How long do you want to live? The Immortalists say 'Forever!'

Tech titans, venture capitalists, crypto enthusiasts and AI researchers have turned longevity research into something between the hottest science and a tragic comedy, writes Ellen Huet

The possibility of living much longer — or forever — has inspired bioethicists and philosophers to ponder the prospect’s unexpected consequences.

WHEN a chipper person with a clipboard approaches you on the street in San Francisco, you can usually expect the inquiry to be about one of a few public policy goals.

Do you have time to talk about abortion rights? Housing? Online gambling ballot initiatives? These days, though, you might also hear a question that’s both more grandiose and more personal, the kind of thing you wouldn’t expect to hear from someone who looks like they want your signature. The question: How long do you want to live?

One Saturday in August, Anastasia Egorova, the 37-year-old chief executive officer of a longevity research non-profit, organised two dozen volunteers in San Francisco and 10 other cities to collectively get answers from almost 200 passersby.

Many respondents pegged their desired life span at somewhere from 80 years to 120 years (close to the global record).

Egorova’s clipboard-toting volunteers in São Paulo and Toronto heard much the same that day, as did volunteers in Haifa, Israel, and Malmö, Sweden. Few people rose to the challenge posed by the merch many of the clipboarders were wearing. All of the hats, T-shirts and stickers read, “Say Forever!”

Egorova and her fellow anti-death activists, a bunch of scientists and longevity enthusiasts who call themselves “Immortalists,” argue that a good and rational person should want to live as long as possible.

Jeff Bezos and other tech titans have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward companies pursuing longer life. Photo: AP/John Locher

While they recognize the existence of the chronic pain and unspeakable traumas that make for strong counterfactuals, they’ve made a personal commitment to try to live forever, and they believe defeating aging should be a top priority for both research dollars and social activism.

They carry around posters with mantras such as “Death is unacceptable,” “Death is boring” and “Stay alive,” all of which made appearances this autumn outside the historic Ferry Building overlooking San Francisco Bay.

One particularly devoted volunteer took the idea of permanence to heart and got the words “SAY FOREVER” tattooed across the front of his neck.

“Dying is bad,” Egorova says. “This is something humanity doesn’t take seriously enough.”

The Immortalists may sound more like the Merry Pranksters than a serious lobby, but they embody a strain of tech industry culture that’s taken hold in the occasional gaps between conversations about artificial intelligence and crypto.

Different circles in the Bay Area and other tech hubs are looking for methods to cheat death, from popping supplements and pipetting solutions in a lab to trying to digitize their consciousness or freeze their brain to be revived later. (They hope.)

The underlying belief is that technology could someday transcend our ultimate biological destiny. Or as influential investor and provocateur Balaji Srinivasan’s X bio puts it: “Immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life.”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has emerged as a flag-bearer for longevity advances. Photo: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

What distinguishes this obsession from a typical midlife crisis is the scale of the money behind it. Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Larry Page and other tech titans have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward companies pursuing longer life.

Partly as a result, immortality-obsessed people in the industry have begun to view radical life extension as a near-term option. Some are, by day, investors or researchers in AI. Others are cryptocurrency winners with fiat money to burn.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has emerged as a flag-bearer for longevity advances — he’s donated millions of dollars to research organisations and posts things like: “Aging is a humanitarian disaster that kills as many people as WW2 every two years.”

Robert Nelsen, a hedge fund manager who has a stake in longevity-focused biotech Altos Labs, takes almost a dozen drugs a day, including rapamycin, which has been shown to increase life span in mice.

Venture capitalists are pivoting to focus on longevity companies, and tech connectors are launching longevity-focused fellowships to entice newcomers to the field. Most of these crowds are united by techno-optimism and a belief that they’re privy to a hidden truth.

Contrarianism is the norm, says Amol Sarva, one of the investors eager to fund advances in the field. He says the industry is a mix of “graybeard wizards” proclaiming mystical-sounding futures, more conventional biotech experts focused on science, the “Peter Pan types” who project youth and the “cyborg types” talking about a future in which human consciousness transcends the fleshy body.

Sarva, who used to run the WeWork clone Knotel Inc., has raised a $100 million fund with a partner to invest in longevity-related companies, with cheques already written to those using AI to better treat cancer and stem cells to create biology-powered computers.

