Peter Diamandis is five feet four and has pipestem legs, but his torso widens into broad shoulders, powerful biceps, and a craggy, Homeric head. The composite effect is of a genie emerging from a lamp. Our wish is his command, and our wish, surely, must be for more time to make wishes: for limitless life. In December, Diamandis stood before two hundred doctors and scientists and vowed that in the coming decade our wish would begin to come true: “It’s either a hardware problem or a software problem—and we’re going to be able to fix that!”
Diamandis was at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, north of San Francisco, to address the Roundtable of Longevity Clinics. He wore his customary outfit: black sneakers, black jeans, and a black T-shirt. Having one look and one message—Life just gets more abundant!—spares him decision fatigue. An ebullient spirit whose confidence is tempered, at times, by his reverence for data, he acknowledged that the task was immense. “We have forty trillion cells in our body, and every cell is running one to two billion chemical reactions per second,” he said. “It’s not possible for any human to understand this. We are linear thinkers in an exponential world.” Yet with robots soon able to run a million experiments a day, and with A.I. poised to parse our cellular code, how long could immortality take?
He observed that his clients at Fountain Life, a longevity clinic he established, were already on their way to freedom from disease. They’d have early access to emergent tech, such as a blood filter that can “filter out metastatic cancer” and a transmitter that uses high-frequency waves to diagnose strokes and zap depression: “Remission in a week with ten-minutes-per-day therapy!”
Diamandis, who is sixty-four, has a bachelor’s in molecular genetics and a master’s in aerospace engineering from M.I.T., as well as a medical degree from Harvard. But he’s not a practicing doctor, engineer, or scientist. He’s an emissary from the realms of possibility. After growing up on Long Island in a family of Greek immigrants, he began making his dent in the universe by founding some two dozen businesses, many of which involved voyaging to space. As a young entrepreneur, he formulated Peter’s Laws, which included “If you can’t win, change the rules” and “When forced to compromise, ask for more.”
He promotes the inevitability of longevity through a multitude of channels. There’s the clinic, which he started with two doctors and the motivational speaker Tony Robbins. There’s a newsletter, two podcasts, and books on the future and how to stick around for it. There are partnerships in venture funds devoted to A.I. and biotech; an annual conference, Abundance360, which showcases advances in nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces; and a semi-annual Platinum Trip, where, for seventy thousand dollars apiece, people get to meet eminent longevity scientists, invest in their experimental therapies, and secure those therapies for personal use.
Diamandis’s network, known to its constituents as the Peterverse, is largely peopled by slim, graying, well-off men who finger their Oura rings like horcruxes. America’s richest now live a dozen years longer than its poorest, and they intend to widen their lead; Jeff Bezos, Yuri Milner, and Sam Altman have all funded anti-aging research. Joel Huizenga, the C.E.O. of Egaceutical, a startup whose “water-based drink” aims to reverse cellular age, told me, “We don’t work in mice. We work in billionaires.”
Near the back of the Buck sat the biological theorist Aubrey de Grey, stroking a beard the size of a beagle. In 2004, de Grey coined the phrase “longevity escape velocity” to describe the moment when science stops us from getting older, so that, with further advances, we can begin growing younger. At the time, de Grey was viewed as a brilliant crackpot. He is now seen as a sort of Alfred Wegener, whose theory of continental drift lacked only a practical understanding of how it might work.
The rise in de Grey’s reputation corresponds to Diamandis’s long struggle to encourage longevity research by establishing a prize—his favorite promotional device. In 1996, Diamandis launched the XPrize, a ten-million-dollar award for advances in commercial spaceflight. Eight years later, a team funded by the Microsoft founder Paul Allen sent a manned rocket aloft and won. XPrize went on to establish lucrative awards in domains as diverse as carbon capture, deep-ocean exploration, and literacy software for children.
In 2007, de Grey suggested a longevity prize. Diamandis loved the idea: ever since med school, when he learned that Greenland sharks can live for five centuries, he’d wondered, Why not us? But impediments loomed. There was no agreed-upon framework for interventions; aging isn’t even classified as a disease by the F.D.A. And there was no obvious way to measure competing therapies, short of running a protracted competition to see how long it took participants to die. Perhaps most important, none of the more than fifty billionaires whom Diamandis approached to fund the prize seemed to believe you could turn back time.
The field gradually caught up to him, though. Health became a competition, encouraged by the advent of watches that track your vital signs and biomarker-based “clocks” that measure your aging. Podcasters converted sad-sack men into biohackers, who juiced themselves with everything from Ayurvedic herbs to electromagnetic-frequency beds. (Most biohackers are men, for the same reason that most gambling addicts are men.) In 2013, there were fewer than a hundred longevity clinics around the globe; a decade later, there were more than three thousand.
So, at the Buck Institute, Diamandis declared that he’d finally been able to establish a prize in longevity. The goal was to devise a treatment by 2030 that made patients’ muscles, brains, and immune systems twenty years younger; the winning team would get as much as eighty-one million dollars. David Sinclair, a prominent geneticist whose lab recently reversed the effective age of cells in lab animals, told me that the prize had galvanized the field: “It’s helped change the focus from mouse studies to ‘Let’s do something in humans!’ It’s our Wright-brothers moment.”
