These Tech Billionaires are Determined to Live Forever, Seriously
Aug 23, 2013 22:46
When you're a billionaire, you can buy anything you want. Except death. Or can you?
The quest for living infinitely is nothing new. People have been exploring this for ages, but it's just that now, five financiers have begun to heavily fund a longevity research - a venture that has become more legitimate in the last 10 years.
Adam Leith Gollner just wrote "The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief and Magic Behind Living Forever". And yesterday he wrote a piece for BookBeast detailing his findings on the bigshots who are determined to stretch their fame and live forever.
For example, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle (and fifth-richest person in the world) hates death. He says the idea that someone can "be there and just vanish, just not be there" doesn't resonate with him. So he created The Ellison Foundation, dedicated to ending mortality. He gives this foundation more than $40 million a year to fund research. Gollner wrote that Ellison’s biographer Mark Wilson believes Ellison saw death as “just another kind of corporate opponent he can outfox.”
Next up is Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov, who founded the 2045 Initiative with the goal of helping humans achieve physical immortality within the next thirty years. Itskov believes that all we have to do is make the simple swap between our biological bodies and machine bodies as soon as possible (sounds like something from sci-fi movies, right?). This way, our brains will be backed up in cyberspace and we’ll just download ourselves into bionic avatars whenever we want. Itskov believes we'll be "100% immortal" by 2045.
The article also features Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Santa Barbara-based venture capitalist and investor Paul Glenn, who contributed to the Methuselah Foundation, whose co-founder Aubrey de Grey claims that “the first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today.”
The quest for living infinitely is nothing new. People have been exploring this for ages, but it's just that now, five financiers have begun to heavily fund a longevity research - a venture that has become more legitimate in the last 10 years.
Adam Leith Gollner just wrote "The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief and Magic Behind Living Forever". And yesterday he wrote a piece for BookBeast detailing his findings on the bigshots who are determined to stretch their fame and live forever.
For example, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle (and fifth-richest person in the world) hates death. He says the idea that someone can "be there and just vanish, just not be there" doesn't resonate with him. So he created The Ellison Foundation, dedicated to ending mortality. He gives this foundation more than $40 million a year to fund research. Gollner wrote that Ellison’s biographer Mark Wilson believes Ellison saw death as “just another kind of corporate opponent he can outfox.”
Next up is Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov, who founded the 2045 Initiative with the goal of helping humans achieve physical immortality within the next thirty years. Itskov believes that all we have to do is make the simple swap between our biological bodies and machine bodies as soon as possible (sounds like something from sci-fi movies, right?). This way, our brains will be backed up in cyberspace and we’ll just download ourselves into bionic avatars whenever we want. Itskov believes we'll be "100% immortal" by 2045.
The article also features Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Santa Barbara-based venture capitalist and investor Paul Glenn, who contributed to the Methuselah Foundation, whose co-founder Aubrey de Grey claims that “the first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today.”
