The broligarchs and the quest for immortality
By Tom Krattenmaker
OnlySky, February 6, 2025
It’s no surprise that the Musks, Zucks, and Thiels of the world are investing big in new technologies to overcome human mortality. After all, it’s human instinct to want to keep living, to put off death indefinitely, to live forever if it might one day be possible.
If tech titans want to spend some of their billions on their own longevity—handfuls of vitamins, hyperbaric chambers, investments in startups pursuing technological and scientific fountains of youth—it’s their call, presumably. They aim to live outside of human laws and limits, so why not also the law of nature dictating that all shall die?
If they can pave the way for others by making themselves human research subjects à la Bryan Johnson, thus expanding medical knowledge of aging and how to best it, maybe there’s something altruistic in their pursuit of immortality.
And if or (probably) when they fail to find the fountain, they’ll have lots of company from myth and history with whom they can share their folly: Gilgamesh, Qin Shi Huang, Ponce de Leon, Linus Pauling, Himmler. The list goes on.
Given the ways of the “broligarchs” and society’s tendency to bow before them, it’s also unsurprising to find a conspicuous hubris and lack of reflection in the live-forever bids of the supermen of our time, and those who would join them in the quest to cheat death.
But a big question hangs over the headlong pursuit. Were humanity ever to achieve dramatic breakthroughs in longevity—including, even, immortality, at least for those who could afford it—would it be a good thing?
The dreams and schemes of the Übermenschen
As well-chronicled by journalist Charlotte Alter, tech centimillionaire Bryan Johnson is devoting his life to achieving immortality, or coming as close to it as he can. Read Alter’s piece to learn about the extraordinary lengths to which Johnson is going and the sacrifices he is making in the present to ensure a long, long life in the future. There are the pills—60 a day—the hyper-strict diet featuring an unappetizing concoction called the Green Giant, the many daily hours devoted to workouts and body treatments, the device he wears on his penis while sleeping to measure nighttime erections (he is trying to reach the 3.5-hours-a-night-mark characteristic of 18-year-olds). The picture emerges of an obsessive who is striving so hard to live forever that he’s not doing much living now.
What some might see as a rich person’s folly is, to Johnson, a bid to achieve “the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.”
Such is the grandiosity of the “Übermenschen,” to use Nietzsche’s term—a superior subspecies of men who live by their own rules.
As Sigal Samuel writes in Vox, many of the broligarchs are steeped in science fiction and fantasy and see themselves as heroes in their own sci-fi stories. “Common-sense morality,” she says of the Thielean mindset, “doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission.”
To me, it’s another case study in the tendency of those who have “made it big,” due in part to luck and the winner-take-all nature of today’s capitalism, to mistakenly equate their great wealth with personal greatness. Take Bezos and Amazon. There is nothing earth-shatteringly important about a website that allows people to buy things faster and more conveniently. It has not done anything “great” for humanity. It’s as if he is overcompensating now by shooting for the stars with his Blue Origins space company.
The same grandiosity is inherent in the quest to live forever. Altruistic half-gestures aside, we can be pretty sure it’s their own immortality that interests the supermen most. What makes the value of a tech giant’s life so much greater than the rest of ours that it’s worth defying evolution and nature—worth opening a Pandora’s box of ethical problems—so that they don’t have to face their mortality?
Excruciating ethical questions
Bryan Johnson had a setback recently. He and his support team concluded that one of the supplements he takes for “de-aging” was actually aging him. Johnson announced he would no longer include rapamycin in his regimen.
It’s easy to mock this “whoops” moment. But apart from the medical inadvisability of what he is doing, Johnson deserves a pinch of credit for putting himself out there and sharing what he is learning by experimenting on himself. And while there’s nothing inspiring about the prospect of his life stretching on forever, he’s right that the achievement of immortality might well be the most revolutionary achievement in human history.
For immortality-seekers of the past, the quest was alchemy, not science. But given the incredible advances in sci-tech and the prospect of more amazing scientific achievements in the times ahead, we can no longer rule out the possibility of exponential advances in longevity. The excruciating ethical issues are becoming less hypothetical and more demanding of attention than ever before.
Books have been written, and there will be many more, about the ethics questions around dramatically longer life spans, and offshoot issues like transhumanism. Let me tease a few of them:
Given the likelihood that the treatments and technologies will be very, very expensive, at least at first, should the world simply allow the ultra-wealthy to partake, leaving the rest to accept the plebian fate of a much shorter life?
Should society apportion some of the scarce life-extension resources to non-billionaire people judged to be doing the most important work and, if so, how will that be decided?
If dramatically longer lives eventually became available for all or most, how would room be made, resources provided, and opportunities opened for the new people presumably being born, so that society may enjoy the renewal and dynamism yielded by the cycling of generations?
How would the experience of being human be altered for better or worse if we did not have knowledge of our mortality tugging on our sleeves, compelling us to make the most of our moments and savor our finite time?
Not worth wanting
When I was a kid and my mother first clued me in on the fact that everyone dies, including me, I cried. Then I grew up and got over it. As adults often do, I eventually came to see that death as a vital part of the grand cycle of life.
As written by biologist Ursula Goodenough, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature, for humans and other multicellular life forms it is reproduction, not endless life for the individual, that perpetuates species and allows for the ceaseless, ongoing creation and diversification that make biological life such a marvel.
This creative cycle depends on the death of individuals. “Death is the price paid,” Goodenough writes, “to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love. My somatic life is the wondrous gift wrought by my forthcoming death.”
Some of the most profound secular insights on human finitude are found in the work of Yale philosopher Martin Hägglund, author This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. Hägglund convincingly argues that without death, life would have no meaning.
“The commitment to living on,” Hägglund writes, “does not express an aspiration to live forever but to live longer and to live better, not to overcome death but to extend the duration and improve the quality of life.”
Were our finitude not always knocking on the door, there would be nothing at stake in our strivings, in the choices we make. Life would be pointless, indecipherable.
We want to live on, yes. We do this not by living forever as individuals, but through our offspring if we have them, and by investing ourselves in worthy principles and projects that we trust will carry on and pay off after we’re gone. It is our species, not its individual members, that ought to be the subject of our dreams for more life, better life—about whose survival we ought to be worrying in this perilous time.
If only the world’s supermen brought as much wisdom as ego to their pursuit of immortality, and all their other grails as well.