Never say Die. Anti-aging and the quest for immortality

If we can survive for long enough, the future will surely be worth sticking around for.

Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher and founder of the Future of Humanity institute at Oxford University. He is a smart guy, one of the world’s great thinkers who has worked on everything from artificial intelligence to simulation theory. In 2005 Nick wrote a modern-day parable called The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.

The parable is about the misery inflicted by a dragon-tyrant who sits on top of a mountain and demands a sacrifice of ten thousand people every day, to eat. The people come together and fight back, it takes years, but they eventually kill the dragon. The dragon is the personification of death and upon killing the tyrant, people have eternal life. The story raises some interesting questions about the acceptance of death as inevitable and how we might live longer.

Most religions were formed around the idea of some sort of afterlife. Trying to answer questions that there are currently no answers for. Death treats us all equally and comes for all of us eventually. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the universe we live in, all our cells and atoms are in a state of entropy, of dissipating energy repositioned. But now we are approaching a time when technology may be able to usurp the second law, to fight and even kill the dragon.

We all know that living a healthy life will add a few years on. Diet, exercise, low stress and community have all proven to be beneficial in long living blue zones. But for some Silicon Valley billionaires, this kind of long-term dedication to a life of nuts and beans and exercise is not enough. They want a more immediate and long-lasting solution. They want immortality and they want it now. These seriously rich, morally questionable, powerful people are throwing a lot of money and resources into fighting death. They want to buy themselves more time.

Vitalek Buterin - founder of Ethereum cryptocurrency.

Peter Theil - founder of PayPal. Trump supporter and Lord of the Rings fan.

Jeff Bezos – owner of evil empire Amazon who still hasn’t paid me what he owes me.

Elon Musk – increasingly unhinged World boss.

Sam Altman – CEO of OpenAI. Maybe not as evil as the rest.

These heavyweight investors and their servant scientists are researching a number of diverse anti-aging methods.

Cryogenic freezing is available for you and your pet right now. As soon as you die, your blood is replaced with a special cryogenic mixture of antifreeze and preservatives in a process called vitrification. Your body will be in a giant thermos of liquid nitrogen at -196℃, cold enough to stop time. You will float around in a frozen limbo slurry until science discovers a way to safely reanimate you. Or someone pulls the plug.

Nanotechnology. This is still a few years away but having millions of microscopic robots inside you, zooming around your veins destroying pathogens, removing debris, ridding your body of clots, clogs and tumours, correcting DNA errors and actually reversing the aging process sounds awesome. As long as they don’t take over my body and use it without my permission. Sign me up!

Whole brain emulation into software or a bio-body. Scanning your brain into a virtual afterlife like videogame architecture or scanning your brain into a clone of your younger healthy self. Very intriguing but would you let Elon stick a computer chip in your head? Would that brain scan really be you? Can’t wait to find out.

Venture capitalist Bryan Johnson sold his company to PayPal for 400 million so he could spend more time on the search for eternal life. He believed he found the solution by injecting himself with the blood of young people, including blood from his own 17-year-old son. Johnson has since concluded there were no benefits but there is a company called Ambrosia plasma, registered with the FDA, that can sell you a litre of healthy blood from 16–25-year-olds to inject for only 8000 US$. I think I will abstain from this one.

There are less dramatic biological methods being studied like the idea of reprogramming our old cells to make them young again. If human cells could be age amended, why must we age at all? The secret may be inside the womb. The miracle of childbirth, chromosomes combining to create a bouncing baby of brand-new cells inside a mother’s hijacked body. Can our cells be re-born? If we could live forever, would there still be an innate need to give birth?

Bio-printing new organs and prosthetic limbs are already widespread. The future is almost here, and technology is already a huge part of our lives. It’s inevitable that we become more integrated and augmented. There may come a time when such technology is freely available, some future utopian paradise. It’s great the work is being done but it does pose some problems.

Call me cynical but I am not convinced these people are spending their billions on finding the secret to eternal life for the good of humanity. The likes of Bezos and Musk have already made their intentions clear, hoarding their wealth, pushing their neo-libertarian agenda, and building spaceships to flee our overheating planet. I can’t see them offering free longevity treatment to the populations of Bangladesh or Pakistan.

With these investors, anti-aging technology will surely become available in the next few years, but it will initially only be for the rich, creating an even more divisive classed based society. The rich already outlive the poor by decades. Imagine a future where Musk and Bezos are 150 years old, world dictators that own the afterlife. Living like gods in their sub-space orbitals, surrounded by hundreds of other rich old white people playing pickle ball or whatever it is rich old white people do. The planet Earth will be better off without them, goodbye and good riddance.

If anti-aging longevity treatments do become widespread and accessible it creates an even bigger problem. Maybe we will need the Musk Mars Mansions, or the Lunation Amazon Apartments because the planet could not possibly cope with the increased population. We are busting at the seams at the moment and the last thing the planet needs is a few more million old people squandering our resources and befouling the atmosphere with their private jets and affluent flatulence.

I truly hope we do survive the climate crisis, the wars and wealth disparity, Trump and Putin, aliens and AI, viruses, and radioactive flesh-eating seaweed. Because if we can overcome these existential obstacles and survive for long enough, the future will surely be worth sticking around for. Maybe climbing in the freezer for a few hundred years is the best thing to do. Wake me up when we get there and don’t forget to pay the power bill thanks.