Nowadays, when the billionaires aren’t investing in space shuttles and tech campuses, the super-rich are investing in methods to increase their lifespan.
Will the concept of death, an idea of nature, ever be replaced by more advanced science and lots of money?
Many people have suspected that such a moment may arrive in their lifetime. Among them are a few ultra-wealthy people. Unbelievably, they have funded companies, started trusts, and announced awards in order to solve the problem of death. Most of the billionaires who have initiated the war against aging and death are from Silicon Valley because they are sort of people who have been trained to believe that a problem needs a solution. And because death is a problem for them, they are trying to find a solution.
“Death makes me very angry,” said Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation and the fifth-richest person in the world whose net worth is $43 billion. Larry said, “It doesn’t make any sense to me. Death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?” Larry wants to defeat the death and for that Ellison has set up a foundation dedicated to ending mortality, or at least to “understanding lifespan development processes and age-related diseases and disabilities.” They spend real money, too: the Ellison Medical Foundation gives out more than $40 million a year.
If you think that these billionaires only have this thought, then you are wrong. If we go back to history, during the 16h and 17th centuries, countless European alchemists swindled aristocrats with bogus drugs for eternal life (these physicians often harmed themselves in their search for the philosopher’s stone, whether asphyxiated by arsenic fumes or blinded from noxious vapors or poisoning themselves with lethal elixirs).
Getting back to this Tec friendly era, here are the few ongoing inventions where the billionaires are investing their money.
Young Blood transfusions
Believe it or not, there are around 3 companies in the US conducting trials into the effects of transfusing blood from young, healthy people – mostly aged 16 to 25 – into those who are getting on in years. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel has expressed interest in the procedure, as well as other medical research on extending the human lifespan.
What if you are being infused with somebody else’s blood and it doesn’t match? We know that unleashes a strong immune reaction, right?
There has been enough progress made to prompt the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in February to issue a statement that the process “has no proven clinical benefits” and is “potentially harmful.”
Would you like to upload your brain to the cloud if it meant you could live forever? Doesn’t this sound something funny to you? Well, laugh out, people! But there’s actually some serious money being invested in this project. A company called Nectome charges $10,000 to preserve your brain after death using a high-tech embalming process in the hopes that future scientists be able to “scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation.”
Are the billionaires going to destroy all industries, all human jobs, and then make everyone live thrice as long as now?
If humankind achieves an escape velocity of longevity, where lifespans are so long, say around 200 years, advancing, and maturing technologies would stretch them even further. The British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey says people might live for 1,000 years.
Cryonic Preservation
Thiel and many other billionaires have also invested in cryonic preservation or the freezing of a human body with the hope that future scientific advancement may allow for the body to be resuscitated. Alcor fixed a charge of a minimum of $80,000 for the preservation of the brain and $200,000 for whole-body cryonic preservation.
According to the New York Times, Thiel has said he’s a member of Alcor. He said, “Cryonics only seems disturbing because it challenges our complacency about death.”
Getting Immortality is next to impossible, and even if get it somehow in the next few decades, will it be beneficial for humankind? It would surely create a few problems. What most people supposed to do for 200 years? Some people might be like the billionaires, and me going to enjoy the extra century, but what about the other people? They would be lost in the ocean of life. And, just imagine how tragic it would be if one dies at 80. Also, what if one wishes to opt-out at 70, saying this is enough. What would that be: suicide or wisdom?
We need to understand that death isn’t easy to contend. Imagining that we’ll live forever, whether physically or spiritually is an elemental solace. No matter how wealthy we may be, we still can’t bribe our way out of dying. But that isn’t stopping these ultra-rich immortality financiers.
Can we live forever? Is it possible?
Do you think these billionaires will ever be able to achieve the immorality?
