Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and the quest for immortality
The billionaires’ race to reconfigure death is the latest manifestation of a timeless human fascination
According to the second law of thermodynamics, we cannot outrun entropy, the wearing down and eventual death of all systems, including the universe itself. So what would it mean to escape the inevitability of death? How counterintuitive is the idea of living forever?
Max Chafkin’s upcoming book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power is a sharp biography scrutinising the venture capitalist and entrepreneur who has also invested millions of dollars into life extension research seeking to “cheat death”. Part of Thiel’s personal branding is his strong connection to parabiosis, a field of experimental biology studying the anatomical and physiological union of two organisms. A disrupter and a Christian determined to fight death, Thiel has argued that if we accept that the future is unknowable, we might as well abdicate our agency.
Since stepping down as Amazon’s chief executive in July, Jeff Bezos has also joined the contest by investing in Altos Labs, an anti-ageing start-up pursuing biological reprogramming, aiming to reverse time within a live mammal. Calico, a biotech company focused on longevity and funded by Google co-founder Larry Page, has been around since 2013 but new fields have since cropped up, such as liquid computers targeted to shut down cells carrying viral diseases, another niche area close to Thiel’s heart.
Memento mori, medieval Christians warned: remember that you have to die. That principle is now contested. It used to be the case that a man’s life lasted less than 30,000 days but Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist, speculates that the person who will live a thousand years has already been born. In Silicon Valley, as the obsession with longevity has turned into a race to reconfigure death, billionaires are looking into a range of methods to increase and tweak their lifespans. Plasma from young donors, reprogramming DNA, tissue engineering, printing organs, cryonics and digital consciousness are a few examples of the utopian dream. But what if indeed we were able to live forever?
Think of the fountain of youth appearing in the writings of Herodotus, the peaches of immortality in Chinese mythology or the elixir of life in the Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia. Tech moguls, accustomed to the belief that there is a technological fix for every problem, see life as somehow reparable. Think of the ankh representing eternal life in ancient Egypt, blue roses — impossible to come by in nature — portrayed in literature and art as symbols of immortality. Forget Matthew Arnold, who in the 19th century claimed that life is long enough to contain everything.
Any biologist will tell you that mortality appears to be programmed into every cell of our bodies. Flowers die, stars die, cry the poets. Anti-ageing intervention is a tool for the wealthy, shout the activists. It is a narcissistic dream, the survival of the richest, say the sceptics. Some in Silicon Valley agree. In his Stanford commencement address of 2005, Steve Jobs said that mortality is “the single best invention in life”. Elon Musk said he does not want to live forever, that he would be happy with 100 good years.
In his story “The Immortal”, Jorge Luis Borges suggested that life gets its meaning from death as with infinite time, there is no motivation. In Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, a ship’s captain is cursed with immortality after attempting to sail in a terrible storm, then doomed to glide around the seas. Perhaps the best shot at immortality is through one’s oeuvre. Or perhaps not. “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” Woody Allen said. “I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
What if we could upload our consciousness, then have our bodies frozen using the technologies of cryopreservation so we could one day wake up from a long sleep? Wouldn’t that diminish the joy of wasting our days? Isn’t life meant to be tenuous and unknowable? If real life is full of peril and adventure, then what feeling would a simulated reality offer that we could cherish? Death may be annihilation but in chasing eternal life we will end up like sliding red buses in liquid-filled pens.
The English moral philosopher Bernard Williams argued that it is a good thing that we are not immortal since it would be impossible to remain attached to life forever and continue to be the same person. Williams insisted that it would be bad to live forever, even under the best of circumstances. To avoid ennui, super-seniors would lose their desires — which is what motivates us to live, after all — and would replace them with different ones again and again. This would ultimately mean abandoning one’s identity, which is tantamount to death. Isn’t most of life leap and recoil, waiting for things we dream of to happen? If so, then we would go on living — but it would no longer be us.