Visions of limitless life extension
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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Back in 1976, just after stumbling onto the original Beachhead invention-building procedure and just before I started teaching it, we experimentally asked ourselves to be shown a device or system which would reverse aging and extend like unto forever the useful/enjoyable human lifespan.
Up to then, and usually since, we had been getting images in keeping with our design stricture to focus on ordinary, simple, easily understood things like the future’s equivalent of the wheelbarrow or tablefork. Here came instead this elaborate vision of a massive, involved installation I could only call “the rejuvenatorium.”
I put that off as a fluke, but it kept coming back for me. What really weirded me out, though, was that when others took up the question, they mostly also got this same image, independently of anything I had told them. That has continued to be the case since.
I’ve finally published, in Discovering the Obvious, the basic “Beachhead” procedure, the variants of which allow a group, not only one individual, to focus in on an invention so that specialists can be brought in to study it. It includes a partial description of the Rejuvenatorium itself, followed by a brief questionnaire to check various details (our answers to those questions are given just a few pages later in the book) so readers can determine for themselves whether they are in fact viewing the same image as we’ve been.
Why didn’t I publish this initial 1976 experience back then instead of 23 years later?
- I hadn’t come to terms with the fact of this image’s apparent existence independent of the one individual observer.
- I didn’t know how to elicit this group-visit procedure on other issues and inventions, and didn’t get those three follow-on “Beachhead”-related procedures, which are now in the book, until 1996-7. Now, of course, that’s wide open for anyone who wants to take a team of diverse specialists in on any question or invention. Stardrive, anyone?
- It took me until the last year or so to finally come out of the closet with the notion I’d like to physically hang around this rather enjoyable life for an unconventionally long stretch of time. I’d like to see in the flesh — this flesh, so to speak, at least this span of conscious continuity — some of the good things which appear to be coming up for humanity.
It is clear to me, from the specific things we have found out, from the image itself and from developments related which have transpired since to highlight those medical breakthroughs it contains and combines, that such a degree of viable restoration and useful/enjoyable life extension is close to being within reach. What we already understand from this image is understood and applicable enough to “buy” a few decades of effective life extension while the rest of it, and/or other things, can be researched out toward further extension.
“Extension” — Moiré pattern by Jacob Yerex
We especially urge five aspects among those revealed in the rejuvenatorium experience, powerful potentially life-saving medical breakthroughs, as hypotheses for urgent formal research.
I’ve also published all this into public domain to forestall the science-fiction-theme possibility that such a youthing source would become the purview of some few rich or otherwise privileged/power people. The more different people’s attentions this book comes to, the better the chances that all this and more can be actualized — hopefully while I’m here myself to enjoy the results … and you yourself.
And now I’ve “let the cat out of the bag!” Truly. My apologies to anyone who finds such a concept or prospect uncomfortable. I hope those of us working in this context, and those who happen to read these lines, can find between us the most positive resolution for all concerned of the various philosophies and backgrounds which we respectively bring to this particular table. Whether or not we ultimately go for major extension of the human lifespan, there is much here in this context we can work with, which can greatly affect general human well-being.
Anyhow, it took until the writing of that book for it all to come together in one convenient package for me, and there it all sits in the package called Discovering the Obvious, there where anyone who cares to can explore and use it for such purposes. I hope at least a few do.
We are still puzzling over the phenomenon. Since that one device itself has clearly shown us at least 5 original medical breakthroughs not otherwise addressed, and so many people have looked in and gotten the same detailed image as shown in our little questionnaire in the book, I have to assume there is some validity involved in that remarkable image, whether or not this means a collective consciousness.
There may be some other explanation(s).