Aleks Krotoski

They tell us that we will try anything and we will do anything, that we're pretty gullible.

I think all of those things are interesting because they have a whiff, just a gentle whiff of science associated with them.

And the aspects of grafting monkey parts onto a human's testicle had apparently some good, robust science behind it at the time, bearing in mind that the time that we're talking about was the very, very early 1900s.

But all of those things are things that people do and have done in the past to extend their lives.

This is very much a Judeo-Christian, like, phenomenon.

There are so many people who identify as transhumanists and who identify as singulatarians within Silicon Valley that I realized that actually what I really needed to do was I needed to understand exactly what is it that they imagined for the future so that we can say no.

You know, I think when writing this book, I found a lot of comfort in the fact that what feels really weird and wacky today actually has quite an extensive history.

So the very first story or one of the very first stories that was ever written down, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is actually a story of the Sumerian king, fabled king, who...

Basically, he tried to pursue immortality.

He tried to become immortal.

So that's like the very first story that human beings wrote down in language.

So this has been going on for some time.

Right.

But if we start with ancient China, we have the predecessors of modern chemistry, the alchemists.

And they were trying anything and everything.

They were mixing these things and they were serving them up to emperors and to one another to see if...

They drank these elixirs if they would give them longer lives.

So far, none of them have.

Then we fast forward to the Middle Ages, and we have popes, we have kings, we have, again, people who are in great power commissioning investigations and research into things like the Philosopher's Stone.

He was a legitimate doctor, and he had a storied career, but at a certain point... He, in particular, made the decision to shift gears when he was in his 70s and beginning to feel...