As mentioned over the years, we have around 300,000 slowly rotating links in what's come to be known as the link-vault.
Here's one of them.
May 31, 2023
Zuzalu, a pop-up city in Montenegro has provided a temporary home for people who plan to set up a new jurisdiction to encourage biohacking and fast-track drugs that slow or reverse aging.
It’s a Friday morning in early May, and I’ve woken up to the sound of waves crashing against the rocks in a small bay on the coast of the Adriatic.
The sky is completely gray, and there are continual rumbles of thunder. The weather has been bad since I arrived in Montenegro. It was too stormy for the pilot to land the plane I was traveling on, and we ended up touching down in neighboring Croatia.
I’m here for a gathering of longevity enthusiasts, people interested in extending human life through various biotechnology approaches. One attendee, with whom I ended up sharing a cross-border taxi ride, told me half of his luggage was “supplements and powders.” Most attendees seem to be wearing “longevity” stickers. Everyone is super friendly, and the sense of optimism is palpable. Everyone I speak to is confident we’ll be able to find a way to slow or reverse aging. And they have a bold plan to speed up progress.
Welcome to Zuzalu
Humans have been searching for the fountain of youth for thousands of years. But progress has been slow, to say the least. Though plenty of companies are working on ways to slow or reverse the process, it’s incredibly difficult and expensive to run a study to find out whether a treatment has helped people live longer. And health agencies like the World Health Organization don’t even consider aging to be a disease in the first place.Now a community of people is working on an alternative setup, including perhaps even establishing an independent state. Aging is “morally bad,” they argue, and it’s a problem that needs to be solved. They see existing regulations as roadblocks to progress and call for a different approach. Less red tape allows for more innovation, they say. People should be encouraged to self-experiment with unproven treatments if they wish. And companies shouldn’t be held back by national laws that limit how they develop and test drugs.
Around 780 such people gathered at this “pop-up city” in Montenegro to work out how they might create such a state—a place where like-minded innovators can work together in an all-new jurisdiction that gives them free rein to self-experiment with unproven drugs. Some attendees are just visitors, passing through. But the dedicated among them have been living here for almost two months. Welcome to Zuzalu.
I heard about Zuzalu through a contact who invests in longevity technologies. The gathering, held at a luxury resort in Tivat, Montenegro, runs until the end of May. Each week has a different theme, ranging from synthetic biology to artificial intelligence, although the overarching focus is on longevity, cryptocurrencies, and the idea of creating novel jurisdictions.
“Zuzalu is not just a conference,” Laurence Ion, one of the core organizers, told an audience at the event. “It’s an experiment in co-living and exploring what the physical presence of an online tribe would look like.” The concept came from the mind of Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, although the organizers stress that it was a collaborative effort....
....MUCH MORE
Some previous posts on longevity:- "Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research"
- "Debate: Does Longevity Put a Strain on the Economy?" (GE)
- "The Richer You Are the Older You’ll Get".
- If You Are Wealthy You Should be Able to Live to 120
- Insurance: Betting on the Old and Decrepit
- Dark Patterns: "the power law distribution that generally defines the longevity of Roman emperors "
- Demographics and Deflation II: Longer Lives, Lower Interest Rates
- "Do Older People Have a Duty to Die?"
- Feel Like Betting On Life Expectancy? There's A Derivative For That
