so much more exciting if there were a trillion humans in the solar system who used more of that output to do amazing things?”

Incidentally, the Washington Post seems to be doing well under Bezos' ownership. 

Thank you Charles Faris for sharing this with me. 

A naysayer on Leary and Wilson's theories

A fellow named Joshua Scott Hotchkin, who has a blog named Advanced Dank Unicorn, recently posted a piece called "Why You Should Be Skeptical of Timothy Leary’s SMI2LE Formula." This is a followup, of sorts, to Hotchkin's other recent piece, "The Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness Is An Egotistical Abstraction," which he claims is "fraught with issues, even as an analogy."

Hotchkin has been using Facebook to propagate his theories, and as you might imagine, it hasn't gone down well with many Leary/Wilson fans. Richard Rasa ventured some criticisms, and found himself blocked by Hotchkin.

It seems to me that the Eight Circuit model remains alive, at least in the sense that people still find it useful, as I've documented on this blog here and here. As for SMI2LE, there are plenty of Silicon Valley libertarian types who are trying to make space migration, intelligent increase, life extension and all of the rest of it a reality, and spending real money to do so. A blog post by a fellow in Iowa doesn't change that.

Rather than address Hotchkin's points, arguably not worth my time, I want to make a general point about models: As RAW would say, you use them insofar as they are useful. To put it in Buddhist terminology (from one of the Pali sutras), a raft is for getting across a river, not constructed to serve as a burden to carry around indefinitely.

As I write this, the disease model for dealing with opioid addiction has become popular in the U.S., because it solves certain problems. It removes the stigma from getting treatment, it allows people to focus on solving the problem rather than discussing the alleged failings of the person with an addiction, etc. No doubt there are points where the disease model might fail, or at least could be debated, but it remains alive because it is useful.

Michael Johnson on space migration

Inspired by Oz Fritz, Michael Johnson has begun a (projected) three part series on the SMI2LE formula for "space migration, intelligence increase and life extension" that was much-discussed by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson is days of yore.

Michael's first posting tackles the space migration part of the formula. Thoughts on intelligence increase and life extension are promised soon.