Every night before his 8:30 bedtime, 46-year-old Bryan Johnson straps on a penis monitor in his quest for immortality. Johnson, a multimillionaire tech-bro, measures his nether region’s nocturnal activities as part of a one-man longevity experiment he’s dubbed “Project Blueprint.”
Johnson’s algorithm-driven, $2 million-per-year daily regimen includes 100+ supplements, bottles of $75 extra virgin olive oil, hours of precisely regimented exercise, three calorie-restricted vegan meals – all consumed before 11 a.m. – and the bedtime of an eight-year-old. Plus obsessive measurements of his every bodily function, including urination speed, brain function, and blood chemistry. Not to mention occasional gene manipulations, plasma transfusions, and the aforementioned penile performance monitoring. Johnson says Project Blueprint runs his life. “My mind no longer decides.”
His quest for immortality is embodied in his slogan, “Don’t Die.” And, no surprise these days, he’s got a huge flock of social media followers to whom he peddles his expensive olive oil – actually branded “Snake Oil” (wink! wink!) – along with $343 packets of pills and powders sold as the “Project Blueprint Stack.”
Let’s set aside the possibility that Johnson might be a 21st-century Silicon Valley version of a 19th-century snake oil salesman – and the issue of surrendering one’s life to an algorithm (So long, free will!) – and consider what it means to make death optional. To “Don’t Die,” to “Be Immortal.”
Immortality has been a hot topic with philosophers and theologians for millennia; eternal life, or some variation thereof, is a big selling point for lots of religions. Johnson himself recently told The New York Times, “Every religion has been trying to offer a solution to ‘Don’t die’—that’s the product they’ve generated.” But for the most part, they are not talking about actual flesh-and-blood-and-guts corporeal life everlasting. It’s more of a transcendent spiritual thing. So, what might it mean for actual human beings if we do not exit this mortal coil? If both our bods and souls live on and on and on? I see several practical and spiritual problems.
Boredom. What will we do to occupy our immortal hours? Retirees today often face this problem even with only one lifetime to complete. How many “Bucket Lists” can Immortals finish before they run out of buckets? Twentieth-century British philosopher Bernard Williams identifies this problem as “exhaustible categorical desires,” meaning the things we want to experience or accomplish in life. Williams suggests that eventually an Immortal’s lists will devolve into pointlessness and never-ending boredom.
Social hyper-stratification. At the penthouse level are the rich folks who can afford to pay for immortality (I’m looking at you, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, et al.), while down below are the rest of us mere mortals. And what if the Immortals are not nice people? Let’s say, for example, Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. Does humanity want to be stuck with these guys forever? Or even a few hundred years? Nope. But maybe they’ll improve with age(lessness).
Let’s imagine what these Immortals might do with themselves (see Boredom, above). Maybe they will evolve into supremely wise, transcendent god-like beings bestowing their gifts and insights on the benighted mortal populace – eternal versions of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermenschen. Or maybe we get a bunch of bored, cranky, jealous, frustrated Greek god-like beings who mess with mortal humans just to have something to occupy their never-ending time. (For a potential preview, see Rob Brinking’s entertaining, profanity-laced review of Olympian badassery.)
Clogging the evolutionary pipeline. With a world filling up with Immortals, there’ll be no need for replacement humans. No need for reproduction in the good old-fashioned way. Will humankind stagnate without bright, fresh new people and their ideas? How will that change our social drives, bonds, and motivations? How might this alter human adaptation as the environment changes and natural selection stops making selections?
Use of planetary or extraplanetary resources. Where will we put all these sublimely wise and/or deeply bored Immortals? Sun City-Mount Olympus eternal retirement communities? North Dakota? Outer Space? Is crowding our fragile, exhaustible planet Earth with ancients who’ve already used up their share of resources – and then some – a good idea? Maybe each one gets a “Best if Used By” date and we periodically clean out Earth’s refrigerator and toss the expired ones into the Void.
Life extension versus life ever-lasting. While it’s tempting to poke fun at Bryan Johnson’s messianic immortality project, we should not allow one guy’s multimillion-dollar midlife crisis to keep us from seriously considering both the promises and problems of life extension. If longer lives mean healthier lives, not never-ending ones, that seems a worthy mission.
Even if physical immortality proves unattainable, as most genuine biogerontology researchers predict, prolonged life extension may be within foreseeable reach. After all, worldwide average life expectancy has more than doubled from 32 to 72 years since 1900. What if today’s average span doubles to 144 years or more? This is not unimaginable according to biogerontology researcher Richard Miller, MD.
Serious scientific research on life and health extension has been underway for several decades, including a breakthrough 1993 finding of a genetic mutation that made roundworms live twice as long. (What the experience was like for the mutant worms was not reported. Maybe they were bored.) That scientist, Cynthia Kenyan, Ph.D., now leads Calicolabs, a multibillion-dollar California research and development entity funded by Google/Alphabet; its mission: “to better understand the biology that controls aging and lifespan… and develop interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives.”
Most folks would probably agree that expanding the years of healthy human vitality and postponing or eliminating suffering from declines and diseases of old age are worthwhile pursuits. And from my albeit very superficial readings in philosophy, reducing suffering is generally considered a good thing. (Unless you’re Nietzsche, who I don’t understand at all.)
So, perhaps we should give Johnson the benefit of the doubt. Go ahead and turn yourself into a one-man lab rat in service of the future of the human race. Your N-of-1 self-experiment might not stand up to stiff scientific scrutiny. You probably won’t become immortal. But at least you’re prompting some buzz and drawing attention to the scientists doing actual life- and health-span research. Let’s hope your algorithm-and-olive-oil-fueled antics won’t distract from the real science.
That research should yield consequences not only for individuals but for society as a whole. And those consequences – social, psychological, economic, ethical, and ecological — could be profound. We mortal humans would do well to give serious thought to what these will mean for us and the generations to come.