He compares the energy of the longevity scene to that of the Homebrew Computer Club, a disco-era gathering that fueled the birth of the personal computer and Apple.

Longevity factions

ALTHOUGH it can be easy to reduce the various longevity efforts to one big blob of existential dread powered by money and fragile male egos, the community includes cliques with very different aims.

Some are focused on extending the average human life by a modest range. Others are more conservative, promising only to add more “health span,” meaning healthier years within a natural time frame.

And some go fully eternal, promising — with typical Silicon Valley restraint — to build their own sovereign-ish state where they plan to master and defeat death.

“We’ve accepted aging and death as inevitable, and now there’s a very good reason to believe they will be solved,” says Adam Gries, an investor focused on longevity. “The only question is when.”

Biotechs

To keep track of the different factions, we’ll give them some nicknames. In one corner are the Biotechs, the most buttoned-up of longevity researchers. They’re developing drugs that they plan to submit for formal approval by the US Food and Drug Administration and that they aim to have available behind the pharmacy counter within the next decade.

Some of these medications are meant to promote autophagy — a cell’s ability to recycle accumulating molecular junk — or clearing out senescent cells, which have aged faster than other cells and can no longer replicate.

It’s early enough yet for these drugs that one of the most promising treatments targets dogs rather than people.

Larry Ellison and other tech titans have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward companies pursuing longer life. Photo: Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty Images

“We started with big dogs because a Great Dane has an average life span of six to nine years, and it’s starting to go gray even at age three or four, so you can see it much faster,” says Celine Halioua, the CEO of Loyal.

Those accelerated dog years make it much more practical to run clinical trials on aging, as opposed to a 50-year trial for human longevity.

Halioua’s idea is to give dogs more healthy years by reducing the release of growth hormones, which are correlated with faster aging in larger breeds. She’s sensitive to scaremongering about zombie dogs and stresses that her goal is “healthy life span extension” for a cherished pet.

“We talk about Fluffy being able to chase the ball longer, being excited when you’re home and not being stiff when she gets out of bed,” Halioua says.

Dogs are a “non-threatening” way to introduce the public to the idea that the biology of aging is malleable, she says. A 15-year-old dog doesn’t evoke all the fears of playing God that a 150-year-old human does.

Wellness

Then there are the Wellness Obsessives. These are people fed up with the medical establishment’s focus on acute care instead of preventive care, and they’re keen to try supposedly pro-active therapies that are often ignored or dismissed as snake oil.

While some of their experiments are pretty far out, the WOs are still considered relatively conservative in longevity circles. They’re focused on zealously evaluating their bodily functions so they can make incremental improvements. Like the Biotechs, they tend to say some version of “health span” a lot.

“You are more in control of your health than you think,” says Martin Tobias, a venture capitalist and the former CEO of Upgrade Labs, a chain of facilities specializing in gadgets such as an oxygen trainer and an AI-enhanced stationary bike.

“If you’re the CEO of your own health, you can get outcomes that are not usually delivered by the traditional medical system.”

Tobias, who’s about to turn 60, says he wants to make sure he’s around when his youngest daughter, now 8, is graduating from college. To get there, he’s trying some stuff that wouldn’t seem out of place at a Goop retreat. 

His Seattle garage is packed with $500,000 in equipment, including two saunas, an infrared light bed, an electromuscular stimulation suit and a cryotherapy chamber.

He takes cold plunges, flies to Central America to get injections of stem cells, and undergoes treatments to lengthen his telomeres, chromosomal proteins that shorten with age.

Tobias and others like him believe that in the pursuit of slowing their own clock, it’s worth burning money on a dozen experimental treatments even if most don’t work. Big names in this world include physician Peter Attia, geneticist David Sinclair and futurist Peter Diamandis.

It’s tough to know whether any of it’s working, given that the biomarkers thought to measure a person’s “biological age” are still poorly understood.

Still, Tobias is doing the work and analysing the results, and he says he’s seeing improvements that are bringing him some peace, along with a sense of control. “My telomeres are measuring 38 years old,” he says.

Radicals

Both the Biotechs and the Wellness Obsessives are at pains to emphasise that they still expect to die. For the Radicals, that’s loser talk. Patrick Linden, a philosopher who wrote a book called The Case Against Death, calls the acceptance of mortality a “fallacy” meant to “protect yourself from the tragedy of wanting something you can’t have.” 

