Long life billionaires - Part 1

'Doing battle with the impossible'

Many tech billionaires are attracted to transhumanism, a  project to sever the bonds that link humanity to the rest of nature. Transhumanists see nature, including human biology, as a barrier to improving the human condition, a barrier that can be overcome by technological innovations that include artificial reproduction and the merging of humanity and AI. Not all tech billionaires are interested in all aspects of the transhumanist project. But almost all of them have become obsessed by the possibilities of life extension, both in its own right and as a step on the path to an imagined everlasting life on Earth.

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“The misery inflicted by the dragon-tyrant was incalculable. In addition to the ten thousand who were gruesomely slaughtered each day, there were the mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and friends that were left behind to grieve the loss of their departed loved ones.”

(Nick Bostrom, The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, 2005)

Many tech billionaires claim that reading Nick Bostrom’s Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant is what inspired them to become obsessed with life extension. Bostrom is a co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association (now Humanity+), and is Profeeor of Applied Ethics at Oxford University. His fable is about a dragon that everyone was convinced was invincible. The dragon, who took away lives every day, was experienced as a source of both grief (loss of loved ones) and waste (resources devoted to meeting the dragon’s appetite). But innovators began to question the dragon’s invincibility, and argued for resources to be devoted to exploring how it might be destroyed. The ruler was persuaded, by a boy who wanted his granny back, to fund this quest. Twelve years later, after several failed attempts, the dragon was destroyed. The ruler announced that it was now time to make use of life without death -  “We have time now…… time for the slow process of building a better world.”

The popularity of this fable tells us a lot about the mindset of the billionaires who have been so taken with it.  They have a childlike belief in a fairy story - albeit a fairy story whose author felt a need to add a conclusion spelling out that the dragon-tyrant is a metaphor for ageing. They see no problems with achieving everlasting life on Earth, and its compatibility with a finite planet. They arrogantly believe that if they throw enough money at it, they can solve any problems, and that they are entitled to create a world that satisfies their desires. They cannot see any advantage in life being finite. And, above all, they want humanity to break away from its rootedness in the living planet.

There are a number of tech billionaires who invest in innovations which they believe to have life extending potential, including;

• Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Peter Thiel (PayPal and Palantir) are major backers of  Unity Biotechnology, which develops not only drugs to target age-related diseases, but proteins and vaccines to eliminate senescent cells.  Thiel also invests in a number of different ageing research projects via the Methuselah Foundation.

• Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google) set up Calico, which applies advanced computing capabilities to understand the biology of ageing and has teamed with AbbVie (suppliers of the puberty blocking drug Lupron) to develop drugs that target age-related disease.

• Sam Altman (OpenAI / ChatGPT) funded Retro Biosciences, which aims to extend healthy lifespan via cellular reprogramming.

• Vitalek Buterin (co-founder of the Ethereum cryptocurrency) is co-ordinating a number of longevity experts with the aim of bypassing regulation and devising ways to disperse the ‘benefits’ of radical life extension to everyone

• Bryan Johnson (Braintree) set up Kernel, which researches neuroprosthetics and brain biomarkers.

• Martine Rothblatt ( United Therapeutics) is involved in a wide range of projects involving not only life extension but transhumanism more generally.

All these billionaires are actively involved in promoting innovations that may or may not extend human lives,. Many, I would imagine, have adapted their personal health regimes to take on board some of what they are learning. Two of them, Bryan Johnson and Martine Rothblatt, are not only doing this, but are quite evangelical about using their personal experience to influence others to follow them.

Bryan Johnson (b 1977)

Bryan Johnson received $800million in cash when he sold Braintree (an online payments startup)  to PayPal. Whether or not that made him a literal billionaire, it was enough for him to devote the rest of his life, and $2million a year, to life extension projects. Initially his focus was on setting up Kernel, and investing in other biotech projects through his OS fund.  More recently, he started to experiment on his own body, to see what slowed or reversed his own ageing process. He ingests more than 100 supplements a day. This, coupled with rigorous exercise, restricted diet, sleep discipline, etc makes for a punishing daily routine. It’s a routine that is constantly monitored and adjusted for its impact on his biomarkers. He regularly publishes the results on his website, to encourage followers to adopt the same protocol, called Blueprint. His aim is to reverse the ageing process and return to the body of an 18 year old. If he can extend his life long enough, he hopes that singularity (anticipated human/machine integration) will make it possible for him to live for ever.

“This time, our time, right now - the early 21st century - will be defined by the radical evolution of intelligence: human, AI, and biology. Our opportunity is to be this exciting future.”

(Brian Johnson, Blueprint protocol)

In 2023, Johnson celebrated the 10th anniversary of his PayPal windfall by writing a book, Don’t Die. Around the same time, he added new treatments to his daily regime. These included gene therapy to increase muscle mass, blood plasma transfusion, and (you couldn’t make this up)  ‘penis rejuvenation therapy’.

