Silicon Valley's Obsession With Disrupting Death
Silicon Valley's Obsession With Disrupting Death
Why become a multibillionaire if you can't live long enough to spend it?
They’ve disrupted transport.
They’ve disrupted the internet.
They’ve disrupted e-commerce.
They’ve disrupted social connection.
They’ve disrupted online communication.
Silicon Valley titans have disrupted just about everything, yet one frontier remains unsolved, one driven by fear, ego and hubris:
Immortality.
A batshit crazy story caught my eye this week. It involves Bryan Johnson, a 45-year-old multi-millionaire attempting to slow down his aging. How exactly? By using blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. Or, more specifically, the process takes a liter of blood from the youngest and separates the plasma from it before re-infusing it into Johnson. What’s even weirder about the whole thing is that some of Johnson's blood is then transfused into his 70-year-old father, completing the trifecta of blood swapping. According to an Instagram post by Johnson, it was the “world’s first multi-generational plasma exchange.”
Johnson, who made his fortune as the founder of Braintree, a web and mobile payment company sold to PayPal, is a stickler for staying young, reportedly spending at least two million dollars a year searching for the elixir of life. The fusion experiment is part of his newest venture, Project Blueprint. Aside from swapping blood, it involves somewhat more sensible stuff like strict diets, rigid eating and sleep patterns, and frequent medical checkups.
Will this mad scheme work? It’s improbable, and there’s very little scientific evidence to support it. The FDA has officially warned against the procedure because “such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.”
But I’ve got to hand it to Bryan’s son; that’s quite the Father’s Day gift.
“Solving Death”
Cheating death is by no means a new concept. Silicon Valley and the small percentage of mega-rich entrepreneurs birthed from it have a long history of trying to extend the human life span.
Jeff Bezos has bet a big chunk of his fortune on Altos Labs, the anti-aging startup aiming to “restore cell health and resilience through cellular rejuvenation programming to reverse disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life.” Or, in other words, it’s trying to reverse time.
Bezos is also a backer of Unity Biotechnology, which hopes to combat the effects of aging. As is the billionaire Peter Thiel, who is equally obsessed with immortality. In 2012, he told Business Insider, "There are all these people who say that death is natural, it's just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth.” He firmly believed that “Death is a problem that can be solved."
In 2013, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page helped launch Calico, a venture that’s tracking mice from birth to death in the hope of finding markers for diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer’s. The goal of this super-secret biotech outfit is “solving death.”
The obsession with living life to the longest has swept into other industries, especially Cryptocurrency. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is on a mission to make humans immortal, suggesting that “aging is an engineering problem.” In a tweet, he also said, “Aging is a humanitarian disaster that kills as many people as WW2 every two years.” Roger Ver, an early investor in Bitcoin and founder of Bitcoin.com, has already signed up to be cryogenically frozen — on an amusing side note, he even considered killing himself and being frozen to avoid a prison sentence. Thiel has also signed up, though he describes it more as an “ideological statement.”
Most recently, Retro Biosciences secured $180 million in funding for its audacious mission — to add 10 years to the average human life span. The source of this investment was a mystery until MIT Technology broke the news that the money came from none other than man-of-the-moment Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO. Retro said that it would “prize speed” and “tighten feedback loops” as part of an “aggressive mission” to stall aging or even reverse it.
The morality of immortality
Let's take our heads out of Lalaland for a second. Death is inevitable. Death is part of the cycle of life. Death motivates us to live our lives to the fullest because you know from the moment you can process it that you’ve only got one shot. So it takes a special kind of sociopath to want to live forever or to even feel they have the right to do so. It’s no surprise many of the wannabe pioneers are entrepreneurs; an obsession like that shares similarities with the mindset required to succeed in the startup world.
But to what end should we pursue the disruption of death? It comes with a whole host of moral implications.
These treatments are going to be exclusive and very expensive. It’s just the survival of the richest and reminiscent of the ending of Don’t Look Up (I won't spoil it if you haven’t seen it), where the rich leave us all behind (at least they get their comeuppance in the film). The reality is that many of these entrepreneurs have exploited us, stolen our data, destroyed the fabric of our society, got hella rich off the back of it, and may soon have the option to outlive us. Yay for them. It’s sure to cause public discontent if only a handful of people have access to longer life spans and further stoke division between the haves and have-nots. How would society even accept that some of us are into our "after-years"? It’s a pretty fucked up concept.
Another major issue is the difference between extending life and extending the quality of life. If we assume many of these experiments only decrease the speed of aging or slow the body's natural degrading, will these people just live longer in a state of decline? Who would want to live in some decrepit state? Even if one of these mad scientist schemes pays off and increases lifespans, what good is it if they don’t improve the quality of the lifespan itself? While many of those rich enough to afford it also will be able to access top-notch healthcare, what if the treatments did open up to the wider public? It would put huge burdens on an already overburdened infrastructure and economy.
Then there’s the real doom-monger stuff. The population continues to grow, and it’s draining our ever-decreasing resources. According to the UN, the global human population reached 8.0 billion in mid-November 2022 from an estimated 2.5 billion people in 1950. What the planet doesn’t need for some of those 8 billion to start living forever. Alongside strained resources, we’ve got climate change, which, if predictions are correct, will have ravaged the planet by 2050, if not long before. Much like the need to improve the quality of life as much as the length, surely the planet's longevity needs to be secured? What’s the point in living another 100 years if you’re living in a burning hellscape, sitting with a VR headset on, trying to pretend it’s the good old days?
I doubt we’ll see any of this come to fruition in my lifetime, or anyone’s lifetime.
But whether the rich of the richest manage it or not, one thing’s certain — they’ll die trying.