Chapter 1: What are the bizarre methods people have tried in the pursuit of immortality?
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Okay, so I wanted to start by listing some phrases from the book that are just so bizarre. They jumped out at me and made me wince, and I couldn't help but write them down. And how exactly these phrases relate to immortality might not be totally clear as I list them out of context. But anyways, here they are. Yogurt enemas. Biohackers post about their nightly erections.
juice extracted from a testicle of a dog or a guinea pig, transplanted sex glands from the young onto the old. I could go on, but I will stop there. You could. I could really go on. What do these lines tell us about the pursuit of immortality?
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: How has the concept of immortality evolved throughout history?
what it says about us, and how it can also take a sinister turn.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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... that he himself was not as vigorous as he described it.
And so what he did was he decided through investigating whatever research was available at that time, that if you extracted semen from the testicle of a younger entity, and that in his case, it was a weird mix of dog and guinea pig. And I think monkey was probably in there as well. This is, And you inject it into yourself. This sounds like a terrible idea, but okay.
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Chapter 3: What role does Silicon Valley play in the modern quest for eternal life?
you know, Silicon Valley or thereabouts, they're perfectly happy and wouldn't it be nice if they did live forever? And some of the researchers that I spoke with actually said that for them, it's also the kind of the next problem to solve given that they are so solution-oriented people The objective is not necessarily to imagine what happens next. It's purely to solve the problem.
And what they've done already is they've solved problems of politics. They've solved problems of economics. They've solved problems of psychology. All of the human sciences, whether those solutions are good for us or not, is up to, I think, where you are on the money-earning side of that.
Yeah.
But they see this as the next big problem to solve. They're like, well, we did it all and we're in space. So what next? I know, biology. And given that they have over the last, I would say, well, 20 years, become essentially brokers of data and our bodies have become much more interpreted through data. They are thrilled and excited by the reduction of the human experience into ones and zeros.
through smartwatches, apps, trackers, whatever, then they're like, great, all we need to do is reverse engineer the human and we've got this. So for them, there's a lot of, well, we already know how to do this. So let's just throw extra data at it and crunch some extra numbers, not to mention AI, which will come up with the solution as well.
But with regards to the first question, why is it that people throughout history have sought to avoid the end is because they cannot imagine what it's like. This conversation comes out of philosophy, ultimately. And my deep dive into that was through a really fantastic book that was called Immortality by a philosopher named Stephen Cave.
And Cave's argument is that the experience of mortality is something that we can understand conceptually, but we cannot understand it truly. Even if you close your eyes and you imagine yourself not being right now, you're still at the center of that comprehension, still kind of cosplaying not being.
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Chapter 4: How does extreme wealth influence the desire for immortality?
And so this is what he describes as the mortality paradox. And he says that the mortality paradox, the idea that at some point we simply will not be, and we know it will happen, despite the fact that we live every day pretending that it will not happen. He says, this is the thing that's driven civilization. And it's a really, really compelling argument. I recommend reading that book.
You are listening to All in the Mind from ABC Radio National. I'm Sanaa Kadar. Today, the extreme lengths people will go to in the pursuit of immortality. And so far, the angles we've covered have been bizarre, but more or less straightforward enough to grasp.
But things get a bit more theoretical from here on out, because it turns out what it means to be immortal or how to extend human life, that is up for interpretation. So there's different camps with this whole business, isn't there? Because when Brian Johnson talks about wanting to live forever, is he actually talking about his body being around for a long time?
Or are we talking about his brain eventually being uploaded to the cloud kind of thing? Tell me about the different camps in the immortality space.
It's at this point that I truly feel like I need to put my aluminium hat on. The thing is, is that as like the more I talk about this and the more I see stuff coming in from newspaper articles about this whole space in general, I'm like, no, I'm actually not a crazy conspiracy theorist. This actually these people actually do exist.
And this really is quite a dominant sense in in not just Silicon Valley, but it's kind of spreading out a little bit further. So Brian, I describe as an example of a biohacker, somebody who lives by the data, right? And Brian's intention is not to necessarily live forever as a de facto, not to become immortal, but simply not to die today.
The way that I'm going to do this is I'm going to hyper optimize my body and I'm going to do everything with numbers. which means that I can then devote all of the health stuff to an algorithm so that it can keep him the same age, biological age, for as long as possible.
But his mantra and his, like, movement is called Don't Die. Yeah, I know. Is his ultimate goal to stay the same age forever or just, yeah, I suppose as long as possible?
He's really good at branding. I think, you know, his religion, as he describes it, don't die, I think is part of the I will not die today. And the reason why that exists is because by staying the same biological age today, not chronological, then he won't theoretically get those diseases of aging. And so his idea is to simply... live at the same age as long as possible.
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