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Even the rich can’t buy immortality. But they have the opportunity to invest in the study of aging and regenerative medicine. Here’s How Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Are Trying To Conquer Death
Most people are afraid of death, old age and illness – if not their own, then friends and loved ones. According to the Levada Center (the organization is included by the Ministry of Justice in the register of NPOs-foreign agents. — Trends), 82% of our countries are afraid for the health of their own children, and 42% said they experience a constant fear of death – thanatophobia.
Many are not afraid of death itself, but of the uncertainty that follows it. Neuroscientist Bo Lotto in the book “Refraction. The science of seeing differently” writes that the brain always strives to reduce uncertainty to a minimum, to make the world understandable. This feature of the psyche makes some people believe in conspiracy theories and turn to mysticism, while others spur on the search for a cure for old age.
Digital immortality
According to the Pew Research Center, 5,8 billion people in the world identify themselves as adherents of one faith or another. According to scientists, the strong position of the church is largely associated with the fear of death, since religion gives hope for the immortality of the soul.
Digital transformation offered a new source of eternal life – not spiritual, but virtual. Adherents of digital immortality believe that it is possible to technically “resurrect” a person if an intellectual heritage remains after death. Correspondence, photographs, posts on social networks, scientific publications store fragments of the consciousness of the deceased in virtual reality and can become the basis for creating a digital clone.
But digital immortality does not suit everyone. Many want to live forever in their own body, and not in a virtual or afterlife – such people are called transhumanists. Among them there are many rich people who are ready to invest millions of dollars in rejuvenation technologies. Transhumanists consider biohacking, regenerative medicine and cryonics to be the most promising methods of combating aging and death.
Peter Thiel and the “vampire startup”
Paypal founder Peter Thiel has repeatedly stated that he is going to live forever. According to the billionaire, he does not understand why many are passive about death, if it can be fought. Thiel considers aging to be the main problem, because “almost any serious disease is associated with it.”
To achieve eternal life, the billionaire founded Breakout Labs, a company that invests in biotech startups. One of them was Ambrosia. Scientists from this team believe that the best way to combat aging is to transfuse plasma from young people to the elderly. Society and the media were skeptical about this technology, and some even called it “vampire”.
Although the founders of Ambrosia stated that Thiel is only an investor and does not use the services of the company, journalists are sure that this is not so. Gawker journalists wrote that the billionaire spends $40 on transfusions every three months.
In addition to innovative technologies, the founder of Paypal considers the refusal of sugar, jogging and the paleo diet to be the key to immortality. To avoid arthritis and fractures, Thiel monitors the amount of muscle mass and maintains its level with growth hormone somatotropin.
Death Cure by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
In 2013, the co-founders of Google launched Calico, a biotech company that studies the mechanisms of aging and life extension. The idea of a startup was born long before that. Back in 2004, Larry Page had a meeting with Aubrey de Grey, Peter Thiel, and Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist who was able to double the life of a roundworm. Then Page got excited about the idea of achieving immortality and was sure that the terabytes of data that Google collects would help with this.
Subsequently, Kenyon became Calico’s vice president of aging. The company’s researchers concluded that the rate of aging can be controlled. Using computer vision and machine learning, they revealed the “genetic landscape” of yeast cell aging. Calico believes that the results of the study can be used to increase human life expectancy.
In addition to Page and Brin, Apple CEO Arthur Levinson and Google Ventures founder Bill Maris also invested in Calico. By 2017, they had invested about $ 1 billion in the work of the research laboratory. Although Calico employees only talk about life extension, the company’s founders are more ambitious. So, Maris said that he “hopes to live long enough not to die,” and Brin noted that he “does not plan to die.”
Many experts are skeptical about Calico’s research. Yuval Harari in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow wrote: “Google will probably not solve the problem of mortality in time to make its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin immortal.” Aubrey de Gray even believes that Calico’s activities are “extremely pointless.”
“Death is meaningless” – Larry Ellison
Oracle founder Larry Ellison makes no secret of his plans to live forever. It has already spent $430 million on anti-aging research and is committed to supporting these developments in the future. “Death never made any sense to me,” he told his biographer Mike Wilson. “How can a person be and then just disappear, just not be?”
The billionaire founded the Ellison Medical Foundation, which studies aging and is looking for ways to defeat death. He also invests in Human Longevity, a startup that develops ways to extend life based on the decoding of the human genotype and phenotype. In addition, the company offers individuals early diagnostics of oncology and cardiovascular diseases. Based on the data obtained, scientists offer patients a “lifestyle change plan” that will help delay death.
Aubrey de Gray and immortality propaganda
Aubrey de Gray is a British millionaire and ideologue of immortality. In 2007, he published a manifesto book, Ending Aging, in which he described the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) program, a systematic plan to combat human death. In 2009, de Gray founded the SENS Research Foundation, which explores the possibility of preserving and restoring the cells and tissues of the human body.
The obsessive dreams of immortality among Californian billionaires are largely the merit of de Grey, who actively calls for investment in technologies to combat old age. In case, in the coming decades, mankind does not invent the “elixir of eternal youth”, de Grey has a fallback option – cryonics. The SENS Research Foundation is partnering with Alcor, one of America’s largest cryonics companies. Alcor has been freezing people since the 1970s. More than a thousand of our contemporaries are her clients.
De Gray himself is going to freeze only the head. Among those who want to save their body with Alcor are the already mentioned Peter Thiel, the creator of computer cryptography Ralph Merkle and Canadian billionaire Robert Miller.
Biohacking by Sergei Fage
While some entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley open laboratories and distribute grants for research in the field of gerontology, others care only about their own immortality. To do this, billionaires become biohackers. Among the most famous “body hackers” are Bulletproof Coffee CEO Dave Asprey, Google CTO Ray Kurzweil, and co-founder of the Ostrovok hotel booking service, our countryman Sergei Faguet.
In the spring of 2017, Faguet published an English-language article on Medium, and a little later, its Russian-language version on vc.ru. The entrepreneur admitted that he spent $200 on biohacking over four years. Faguet said that in pursuit of immortality, he takes dozens of medications every day, from metformin and antidepressants to growth hormones, lithium, and an estrogen blocker. Like Thiel, Faguet cut out sugar and “industrialized” food. The entrepreneur hopes that he will live to see 2085 and celebrate his own centenary, and then use the “technologies of the future” that will allow him to avoid death altogether.