Sana Khadar

I could really go on.

What do these lines tell us about the pursuit of immortality?

Alex Kratosky is a social psychologist, a tech and society reporter, and the author of The Immortalists, The Death of Death and The Race for Eternal Life.

And these days, the pursuit of a longer life has less to do with animal testicles and more to do with data tracking, biohacking, AI, and a quasi-religious movement that's convinced we'll one day live on computer servers on Jupiter, with our brains having been uploaded to a cloud.

Okay, so things in the longevity slash immortality space remain bizarre.

And today's pursuit of longevity is driven almost entirely by Silicon Valley.

And the question I have is, what is it about extreme wealth that makes people think they can defy biology and figure out a way to live forever?

And why would anyone want to?

You're listening to All in the Mind from ABC Radio National.

I'm Sana Khadar.

Today, our millennia-long effort to dodge death.

what it says about us, and how it can also take a sinister turn.

This is so fascinating.

I want to start by drawing a brief history of the human pursuit of immortality through time.

So maybe we can go, you know, from like ancient China to the Dark Ages to the wild stuff that was happening in the 1900s.

And then we'll get to present day.

And then, if you fast forward to the 1900s, you get those experiments with animal testicles, as well as experiments with animal semen.

Enter a doctor named Charles Edouard Brown Sicard.

Okay, let's come to present day and the kind of current day poster boy of immortality as, you know, pursued by Silicon Valley types is Brian Johnson.

I'm like an Olympian, but for longevity.