Many of the clinicians I talked to seemed skeptical about hitting such a difficult target. At the Roundtable, the C.E.O. of the Buck, Dr. Eric Verdin, cited a recent paper in Nature Aging which concluded that we’re already bumping against our biological ceiling. He warned about overpromising: “I do worry for the credibility of our field!”
Diamandis was undeterrable. (Peter’s Law No. 22: “The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”) From the stage, he exhorted his colleagues to rise to his level of certainty. “Mind-set is very important,” he said. “Optimists live fifteen per cent longer than pessimists.”
Humans are the only animals known to be discontented with natural selection. Sure, it created us, but we have a few notes. For instance: diabetes was beneficial for our ancestors, because eating fat and sugar shifted them into insulin resistance, helping them withstand cold and famines. Nowadays, chugging a Big Gulp is less evolutionarily shrewd. A feature has become a bug.
For millennia, we’ve sought a fix for debility and death. Medea, of Greek myth, rejuvenated her lover’s father by replacing his blood with plant extracts and foam from a sacrificed werewolf—or, another source has it, by boiling him in a golden cauldron. The first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, may well have died from mercury in an immortality potion concocted by his alchemists.
Today’s biohackers sometimes look to antiquity for inspiration. This usually involves hormesis—a mild ordeal, such as exercise, fasting, or cold plunges, that can shock cellular pathways into better health. The CAROL, a resistance bike that promises the benefits of a full workout in minutes, spurs users to pedal all out for twenty-second intervals by imagining they are being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger. “Neanderthal man didn’t jog,” the bike announces. It’s unclear how CAROL knows that, or why emulating Neanderthals would improve our longevity, as those who escaped the tigers typically died in their thirties.
Most biohackers look to the future. The best known of them is Bryan Johnson, who founded the payments platform Braintree. Once rich and chubby and depressed, Johnson is now, at forty-seven, rich and ripped and determined to live forever. He spends a quarter of a million dollars a year in that pursuit. His regimen has included restricting calories to 1,977 a day, undergoing high-frequency stimulation of his abdomen to simulate the effect of twenty thousand sit-ups, and stimulating his penis with shock waves for some doubtless excellent reason.
Johnson leads a movement called Don’t Die, whose adherents hope that they, too, can reprogram their bodies and minds. Open-sourcing himself, he publishes his biomarkers online, everything from body-mass index to a total duration of nighttime erections (three hours and thirty-six minutes at one recent climacteric). His habit of requiring employees to sign confidentiality agreements and then gliding among them nearly nude has drawn some negative comment, as have his penile metrics. But Johnson told me that it’s a great way to grab people’s attention. “If you tell somebody to go to bed on time, they’re, like, ‘Whatever,’ ” he said. “If you tell them that not getting good sleep is going to ruin their boners—that if they don’t have nighttime erections, they’re seventy per cent more likely to die prematurely—it really is efficacious. No one wants to lose their nighttime erections. That’s a masculine thing.”
Diamandis chooses his words carefully when he talks about Johnson. “Bryan has done more to popularize longevity than any single person,” he told me. “I kind of wish he hadn’t gone down the erection pathway.” Where Johnson seeks to embody biological optimization, Diamandis seeks to articulate the case for its feasibility. His goal is to mobilize a consortium of entrepreneurs, scientists, and investors to help us double our life span and grow rich while we do it.
For Diamandis, the first step to creating the future we want is to speak of it as if it’s already here. He doesn’t watch the news, which he calls “the amygdala-stimulating dystopian from the clickbait media”; he gathers data from conferences, scientific papers, and pitch decks. He checks his colleagues’ claims, but he’s a generous grader. When the noted artificial-intelligence researcher Dario Amodei speculated that A.I. could double the human life span “in five to ten years,” Diamandis immediately began touting the quote—the caveated forecast of someone expert in A.I. but not in medicine—as confirmation that enhanced longevity was close at hand. His promise is essentially a world in which you can blithely marry someone forty years younger than you, continue to have children even as your grandchildren are having children of their own, and keep your gaze trained on the farthest horizons—in which you can stick around to witness, and even determine, where humanity goes next. Joe Polish, a marketing guru who has worked with Diamandis, said, “Peter has learned that a compelling offer is ten times more powerful than a convincing argument. Now people just want to be part of his world and go wherever he’s taking them.”
Thanks to such advances as antibiotics and better sanitation, our life spans have roughly doubled since 1900. Back then, the leading causes of death were pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. Now we die of the maladies of old age—heart disease, cancer, strokes, Alzheimer’s. The downside is that we go lingeringly, in ways that we and our children regret. The average American dies at seventy-seven, after twelve years of bad health; if you are old enough to buy a senior-citizen ticket, you are likely to have a chronic disease, or perhaps two.
