The Genity Whitepaper
The Opportunity for Continuance
Abstract. Our human species is actively pursuing life extension, from modest longevity to putative immortality, seeking pathways to ward off death. This paper presents an outline for a Society (here the Humanist Union) to be structured as a DAO, that safeguards the genetic continuance of its members (Genity) via DNA stewardship. This decentralized Society presides as an Oracle on the Ethereum blockchain, mounting and executing smart contracts per the instructions of each member, confidentially. The Genity initiative recognizes ectogenesis (EG) as an imminent technology for personal gestation — an unprecedented opportunity to expand our human franchise beyond one life cycle. DNA stewardship begins with long-term biobank storage of tissue samples, optimized for reproduction. The Society/Oracle function administers the child’s gestation, infancy, youth and the related funding. This document envisions three sequential life cycles during the next five hundred years, as a global social contract and framework — a common quid pro quo toward cooperative harmonization with ourselves, our sister species and this planet.
Introduction
All living organisms enjoy two brief privileges — life and our singular presence in a virgin universe. Humans are afforded this provisional ‘franchise’ subject to severe limitations. Evolution allocates the species a discrete life span of <100 years, then halves each genome during sexual reproduction. This extinguishes individual identity, which the HU Society considers to be centered in our DNA, as present in every living cell.
Our DNA subtends the Self, whereas our brain is a temporal computing organ designed for, and committed to homeostasis. Evolution’s model serves its own interests, as any offspring expends its single life cycle to survive differentially — to adapt on behalf of its staking genes — then perishes.
Despite universal aspiration, humanity has had no opportunity for continuance of each individual franchise — until this moment.
Life extension initiatives range from anti-aging research to silver-bullet solutions claiming to delay the burdens and ailments of old age. The average lifespan of western societies is in decline, as the metabolic ‘diseases of civilization’ including obesity, diabetes, cancer, cardiac events and dementia — all rarely seen before 1900 — enforce an often painful death.
The main features of human culture that must be addressed soon are:
· Nutrition and Health
· Genity and DNA stewardship
· Governance — Militarism vs Humanism
Nutrition and Health
Agriculture and the mass production of food has enabled humans to overpopulate the planet to an unsustainable level, leading to existential threats, especially global heating and destruction of the atmosphere. It is conceivable that now only fusion power can avert the heat death of all life on Earth.
Less appreciated is the hazard of world malnutrition resulting from ignorance of what a proper human diet must consist of. A million years of mammalian evolution has left us dependent on animal food sources, yet some imagine that food can be designed like clothing, manufactured outside natural processes, to conform to ideologies like vegetarianism or cost expediency. Evolution demands otherwise.
The prevalence of cheap, highly refined factory food and seed oils akin to motor oil have resulted in the emergence of the ‘diseases of civilization’ that have degraded human health since 1900, before which they were almost unknown. These include diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, dementia, and cancer. Their recent prevalence threatens the metabolic health of the entire species.
A willful ignorance of our central hormone for combatting URI’s and inflammation 25(OH)D or ‘vitamin’ D has underwritten the ‘pandemic’ of Covid-19, which resulted from deep deficiencies in northern latitudes, yet itself caused no excess mortality above 1%. Its most draconian legacy was the degree of media censorship implemented over a rough seasonal flu, by epidemiologists largely untrained in nutrition.
The idea that disease can be addressed using silver-bullet solutions — drugs, pills and surgery — has benefitted western doctors and Big Pharma, both operating beyond their scope by pre-empting nutritionists/dieticians, who have been stripped of any authority. Doctors are best as interventionists and specialists, and the corruption of western ‘Food Guides’ by the A*A medical agencies has left the majority of their patients obese, and destined for the horrors of death by diabetes. Nutrition science professionals must be respected before doctors’ opinions.
Across the globe the grasslands, soils and water tables must be restored for sensitive grazing. Animal-based food sources are our evolutionary heritage, and we must scale down our populations to levels that can be supported, as they were just a century ago.
This introductory document foresees our next five hundred years as a return to ecological balance, to a participatory retrospective (given a few more life cycles) of what powers we newly command, and what treasures and friendships, loves, achievements we might enjoy, before we pivot as a mature entity, to face the threats of transhumanism and artificial intelligence (AI).
Genity and DNA Stewardship
This section describes the prospect of sequential life cycles imminent within this century.
The outlined Society program introduces the concept of Genity as secure long-term DNA stewardship, beginning with an optimized tissue sample (e.g. whole blood) viable for reproduction, held in advanced biobanks. The Humanist Union Society in this instance acts as an Oracle overseeing member samples, while executing the members’ registered smart contracts, both onto and off the Ethereum blockchain.
Ectogenesis
The declared and implied goal of such long term biobanking is to enable our literal rebirth, via a deeply complex technique termed ectogenesis (EG, artificial womb). Counterarguments around memories (as the seat of the Self and consciousness) notwithstanding, biobanking is fully capable of retaining viable tissue samples for centuries. As such it is DNA stewardship arresting the march of time, awaiting the ongoing maturity of a reproduction revolution that will expand humanity’s life extension options as a species, and most pointedly — as individuals.
