The Genity Whitepaper describes a sequence of steps, summarized as BB-H-EG, toward ensuring that individual lives can continue through to successive life cycles. In other words, we can ‘step down’ from this life, yet return to a new cycle multiple times over the coming centuries. This rebirth will be seeded by our own DNA samples, each time replicating our unique genetic phenotype (body) without biological discontinuity or modification.
This process is very different from schemes promoting longevity via Big Pharma, or extra-human perspectives such as the ‘singularity’ espoused by transhumanists. Our health and longevity today depend far more on avoiding the obesity and T2D pandemics than on ‘superfoods’ or drugs. Whereas, transhumanism alters our native identity via undetermined ‘enhancements’ to our brains, cognition, organ replacements etc. and are little more than effete speculation, hiding behind the conceit that such enhancements might someday make sense, for individuals living today.
In clean contrast, DNA stewardship - beginning with our legacy diets through to long term biobanking - is a biologically conservative strategy to ensure that the DNA we have today provides continuance of our identity through successive life cycles, as we elect to enjoy our singular human franchise and more Life. Eventually we must deal with competing intelligence, envisioned as entities or chimeras outside our given human species. A few more centuries will grant humanity a chance to rebalance with nature, to harmonize with our planet and to recognize that the ‘heaven’ foreseen by our ancestors is an emerging reality.
Dissecting the BB-H-EG Model
BB is Biobanking - actually cryobanking - of blood, tissue and DNA samples maintained at very low temperatures (<-137 C). In advanced facilities the biological specimens are no longer immersed in the usual medium of liquid nitrogen, to prevent cross-contamination from other samples. Instead, they are frozen to vitrification (glass-like) solidity using liquid nitrogen vapor. This procedure is well known for preserving stem cells and cord blood/tissues following birth, as a reference and resource throughout the lifetime of the newborn. Such cryostorage costs just a few hundred dollars per year, typically for intervals of 15 years or more. For future regeneration, cryostorage of whole blood or tissues is already a mature and proven bioscience.
EG is Ectogenesis – gestation within an artificial womb – and like biobanking is an existing science developed toward rescuing and nurturing premature babies. EG is not as mature as biobanking, although it was likely utilized to clone macaque monkeys – primates like humans. Early EG had many issues around the number of samples and trials required before success. Ethical questions are expected with any technology that redefines human reproduction, whether for the fact that the infant retains its own DNA from a previous lifetime, or that women will gain an option outside full pregnancy for reproduction. Ectogenesis will become a transformative technology in a manner similar to the development of computer chips, which currently are the most complex entities ever manufactured, by machines that can cost >$200 million. When this level of technology is applied to EG research, perhaps as a ‘Manhattan’ project we will appreciate that human life extension can be realized within our lifetimes, and motivate the character of humanity away from desperation, toward cooperation and interdependence.
H is Humanism - which is necessary for our species to survive the coming centuries. Humanism bridges our intra-species communication. As this is written, a single human can initiate a terminal war, and that summarizes the parlous nature of our species governance. We are - to confess - a young plague of greedy killer apes, with this planet now at peril of runaway heat death - the fate of our sister planet Venus. Humanism is the native, blood credo of humanity - a secular sidecar adaptable by any religion. It is congruent with human aspiration for an afterlife, over millennia - ‘heaven’ as the foretold opportunity to celebrate an idealized life on a paradisical planet. Militarism is the cultural cancer that our species must eliminate, before it bankrupts and renders our legacy to shame.
The Strength of the BB-H-EG Model
As shorthand for BioBanking-Humanism-EctoGenesis, the BB-H-EG model is easy to understand by most adults, once each term is explained. The position of the late E.O. Wilson - that humans came to dominate the Earth through cooperation - is worth our personal trust. Never has the goal of de facto immortality been closer!
The salient hallmark of cognitive evolution in humans began with our ability to formulate and exchange ideas with language. Most religions present ‘heaven’ as an achievable goal for anyone alive today, and “…nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” – Victor Hugo.
This model also cannot be wrong, nor disproved.
Biobanking is the back room of all biological research, and is a mature, routine science of its own. Low-temperature cryogenics has worked to overcome issues like ice crystals and cracking when freezing or thawing with liquid nitrogen. Today controlled warming and gradual freezing avoids damage to the point that embryos, sperm and oocytes survive cryopreservation to resume life. Whole organs will have to wait, but at the scale of SCNT EG (somatic cell nuclear transfer, which produced Dolly the sheep in 1996) that our model requires - it survives intact. EG works well today for premature babies, and needs to expand and include uterine environments to complete the model.
Frozen embryos are an accepted route to reproduction in human fertility medicine, so the BB part of the model is a conventional lab protocol already. Biobanks reliably keep vitrified samples in nitrogen vapor indefinitely.
The same can be said for purified and fortified dry DNA, returned to the individual (myself here) in a hermetically sealed steel cylinder. This is the first step in personal DNA stewardship, and anyone can keep their DNA in a safety deposit box.
So Genity - the science of retaining our human franchise in this virgin Universe - begins with dry or cryopreserved DNA. This secures a dry sample from degradation for at least a century. Preserved DNA can be infinitely patient as it waits for EG to catch up. If the world and our species can be harmonized via some degree of Humanism, the time until EG’s technical and ethical maturity will arrive within decades, or earlier.
Once EG becomes accepted and reliable as a technique for human reproduction, then only one question will remain: Is the child reported by the Ethereum Oracle actually you? A DNA test will be required before funds are dispensed from the blockchain for the costs and the child’s upbringing. The test will confirm that you have a complete match, because only one molecule of your DNA was transferred during EG, and it will be yours – with blockchain certainty.
Then, we might have to wait a few years before we can ask the child if the procedure actually ‘worked’. No human will ever answer that question wrong, and no sensible adult will ever ask it.
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