The idea behind Drake's equation - applied to the question of why there are so few active supporters of life extension in the world - has been floating around the movement for a long time.

The first precursor to articulate something along these lines was formulated by Vladimir Shakirov in 2024.

Here we took the initial filters as a foundation and reworked them as a series of statements that must each receive a positive answer for a person's contribution to life extension to be truly meaningful.

Few people will answer "yes" to all of them — but let's try.

Filters

Beliefs

1. Disease and aging are bad, and death is worst of all.
   Many agree with the first, fewer with the second, almost no one fully internalizes the third
2. The problems of aging and death are solvable engineering challenges.
   Filters out everyone without exposure to science, engineering, and without imagination
3. Every day of delay costs lives.
   Filters out everyone who is okay with that. Those who make it here are at least potential voters
4. My participation here matters for acceleration.
   Filters out everyone who chose a different path — those who remain have at least subscribed to stay informed

Identification

5. There are already others around me who are also focused on the problem.
   Filters out sparks that never found their people
6. I openly express my position, even if others find it strange.
   Filters out everyone who risks their reputation and income. Those who remain move the Overton window
7. Part of my money goes into the problem.
   At this point you'll at least buy a subscription or a conference ticket
8. Part of my life goes to this problem.
   At this point you're already a volunteer: organizing meetups, running channels — giving back without needing specialized credentials

Competencies

9. I apply my skills to solving this problem.
   At this point you're a fighter against aging and death
10. I start where no one has started, without waiting to be told.
    At this point you're a leader

Impact

1. I understand where the current leverage point is.
   At this point your contribution can be directed where it actually matters
2. I can work on this for years, even without immediate results.
   this is the difference between ARPA-H and Hevolution — we work for years or we do nothing
3. I have enough runway to take a real risk.
   at this point you can make a big bet with your own or others' resources and get a big return
4. I live where my location helps advance the mission.
   without this, all previous levels yield less output per unit of effort
   

And Yet They Induce More Questions Than Answers

Being honest, answering these questions properly we think to be one of the best leverage points.

General Questions

• The current pyramid is inverted — we have a mass of people occupied with expensive research and almost no one at the early stages. Why?
• The movement has spent decades looking for bottlenecks in biotech, but the most basic filters eliminate the most people — and those early stages can potentially be addressed through mass communication at low cost per person reached. Primarily communication and culture — not what the scientists who form the current core are trained to do.

Questions About Beliefs

• How do we spread the idea that death is bad? If we clear this filter, we get millions of wellness enthusiasts. And billions of deaths. And who do we target? Young people? Older people change career tracks less easily.
• How do we produce and distribute urgency? AI optimists, gerontologists, and replacement theorists don't care that millions of people are being irreversibly destroyed right now. Neither does the general public. Only I and a handful of cryonicists seem to care. Urgency is produced through personal loss and through a culture that places other people's deaths inside a moral frame. How do we turn that into a strategy?
• Should the strategies for reaching the masses and the elites differ? Right now they're merged into one and it's uncomfortable for everyone.
• What's faster to change — belief filters or competency filters?
• How and who can fund phases 1–4?
• It's unclear whether we need a parallel positive culture, a confrontational culture, or both — because our opponent is the way mass culture copes with the fear of death.
• Mass-scale outcomes are unlocked at the upper levels. For geroscience to get 1% of the budget, we don't need 1 million activists — but 1 million voters who have passed filters 1–3 would be useful.
• Should there be a landing point for those who have passed filters 1–4? Either this becomes an electorate (if GR infrastructure and candidates exist), or it channels into volunteer competencies and action — or it dissolves into disappointment.

Questions About Identification

• How do we retain people who come to us?
• How do we raise the prestige of the field?
• Do we have enough people to sustain communities even in the cities we already have?
• How do we create more communities? What should communities do? How do they fund themselves?

Questions About Effectiveness

• How does the movement create a "Where to apply effort?" service?
• The bottleneck-knowledge filter — we need a metascience of life extension that studies the dynamics of the field itself. Otherwise even what we have will slip through our fingers.
• How do we build retention tools to reduce activist burnout? Every person who lasts ten years is worth dozens of new arrivals, since many newcomers will leave.