what it has to do with billionaires & climate

It is quite normal to fear death. It’s one thing we have in common with every iteration of humanity for as long as humans have existed. How can one be conscious about death while alive and not be terrified of it? Well, there are many strategies humans have developed – over millennia – for making peace, or at least tolerable coexistence, with our mortality.

I’m no stranger to death fearing. I’ve been suffering existential crises about death since I was 5 years old. I would, not un-frequently, lie in bed at night, awash in terror of the vastness of the universe and the perceived meaninglessness of life. But like all humans, over the course of my life I’ve had to contemplate and face the idea of death many times, and I’ve come up with my own coping mechanisms. None of my methods for coping with death include a delusion of immortality.

I strongly believe that seeking to overcome death through immortality is not the answer to the age-old inconceivability of death. Whether immortality is possible, to me, does not matter. It is not a worthy aspiration.

Billionaires want to be immortal

The world’s ultra wealthy have been pouring large sums of their vast resources into age reversal research and development, and it seems they won’t stop until they achieve their final goal: actual immortality.

Leading this charge most visibly and unapologetically is tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. Bryan Johnson has devoted his life (time-limited or not) to testing out methods for reversing human aging on his own body. He goes to extreme lengths: temporary blood-plasma donations from his teenage son, hundreds of daily supplements, hours of medical assessments every day, a strict diet regimen that prohibits food after noon, penis shockwave therapy. Johnson claims he has built an algorithm that has exceeded his own abilities to take care of himself. He publicizes his experimental efforts and also built a company around his protocol, called Blueprint.

Beyond Johnson, billionaires are investing in cryonics trusts and preparing for a future in which they can thaw and reanimate their frozen bodies post-humus and live forever with their AI-uploaded consciousness. Cryonics is the practice of deep freezing a dead body in hopes of revival in light of scientific advances. Cryonics trusts aim to ensure the dead maintain a grip on their wealth in that hopeful waiting period, so they don’t come back poor. Amongst those billionaires putting their hat in the ring / head in the freezer are PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison.

Why the ultra wealthy are seeking immortality

While many are lauding these efforts as trail-blazing the future of humanity, it’s important to hold skepticism for the motivations behind them.

Bryan Johnson is motivated by future glory. He claims the things we tell ourselves about the merits of death are just stories to make us feel better about its inevitability. That if death is no longer inevitable, those stories won’t apply. But his notion that humans can and should be immortal is just another method of coping with mortality. It is his own story and delusion of control. He describes his goal as seeking to align with what will be the highest virtue in the future: existence – rather than the highest virtues today, of wealth, status and prestige. Yet he himself admits that he is motivated by the exaltation he hopes to receive from people of the 25th century.

I venture to say that most billionaires believe they are separate from nature. They believe they can conquer anything they want to, because in material terms, they have. They believe natural limits do not apply to them.

What they likely won’t admit is that, like you and me, they are scared. At the root of these efforts is still fear. Fear of loss of control and power. A feeling we all have becomes so much more pronounced, delusional, and dangerous when exhibited in a class of people who have successfully spent their lives being fooled by themselves and others. Fooled into thinking that they actually have real control over life’s pesky uncontrollables. That they are in some way all-powerful.

“Yes, it has got to be frustrating when you have more money than God, and yet, as William J. Kole, author of The Big 100: The New World of Super-Aging, told me, “There’s no way to purchase immortality.”” – Mother Jones

Immortality for me and not you

Bryan Johnson correctly points out that “we have built a society around die,” referencing the ‘die economy’ of fast food, cigarettes, environmental toxins, and grind culture. Though that problem is clearly structural, his solutions are neoliberal, putting the onus on the individual. He proclaims, “the way we solve our existential threats is through individual decision making. It’s not blaming someone, it’s not pointing fingers, it’s not asking someone else to come in and save us.” That’s a convenient viewpoint to avoid ruffling the feathers of the profiteers of the die economy: oil and gas CEOs, corrupt world leaders, arms dealers, owners of the world’s most powerful corporations. Many of which are members of the wealth class who happen to be most invested in the future prospect of immortality. (Johnson has also aligned himself with RFK Jr.)