The blood transfusion therapy was inspired by cruel experiments which showed that when young and old mice were connected to each other to share their blood the older mouse would become physically stronger and cognitively sharper. After some dubious research suggesting that blood plasma donated from young donors would have a rejuvenating effect on older humans, Johnson tried it for himself. He arranged for plasma from his 17 year old son to be transfused into him, and plasma to be transfused from him into his 70 year old father. But when his monitored biomarkers showed no improvement, he discontinued this experiment.

Johnson is more enthusiastic about what his ‘penis rejuvenation therapy’ has achieved. He is keen to let us know that he does not have problems with erectile dysfunction, and that he endures the electric shockwaves that are regularly applied to his penis so that he can feel younger. He wears an electrical  device around his penis while he is asleep that automatically measures the number, duration and hardness of his erections. These measures, like his other biomarkers, are published online, so we can follow his ‘progress’. He claims that this helps to reverse ageing because ‘nighttime erection duration’ is an indicator of both sexual health and cardiovascular health. His aim, he says, is to achieve ‘teenage level erections’, lasting more than three hours a night. He believes that achieving this will slow his ageing process.

Johnson’s self-published book, Don’t Die, is a rambling ‘conversation’ between different voices, supposedly an account of different thoughts that he would have if he believed he was about to die. The aim of the conversation is to work out a plan “for the future of the human race.” . It starts with a misunderstanding of biology that is akin to that demonstrated by gender ideologists who claim that because clownfish can change sex so can humans. Greenland sharks, Johnson notes, can live for 400 years. Which, he imagines, proves that for humans “ageing is a choice, not a fate.”

Although the conversation between Johnson’s voices often reads like a therapy session for someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder, it does at least discuss a fundamental issue that s ignored by most immortality enthusiasts - how could  infinite human life be sustained on a finite planet? The answer, suggested by Don’t Die’s Blueprint voice, is ingenious, but unconvincing. Sensors will monitor the planet’s health, in much the same way that sensors monitor Johnson’s heath. Advanced AI will give us the tools to reverse apparently irreversible planetary processes such as global warming, just like it will give us the tools to reverse the apparently irreversible human process of ageing.

“The conscious mind lives at the wrong timescale to solve humanity’s biggest problems … Our only chance is creating and training an intelligence so profoundly strong it can cancel our mistakes and bring us into a new era of prosperity.”

(Bryan Johnson, Don’t Die, 2023)

The humility of Johnson’s acceptance that human intelligence cannot solve the problems that humanity has created is immediately cancelled by the arrogance of his suggestion that an intelligence created by humans will solve the problems they create, and enable them to transcend nature’s limits. Some of the voices in Don’t Die make the extraordinary suggestion that this is merely an updating of the Gaia hypothesis that James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis developed in the 1970s. Johnson’s understanding of their hypothesis is unbelievably simplistic - the complex self-regulating network of feedback loops that they identified is reduced to algae excreting the oxygen that allowed complex life to form.

Nature took many millennia to evolve a self-regulating system. This is a timescale problem that Johnson evades by assuming that AI systems, operating at super fast speeds, will massively accelerate the evolution of a new, algorithmically controlled, self-regulating planetary system to replace self-regulation by nature. Not only that, but he suggests that familiarity with algorithmic monitoring of our own bodily feedback loops will make algorithmic monitoring of the planet’s feedback loops more acceptable to us. Adopting Johnson’s age reversal protocol is the essential first step  - it’s “a proving ground for doing battle with the impossible.”

There is nothing new, of course, in human arrogance about the benefits that it assumes will flow from ignoring nature’s limits. This is, after all, at the heart of patriarchal capitalism as an economic system. But nature’s limits are real, and do not disappear just because a group of super-privileged men believe that the problem will disappear if they throw enough money at it.  Pursuing colonisation - whether of the land, of the sea, or of bodies -  inevitably crosses boundaries. Once critical planetary boundaries are crossed, the process is irreversible.  Unless, Johnson would insist, that is just a limiting belief, a belief which can be countered by carrying on and having faith that Advanced AI will be able to solve any problems that arise. That’s it,. faith. Faith that no matter how much further damage we inflict on the planet, an advanced artificial intelligence that we have not yet created will be able to clear it up.

Regardless of how quickly artificial intelligence develops, there is no way it could be fast enough to counteract the imminent destruction of the biosphere - a destruction that would be accelerated  by the intensified material demands of a population that could live for ever, or even a population whose lifespan is dramatically extended. Johnson, as a one-time Mormon missionary, still retains a conviction that he has been guaranteed eternal life. The difference is that he now expects to live it on Earth, not in Heaven.

Drawing back from irreversible damage to the planet is not impossible. It doesn’t require faith, except in the capacity of humans to face reality. What is required is declining material consumption, and living within limits set by nature. Accepting the reality of limits, to human life and to economic growth, is an option that Johnson and his fellow long life billionaires are unable to contemplate.  But it’s the only option that would enable us to survive. And any personal sacrifice that this entails is a lot less than what Johnson’s Blueprint protocol demands of its adherents.

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In Part 2, I shall explore another tech billionaire committed to battling the impossible  - Martine Rothblatt, an entrepreneur who is actively involved in the innovation of life-extending technologies, and in breaking species boundaries.