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Vitalist Bay Recap - Freethink
webfreethink.com·freethink.com/biotech/vitalist-bay-recap
Tangentially relevant to AI safety as it covers the longevity/transhumanist community that overlaps with EA and AI safety circles; provides cultural context on techno-optimist movements but has minimal direct AI safety content.
Metadata
Importance: 18/100news articlenews
Summary
A firsthand account of Vitalist Bay, an eight-week pop-up community and conference in Berkeley, California, where over 200 speakers including biotech CEOs, researchers, and biohackers gathered to advance radical life extension and anti-aging science. The piece explores both the social dynamics of the longevity movement and the substantive scientific and philosophical claims being made about defeating biological aging.
Key Points
- •Vitalist Bay was a two-month event on a private Berkeley campus billed as 'longevity's new capital,' blending conference, commune, and research zone.
- •Over 200 speakers participated, including biotech CEOs, venture capitalists, scientists, and figures like biohacker Bryan Johnson.
- •The event reflects the growing organized community around radical life extension, with participants committing talents and capital to preventing aging.
- •The piece frames longevity pursuit as a community-forming movement with quasi-religious intensity, drawing parallels to other ideological tribes.
- •Freethink's coverage positions the longevity/radical life extension field as transitioning from science fiction to mainstream biotech discourse.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthaven (Event Venue) | Organization | 40.0 |
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Humans will build a community around seemingly anything. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No god but our God. Fan fiction and cosplay. Racial justice, gender rights, and pride movements of all colors. There are communities of rationalists and Buddhists and birdwatchers. Flat Earth Society members and QAnon conspiracists. Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival somehow manages to combine all the above.
No matter the motive, bonding is hardwired into our biology. When we form and fortify new relations, our cells release the “love hormone” oxytocin, which makes us feel cherished and rooted. We evolved this particular pleasure button because members of our species tend to do better in groups than as individuals. Millennia ago, being part of one meant you were less likely to be eaten by wolves or die of starvation. Today, maintaining social connection reduces the risks of both [heart disease](https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/04/social-isolation-loneliness-can-damage-heart-and-brain-health-report-says) and [dementia](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-023-00387-0#:~:text=Abstract,and%20policy%20dementia%20prevention%20interventions.) by about 30%, according to two recent studies.
We may contrive celestial stories to justify the existence of our communities, but the common threads that bind us are almost always secondary to a more simple and primordial drive to be in each other’s presence. Yet as our communities grow in both diversity and number and our capacity to choose our own tribes expands ad infinitum, the places where we find belonging come to serve as statements about who we are, what we care about, and how we wish to spend our time on Earth.
Our associations of choice are also expressions of the world in which we hope to live, and our strongest associations can become shortcuts to making that world a genuine reality. Along those lines, for two months on a small campus near the eastern lip of the San Francisco Bay, a community formed around the dream of a very special kind of world: one in which we never grow old and die.
Samuli Hartikainen
Millionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson presents a talk about the future of longevity at Vitalist Bay.
### **Part conference, part commune, part concert venue**
Vitalist Bay was many things at once. According to its organizers, it was “longevity’s new capital,” while a pin on Google Maps dubbed it “a wellness program in Berkeley, California.” To some, it was a group home, an academic conference, a pop-up community, and a special resea
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