The billionaires seeking immortality only have this ‘don’t die’ philosophy for themselves – not the broader, society and humanity-wide agenda Bryan Johnson purports to have. Just look at their shady, exploitative business practices. As a rule, their own life-enhancements feed off of devaluing the lives of others. Billionaires could be using their extreme wealth to invest in rebuilding the resilience of life on this planet today, but they know that it is the very destruction of Earth’s resources that got them such wealth. They have invested in the destruction of the world out of greed, and now invest in their own immortality for the same reason.

There is also the evergreen ethical concern of who will be left behind when a new advancement is built and shaped by a select privileged few. Some fear that entire groups of people will be ‘coded out’ of this vision of an AI-optimized human species.

Death is not a problem to be solved

I think the question here is the same one I have for any new technology or development. Even if we can, should we?

I contend that death as a fact of life is not a problem at all. But even if it were, it should not top our priority list. The top of our to-do list as humans in this century is to make planet Earth as un-unlivable as possible. Learning to reverse aging makes no sense as a priority in our current context.

What’s lost when death is lost

Writing off death as bad completely ignores everything death gives us. Death does not just take; it gives much more than we credit it for.

There is beauty and necessity in surrendering to the fact of mortality. Nothing is meaningful without limitations. Limitations empower and energize us to prioritize what really matters and to value what we have while we have it.

Philosophically, death provides the entire context and backdrop for our experience of life. As philosophy professor Susanna Siegel puts it, philosophers Kierkegaard and Heidegger each discuss death “as a horizon that implicitly shapes our consciousness. It’s what gives future times the pressure they exert on us. A horizon is the kind of thing that is normally in the background — something that limits, partly defines, and sets the stage for what you focus on.” This is what gives us drive, focus, and direction in life.

Death & capitalism

Climate change is the problem of our time, not death. In fact, the obsession with ‘defeating’ death is another symptom of the same root cause of the climate crisis – hello, capitalism.

Operating always toward a single goal of profit maximization, capitalism scoffs at the idea of limits. So is death fearing more dangerous in a capitalist system? After all, unchecked capitalism as an economic system is rooted in the delusion that infinite growth is possible on a finitely resourced planet. Enabled delusion begets more delusion.

In a capitalist system, delusion of power and objectification of all life are rewarded. It’s no wonder this system would lead to a desire to take these notions as far as they can go. To objectify and mechanize humanity itself, to defy death.

Death fearing is cultural

Western culture is uncomfortable with and thus terrified by death. That leads to billionaires throwing all their might into evading it. Without such a potent cultural fear of death, would Silicon Valley be so obsessed with defeating it?

Many other cultures view death as a beautiful, natural, and a necessary part of life. Just a few examples of rituals that allow for the healthy processing and celebration of death include Día de los Muertos in Mexico, Qingming in China, and fantasy coffins in Ghana.

In too many eloquent quotes to whittle down, author Richard Powers beautifully illustrates an alternative, ecosystem-aware cultural viewpoint on death in this interview for Atmos:

On the current, most salient perspective on death: “when meaning is private and depends upon self-accumulation, death wipes all that out. Death is the absolute enemy of meaning inside this culture. We live in constant terror of it.”

“there is nothing to fear about death once you perceive yourself as being part of this large experiment in kinship and interdependence.”

“In this transformed consciousness, in the consciousness of interbeing…death is not only a necessary and acceptable part of the change and the seasonal migration of life, it actually is the best technology that life ever came up with. Because it is the engine of birth. It enables evolution. A dying organism makes room for and provides the means of more transformation.”

“My individual death would only be annihilating if I thought that meaning resided in an individual. Once I see myself and my destiny in other living things, my death permits new configurations in that shared destiny. And everything that I am goes on in other combinations.”

The Silicon Valley approach to life

This is when technology goes wrong: when we use it to prop up our delusion that we can exist without any of the limitations that apply to the rest of life. Silicon Valley culture proliferates a certain hubris that causes amazing advancements to be possible and at the same time becomes a runaway train for humanity.

It leads to this very real mindset that everything in life can (and apparently obviously, should?) be manufactured and engineered like a machine. In the process, humanity is tossed out.

