Drake equation for conversion of people into our activists
Why and how do people become active participants in transhumanist projects? What are the things that need to come together for this to happen? What forms the Big Filter of the Drake Equation for the conversion funnel of ordinary people into participants in our projects?
1) a particularly acute personal perception of death/aging? (personality type peculiarities? can this peculiarity be caught through the Big Five, or some other questionnaire?). Maybe. Still, nobody really wants to age, a considerable part of people try to engage in healthy lifestyles, etc., all grieve for loved ones who have died. So maybe this factor is not that important (because all hate aging, age-related diseases and death).
2) extremely high self-esteem over999999? (in order to seriously undertake the project of victory of science over aging and death! moreover, when the vast majority of scientists and society does not say anything about it; moreover, to think that your efforts can seriously change something).
There are such people indeed. However the self-esteem of a median transhumanist chat volunteer does not seem to be very much unusual.
3) availability of a sufficiently large amount of free time (projects require a lot of time from many participants; + to get the necessary qualifications, you also need a lot of time).
Yet most people have free weekends, free evenings. Well, with the exception of parents of small children. So also not really convincing.
4) having a sufficiently broad outlook and good education. Maybe.
5) a certain special propensity for self-realization through social activity (for example, the need to be involved in something great)
6) Atheism (however this is a frequent phenomenon)
7) A fairly high stress tolerance. While working on projects, different people (including your fellow transhumanist colleagues) will sometimes criticize you in not always kind ways; you need to be resistant to this.
8) People who pass the filters of the previous points - often drop out because they concentrate their efforts on trying to develop their own business/startup, or say get into power, or say create their own popular cool game/social network
... in general, make some kind of superproject, and then come back with resources to promote radical life extension
... On the one hand it is correct, on the other hand - many people on this way spend all efforts and achieve nothing, burn out, and in the end do not bring any benefit; others come to some success, but on the way lose the necessary energy and passion and don't want to spend resources on promoting radical life extension anymore)
9) people often just don't understand what they can do to bring science closer to defeating aging. That's why we create One hundred ideas for life extension agenda promotion.
Now, there is another big filter.
(10) most of the people who managed to pass the Big Filter of the previous section, do not have enough resources (money, competencies) and/or sufficient motivation to regularly provide some kind of benefit to the movement.
(11) of the remaining ones, many live in the poor countries (or ex-USSR) where it's harder to do real progress for many reasons.
(12) As of those who live in developed countries... that's where it gets interesting. I don't have ready answers. But perhaps, they believe in free market too much? Like, if there is a good timely idea of some useful experiments/research, then it will certainly find funding or investment. If the resources are not found, this means that there is something wrong with the idea or its organizers (lack of experience, insufficient elaboration, unrealistic ideas at the current stage of science, etc.). This reasoning is not without flaws (basic science does not pay off in the medium term and is unattractive to investors), but people from developed countries are probably inclined to believe that it is better to finance what pays off, and after getting the necessary intermediate results to move on to what previously did not pay off (medium term), and now after the intermediate results will pay off.