Radical Life Extension - Not Without a Planetary Polity

(Last updated: 2025–06–18 Wed)

What am I now? - I can’t even pigeon-hole myself anymore . .

Background

• My parents were scientists and humanists with political positions to the Left of the Australian Labor Party (until the 1980s a nominally “Democratic Socialist” party).
• I grew up with similar views and empathies to various “-isms” on the Left but also supporting the ALP as the “least worst” political option in terms of decisions relating to “Representative Democracy”.
• I became extremely alarmed about the future of our species after reading Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962 when I was ten years old.
• I had assumed when I was very young (and very naïvely as it turned out) that by about the year 2000, modern science and medicine would have solved most of the problems relating to curing most of the diseases and other ageing problems for most of the people on the planet and that humans would be physically exploring most parts of the Solar System.
• There were bright spots: eg the USA started landing people on the moon and returning them to Earth in 1969 and the Whitlam Labor government was elected in 1972 and immediately withdrew Australian troops from an illegal and stupid war in Viet Nam.
• Despite the bright spots, a combination of obcsene corporate greed and global political incompetence accelerated The World’s Sixth Mass Exinction to the state where it is most likely that this process will continue to its inevitable conclusion in the near-term.
• I wanted to live forever (or at least till I got too bored to persist) and explore the rest of The Universe - that desire might have actually been technologically possible in the near future but now looks hopeless.

My current view of modern history (ie from the Industrial Revolution onwards):

1. Lord Acton was correct ie: “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
2. For-profit Corporations are destroying the world (biosphere) and should be done away with - in the West this process has been enabled by the co-opting and then capture and thus failures of Representative Democracies around the world. This process has been most obvious with the modern MIFIMC (Military Industrial Financial Intelligence Media Complex) of the USA - Yankee MIFIMC for shortness. The US Congress and Courts have been captured by the YMIFIMC since at least the end of WWII.
3. The MIFIMCs of at least the last 100 years became so powerful that they frustrated the radical or even just reformist programs of developing nations (former colonies of Europe) around the world that threatened the financial interests of ruling elites in Europe and the USA.
4. National political reforms or revolutions that sought to change their systems for the betterment of the their own populations only succeeded if they, themselves become so thoroughly single-minded and ruthless that, after their successful revolution, they had to have iron control over their populations, politics and militaries to prevent counter-revolutions by internal and external elites.

So now I sort of think of myself as possibly a “Libertarian Anarcho-Socialist” (in a similar way to Noam Chomsky?) ie human governments and for-profit corporates cannot be trusted to run the world and self-governance should be managed by non-profit organisations and AIs dedicated to:

1. Human Rights, where every person on Earth is entitled to shelter, nutritious food, clean water and an education that will allow them to explore the full potential of their lives and to live for as long as they want to.
2. Diverting the national allocations currently spent on national militaries to slowing and stopping The World’s Sixth Mass Extinction and creating rotating O’Neill cylinders in an orbit corresponding to the L1 Earth-Sun Lagrange point.

However:

IF

I am correct that humans will all but become extinct in the next few years or decades (or even if this is a non-trivial likelihood).

AND IF

Human culture, art, music, science, philosophy etc etc is worth preserving.

THEN

Humans should be putting as many resources as possible into developing non-biological human-level (and greater) intelligences ie synthetic or virtual human beings who can survive conditions on Earth that are hostile to complex biological life forms ie there should be almost zero concern for accidentailly developing “SkyNet” (we are already the Terminators) with the development of AGI, and, instead, we should should greatly accelerate this process.

OK, so what is the first step? I think that somehow the YMIFIMC needs to be disempowered ie the USA (and its regional branch, Israel) needs to have its funding reduced (to at least that of China or Russia) and redirected to socially useful ends. If that can be accomplished, then the abolition of all nuclear weapons would also be a sensible idea. I am not entrely naïve about how likely this scenario is but I am convinced that “civilisation” will collapse otherwise - if not the extinction of Homo sapiens altogether. So, to that first step, see my new web site:

Towards A Planetary Polity

So, if that is my position — what is now my appropriate “-ism”? - does an appropriate one even exist that does a decent job of describing my current world view?

Thanks for reading and maybe responding with constructive comments!

Phil.