A growing number of billionaires in technology are pursuing the quest to live forever and have decided that they want to use their abundant wealth to try to help humans “cheat death.”
Alphabet’s Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Palantir’s Peter Thiel, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison are a few super-rich billionaires who have taken a keen interest in the rapidly emerging field of longevity as per the reports from interviews, books, and media.
While breakthroughs in this field of longevity are far from guaranteed, these billionaires hope that different medicines, therapies, and other life science technologies can enable the human species to live well above 100 years and maybe up to 200, 300, or even more than that.
But there is ambiguity over whether their efforts will benefit the whole of Humanity or just the rich class can afford that.
Stefan Schubert, who specializes in “effective altruism,” said, “Technologies that initially are only affordable to the rich typically become more widely available with time.”
Tech investor Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype, said, “Silicon Valley’s quest to live forever will eventually benefit humanity as a whole.”
Tallinn said, “I think involuntary death is clearly morally bad, which makes the quest for longevity a morally noble thing to engage in. Early adopters always tend to pay more and take larger risks than the ‘mass-market,’ so if therapies start off on the expensive/risky side, that’s to be expected.”