Engineering (& bio-hacking) life rather than living it

Johnson reasons: “We build technology with absolute precision because that’s what we can do…we humans are not built to be perfect. That may not be true for the future. We may be able to build ourselves with precision that is unimaginable to us right now.” To him, this is evolutionary adaptation: to turn over physical bodily operations and decisions entirely to computers.

In this mechanical, optimization ethos, so much is missing about what makes life worth living. Art, beauty, pleasure, pain, learning from our own mistakes. We are not meant to be machines.

HUBRIS: humans > all other life

Johnson says the only thing he knows for sure is that in each moment, he wants to continue to exist. Yes, I probably will never want to die. But does that mean if I don’t want to die, and it becomes a real possibility, then it should automatically happen? Who says I know what’s best for the world, and that what’s best for the world is me living forever?

Shockingly, this hubris has led Silicon Valley to even proclaim death itself is a moral wrong. Rather than an integral part of nature’s intelligent design. Tech investor Jaan Tallinn told CNBC: “I think involuntary death is clearly morally bad, which makes the quest for longevity a morally noble thing to engage in.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the dangers of seeing ourselves as separate and higher than the natural Earth systems we inhabit.

The advent of AI makes some people feel even more so that we as humans are separate from the natural world. That is so dangerous. Death is not something to be overcome. We are part of nature, not separate from it.

Fatalism and predeterminism – projecting into the future

Another quality of Silicon Valley culture that strikes me as disturbing is the idea that a certain technological future is pre-determined. As if we have no agency today in the technological developments that we allow to come to fruition.

In an interview for TIME, Johnson said, “We’re walking into a future where we no longer have control,” then saying, “we are willing to divorce ourselves from all human custom. Everything: all philosophy, all ethics, all morals, all happiness.” The interviewer interpreted his position on the future as requiring sacrifice of human qualities in order to survive the coming ‘AI-aligned’ world.

We need to embrace death to save the planet

Bryan Johnson says his philosophy is ‘Don’t Die,’ with these core tenets: “Don’t die individually, don’t kill each other, don’t kill the planet, and align superintelligence with don’t die” – and yet I don’t see what he is doing to ensure we don’t kill the planet. Given the rapidly worsening state of the climate, it seems to me that not killing the planet should be our #1 priority right now.

What good is immortality if we have no planet to live on?

If not killing the planet is to be taken seriously, we have to contend with the consequences that immortality would have on the earth. Overpopulation already poses a threat to human livability on Earth under our economic system of unfettered growth. Imagine how much worse that issue would become if people stopped dying. What’s even scarier is if only billionaires stopped dying, because their lifestyles are the ones consuming the vast majority of Earth’s resources.

Immortal billionaires would be even worse for democracy, too. Their wealth and influence will only grow the longer they stick around. It’s hard to conceive of an even more grotesque wealth gap between billionaires and the rest of the world than what we currently have, but given the pattern of exponential growth, that’s what would happen. As bioethicist Christopher Wareham states, “in many cases, the only thing that topples an autocratic regime or brings about genuine social change is … well, death.”

The most crucial point is that death is an essential part of the life cycle.

The necrobiome, a term coined by Erin Benbow, is the assembly of organisms that feed on plant and animal decay in order to regenerate life. They are the magicians behind the greatest possible trick: turning death into new life. Death is what makes the cycle of life possible, what keeps the give and take of life on Earth in balance. “A corpse is a cache of nutrients and a great blend of multiple fats, proteins, carbohydrates and building blocks of life,” as Colagrossi put it for Big Think. Scientists have studied mass wildlife deaths events. The result of so much concentrated death was a staggering amount of life. The carcasses turned to rich fertilizer. The landscape was altered by way of much greater biodiversity in a short amount of time, thanks to the magic of the necrobiome’s decomposition work. The natural systems on Earth show us that death is not a flaw, but rather serves as intelligent design.

If death were to be stopped, that would, ironically, get in the way of the creation of life. If decomposition didn’t happen, “the Earth might run out of the key elements these organisms contain,” according to this Michigan State University study.

The quest to live forever should not be celebrated. It is a manifestation of fear of death. We should continue the messy process of relating with death not solely as a source of terror, but as the ultimate life meaning-maker, natural climate solution, and a beautiful necessity in the cycle of life.