The Radicals’ cause began to reach the mainstream in the mid-2000s.

In 2005, Nick Bostrom, an influential AI theorist, wrote a fable in which death takes the form of a tyrannical dragon that terrorises a kingdom, demanding a constant stream of sacrifices, until a brave king spends vast sums over many years to develop a missile that kills it. (A video version of the fable, posted on YouTube far more recently, has about 10 million views.)

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Around that time, British researcher Aubrey de Grey, whose foot-long beard gave him a bit of a Merlin vibe himself, became the public face of a fledgling longevity movement. De Grey said in a BBC interview that the first person who’d live to 1,000 was probably already alive, then delivered a TED Talk about why humanity should devote resources to fighting aging.

He argued that once we’re able to repair aging damage at a faster rate than we age, we’ll reach “longevity escape velocity,” where age-related mortality keeps receding farther and farther away.

Longevity consequences

THIS possibility of living much longer — or forever — has inspired bioethicists and philosophers to ponder the prospect’s unexpected consequences. It’s an isolating field of study.

“If I go to the hairdresser and I tell them what I’m working on, the immediate reaction is, ‘That sounds horrible,’ ” says Raiany Romanni, a 29-year-old bioethicist exploring the stories we tell ourselves about death and meaning. She says she sees acceptance of death not as a natural part of the grieving process but as naiveté.

“I spend my professional life thinking that death has no purpose,” Romanni says.

“That can be really harmful on a personal level. But if we keep telling ourselves comforting stories, it could be infinitely more harmful.”

Some Radicals are hoping a mega-funder such as Elon Musk will sponsor their dreams over the next decades. Photo: AP/Alessandra Tarantino

In the meantime, some of the most hardcore Radicals are backing the old libertarian play of colonization — trying to move to one place en masse and make their ideology a matter of policy.

They gave it a dry run for two months this summer at Zuzalu, a Burning Man-esque temporary city in Montenegro. There, on the edge of the Mediterranean, Ethereum’s Buterin gathered hundreds of longevity true believers, crypto founders and AI researchers to discuss the practical realities of living forever.

What political structures would you need? How could you build regulation-light “innovation zones” to pursue experimental treatments? If everyone started living dramatically longer, how quickly would populations grow or (maybe) shrink?

Vitalism

Between cold plunges and sauna sweats, two venture capitalists unveiled their plans for a movement called Vitalism, which they said would coalesce around the belief that “death is humanity’s core problem” and that the species should do what it takes to “reach freedom from aging as soon as possible”.

Depending on your views, the rhetoric is either inspiring or ridiculous. But in Silicon Valley, where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a small crowd of billionaires, winning over a few people can sometimes be enough.

More traditional researchers are very aware that two-month bacchanals and multimillion-dollar treatment regimens can make their field sound like a distraction for the rich.

Loyal CEO Halioua, who researched the economics of gene therapy at Oxford University, says the broader industry is “sketchy,” and people who overhype the benefits of unproven treatments or talk about immortality are causing a “massive reputational issue.” To her, people like Johnson and Buterin help relegate longevity science to the fringes.

Progress

In the meantime, the various longevity factions are making progress in their own ways. In November, the FDA approved part of Loyal’s application for a drug meant to lengthen big dogs’ lives by blocking a specific type of growth hormone once they’ve reached their full size.

The drug could be available for your Great Dane or mastiff in 2026. Meanwhile, particularly well-capitalised Wellness Obsessives are scoping out longevity tourism, flying overseas to get experimental treatments.

Diamandis is charging $70,000 for a five-day tour of various private longevity clinics. And a group that includes some Zuzalu organizers is planning to create a pop-up city this winter on the Caribbean island of Roatán.

Larry Page and other tech titans have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward companies pursuing longer life. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Some Radicals are also hoping a mega-funder such as Elon Musk will sponsor their dreams over the next decades.

Musk, for his part, recently said he thinks extreme longevity would cause the “asphyxiation of society”.

Elsewhere, he said: “I can’t think of a worse curse than living forever.”

Says Linden, the philosopher: “We’re all hoping for Elon Musk, obviously, to wake up.”

Adapted from a Bloomberg article