Swedish life extension advocate Linus Petersson proposes making overcoming death a shared goal for civilization

Swedish life extension advocate Linus Petersson proposes making overcoming death a shared goal for civilization

In a series of posts on 5 November, he connects efforts to address aging with humanity’s survival and the expansion of human capacities. His starting point was a talk given years earlier by philosopher Nick Bostrom.

Petersson sees aging as a technical problem that people can and should solve: our bodies deteriorate for biological reasons. He says he has spent more than twenty years working to eliminate aging.

“Every day, people die who would prefer to keep living.”

Each person’s future also depends on the fate of humanity as a whole. Petersson asks us to imagine everything people could discover, create and experience over even the next thousand years. Human extinction would end that entire future; he identifies reducing the risk of such a catastrophe as the second task.

Even if the first two tasks were accomplished, a question would remain: how good could life become? This is the question Petersson thinks about most often. In his 2005 talk, Bostrom linked this task to changes in human biology: improving memory and our ability to understand the world and other people, appreciate art and form relationships. A longer life would allow people to gain experience for which they currently have too few years.

Bostrom asked his audience to imagine intelligent beings who cannot appreciate music and are puzzled by our enthusiasm for it. Our capacity to enjoy music depends on how our brains are built. Bostrom suggested that the human brain’s current capacities might also limit our access to other valuable experiences. Expanding those capacities could allow people to have experiences that are difficult even to imagine today. Petersson wants to have such experiences himself.

Petersson proposes that governments and civilization as a whole adopt these three tasks as a shared goal. In 2024, he published the book “Medicines Against Aging”. In its preface, he was already calling for a shared goal and public discussion of the scientific and ethical questions surrounding life extension.

Petersson hears people speak of loneliness and a lack of meaning even in wealthy, secular societies. For him, working to extend life and explore the world already provides a sense of purpose.

“We have people we love whom we want to spend more time with.”