The cycle begins by leveraging biobanking’s infinite patience, until EG becomes accepted and reliable. Once the Oracle oversight can confirm a definitive DNA test — we are thus reborn, and the blockchain funds are remitted to each party. It behooves the HU to participate in a project that, like fusion power, presents deep new perspectives for humanity. An integrated procedure that affords women an option beyond conventional pregnancy, while redefining the parceling of life itself, is worthy of escalating, dedicated study and financial support by this Society and localized affiliates.
Biobanking
In simple terms, the membership gets aboard a time machine designed to transport their full genetic identity, as their continuing seed or ‘franchise’ in life, through to rebirth. Low temperature DNA stewardship is an established technology, a retail service available to anyone today. For example, the Humanist Union’s biobanking contractor has more than 3000 funeral homes as affiliates. Twenty-year storage in an advanced vapor nitrogen facility costs no more than $100 annually. More than anything, stewardship will rely on this stability over decades, alongside evolving EG technology already operative for successful mammalian and primate cloning.
The Blockchain
Truth and its inalterable documentation are the twin attributes that the blockchain brings to human culture, and together they ensure a solid certainty that precludes cheating. This effectively elevates human character by reducing opportunities for intrusive gatekeepers, and allows both logic and capital to move through smart contracts intact. The blockchain is the sure guarantor of our sequential DNA identity, as only a positive DNA test at the end of EG will release the funds designated for each party and process. The same is true of any intermediate ‘trust’ processes described and programmed within those contracts.
Governance — Humanism vs Militarism
Presently humans are a young species of killer apes maximized as a literal, biological plague. We have converted the earth’s verdant river deltas into massive concrete hemorrhoids exuding poisons. The expedient way to exterminate any infestation is to fumigate its breathing space — to snuff their atmosphere. If this is magnified by a nuclear war, the planet itself may step back a billion years, become a hellish cinder like Venus.
Our humankind twice has failed in the past century to rationalize our own species governance. The United Nations nonetheless remains a ready framework for redirecting ‘defense’ budgets that perpetuate human failure and poverty into social and environmental reconstruction programs. There is no question that nuclear weapons and the 20th century comprise a dire warning. Yet if homo sapiens explicitly doubles its lifespan, as a focused alternative to the pursuit of wealth, then our planet and sister species should return to the rich diversity we once all shared collectively.
Despite those 20th century failures, amid our ongoing cultural cancer of war, a new variant of species governance — liquid democracy — promises to bond humanity internally. Liquid democracy aka delegative democracy has numerous advantages over simple representative versions, and places everyone into an active democratic role that reflects their own expertise.
Humanism
Why is Humanism the preferred envelope for biobanking/ectogenesis? The notion of ‘sequential lives’ implies that we each share two or more full life cycles within the next 500 years — an arbitrary time frame that delivers genetic continuance, including the wondrous embrace of human childhood and youth. If Humanism is classified by some as a de facto religion, then it here offers half a millennium in paradise. Genity will find universal respect in the law, with recognition as a gateway to an afterlife — which many religions envisage — adoptable within beliefs as a ritual/ceremony. Humanism can act as a secular appendage enabling ancestral transitions that religions have presaged for millennia. Religion is private and personal — the Society remains a secular, humanist sidecar, personally suitable for docking with any faith, to celebrate life and our planet’s glories for centuries to come.
The humanist rationale foresees that after a putative period of five hundred years, our young species will likely face existential risks such as artificial intelligence, natural disasters, and Black Swan entities and events that will require humans to cooperate as one synchronized entity. This is a putative junction where transhumanism and AI can be dealt with by a sophisticated species — homo sapiens at maturity — specifically interfacing with these threats, and their grave implications for life itself.
The conceit in this analysis lies in the fact that society must restructure pro-actively, via institutions such as fusion power and liquid democracy; to bypass climate peril, to defund militarism and then direct those resources to constructive programs. If a warship is a monument to human failure, stolen from the poor, perhaps it can be converted to a relief vessel for natural disasters. Such is how our thinking must evolve, and very soon.
Hence we can access the foretold paradise of our ancestors, to enjoy the glory of families and health, the vistas within wise education, shared across friendships that may span multiple life cycles.
Passing the Torch
Buddhists describe our Spirit, transitioning between two states of existence, as a flame that is passed between two candles. This is metaphor of course, yet it is critical to understand that the transition to a sequential life cycle is completely biological — our universal blockchain is Evolution. Exactly one molecule of DNA is physically transferred from one life cycle to the next — intact, and indeed is the sole actor in this immaculate conception. The New Philosophy will have much to say about this in the decades to come. Contemplating our next life cycle is a useful pastime.
This is continuance of the precise chemical and biological identity of the individual in stewardship with the Society/Oracle, and is what distinguishes Buddhist allegory from our required scientific certainty. L1 of the blockchain will listen only for the L2 data that confirms our confirming DNA test. It then funds our youth in accordance with our smart contracts. There are the circumstances for our successive birth. These arrangements can be made today, for eventual EG.
This process, from DNA stewardship through to secure Genity, is an implied quid pro quo binding species cooperation over the next five centuries. From that vantage point homo sapiens can address any exogenous threats and emerging opportunities, if we do some housecleaning on Earth beforehand.
References
- DNA Capsule Specifications — SecuriGene DNA Capsule Specifications — SecuriGene
- First monkeys cloned with technique that made Dolly the sheep (nature.com)
- Liquid democracy — Wikipedia
- Humanist Union | Stewardship
