The science of immortality and the future

Anti-aging and counter-revolution

There’s been a lot of media hype about anti-aging science lately—that through biology, lifespans might be extended indefinitely. There’s this one guy, Bryan Johnson, who has very publicly embraced this, and he has lots of media coverage lately. The science of anti-aging is pretty interesting—it’s part of a subfield of biology called bio-gerontology, or the biology of aging. Aging occurs when chromosomes in the body break down, as the telomeres—structures at the ends of the chromosomes—erode over time. But if you prevent this by strengthening the telomeres, then chromosomal decay doesn’t happen, and you don’t get the effects of aging.

This science has developed a lot lately, and billionaires are very interested in it. This Bryan Johnson guy is a billionaire (he made money through Venmo)—and one reason he wants to live forever is that he has billions of dollars and that will compound into an even bigger fortune in the decades ahead. Imagine how rich Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk will be 25, 50, or even 100 years from now—they might be trillionaires by then.

Why else do they want to live forever? I guess it’s pretty self-evident: life is good, death is bad. But the anti-aging elites like Johnson have lots of fancy rhetoric about it: that it’s the “most significant revolution in humanity’s history.” (I replied that it’s actually a counter-revolution, and he agreed. Lol).

So why is the anti-aging movement a counter-revolution? Because it’s being led by elite, undemocratic means: scientists at the Harvard Medical School, with billionaires funding it, and first in line to take it. When a revolution comes from elites, it’s a counter-revolution.

But that’s not all—on a deeper level, anti-aging is a revolution against death. It isn’t for anything, it is merely against something (against aging). A revolution has to have positive values—like liberty, equality, and so on. A counter-revolution just tries to stop things from happening—stopping liberty and equality from spreading, for example.

With anti-aging, the “revolution” is just against death. They might say that they are for life, but they aren’t really—they are against death. (In his post, Johnson even says that: “The most significant revolution in humanity’s history is here: Don’t die.”

Don’t die. That’s all that matters—keeping death away. This begs the question: what are they living for? What are their positive values? Why do they want to live? Is it simply because they don’t want to die? Not wanting to die isn’t the same thing as having a reason to live.