While the most zealous biohackers seek eternal life, many of the clinicians who oversee their care hope instead to increase their “health span”—the years lived without illness. Traditional life-style therapies, such as Dr. Dean Ornish’s popular approach (“Eat well, move more, stress less, love more”), increase health span. But attempts to target a specific aging dynamic with a specific molecule have mostly just increased scientific vexation. Dr. Jordan Shlain, who runs five longevity clinics, told me, “Everything you do to improve your health span can improve your life span. Everything you do to improve your life span is fucking bullshit.”
It once seemed that improving life span was nearly inevitable. Back in the nineties, a single gene mutation was found to double the longevity of the C. elegans worm, and the geroscientists Simon Melov and Gordon Lithgow made predictions on a bar napkin: Lithgow believed that in five years mammalian life spans would double, Melov that they would more than double. Recalling the moment, Melov sighed and said, “The five- to ten-year horizon for huge breakthroughs has never gotten any closer.”
Animal proxies turn out to be not all that proximate. Lab mice share eighty-five per cent of our DNA, and they live only about two years—a useful period when you hope to quickly determine whether a given peptide might be the long-sought elixir. But mice don’t have heart attacks or get Alzheimer’s, and their muscles waste suddenly, rather than gradually, as ours do. More than eighty per cent of animal-tested therapeutics fail in people.
Our bodies, technically speaking, are just really fucking complicated. The Buck’s Eric Verdin told me, “Peter Diamandis says we’re thinking linearly in an exponential world, and we’ll be able to solve all these problems. But the biological problems to solve also get exponentially harder as you go deeper.” Even the indicators are baffling. Hearing loss has been linked to dementia, as has failing to floss. An impaired sense of smell is more strongly predictive of all-cause mortality than heart disease. And the mysteries do multiply the deeper you go. People who have four organs that are “youthful” for their age are much less likely to experience kidney disease or arthritis, yet those with seven youthful organs—which must be even better, right?—have a greatly heightened risk of diabetes and Parkinson’s.
In trying to live longer, we’re fighting our own imperfection: every time a cell divides, a few thousand mistakes can be introduced into its DNA. We’re also fighting the entropic forces—time, gravity, and oxygen—that ravage pretty much everything. The authors of a seminal paper in Cell distinguished twelve hallmarks of aging: such signs of impaired self-regulation as DNA instability, mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, cellular senescence (when burned-out cells start oozing toxic sludge), and stem-cell exhaustion. Though the authors noted that all twelve hallmarks “are strongly related,” they could not establish whether the indicators were diverse expressions of one fundamental process or whether they evolved independently.
Every few years, a new approach promises to turn the switch. These have included taking supplements, such as NAD+, that help preserve genomic integrity; maintaining our telomeres, the protective caps on DNA strands which shrink as we age; perfusing our veins with “young blood”; and taking rapamycin, a drug derived from a bacterium discovered on Easter Island.
Yet interventions that arrest one hallmark of aging often accelerate others. Rapamycin is popular with biohackers because it inhibits the senescent cells that cause inflammation—a condition so associated with aging that it’s often called “inflammaging.” But having too few senescent cells is dangerous, because senescence helps block tumors. Almost nothing the body does is always bad or always good: we walk a narrow footbridge between atrophy (cells failing to replicate properly) and cancer (cells replicating all too well). Caloric restriction, a “natural” alternative to rapamycin, shares some of its benefits—but it can also shrink muscle mass, lower your libido, and suppress neuronal function. Plus, you’re hungry all the time.
The body seems to require a Goldilocks solution for pretty much everything. And yet, to realize significant gains in longevity, we’ll need to significantly disrupt our natural functions. “If it can’t kill you, it probably doesn’t work,” Matt Scholz, the C.E.O. of Oisín, a biotech startup that’s tackling age-related frailty, told me. “That’s maybe not the best way to put it, but you’re perturbing a complex system, so you need to be really doing something.”
Diamandis rises each morning at five-thirty and assesses his overnight biometrics, gathered by an Oura ring, an Apple Watch, and a continuous glucose monitor. Then, as he meditates, he employs three red-light-therapy devices: one for healthy skin, one for lustrous hair, and one to kill oral bacteria. Along with a Ka’Chava shake, he consumes the first of five daily pill packs: this includes a GLP-1 agonist, a mitochondrial stimulant, a stress dampener, and a nootropic for cognitive enhancement. After using a toothpaste tailored to his oral microbiome, he begins his morning Zooms while pedalling a stationary bike. He also pumps iron and pins his daily protein intake at a hundred and fifty grams, one gram for each pound he weighs.
In February, he visited a Fountain Life clinic in Orlando to undergo his quarterly testing. He shuttled between a private room where a video loop of Diamandis himself spoke reassuringly about any worrisome test results—“Wouldn’t you rather find out at the beginning, when you can do something about it?”—and smaller chambers where technicians took blood and saliva and had him blow into a silver bag to test for intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
Aides kept offering him electrolyte-infused fizzy water; the clinic describes itself as “like a country club for precision diagnostics.” Annual membership is $21,500, plus about $5,000 for supplements and additional tests. This isn’t bad, as such plans go: the Superhuman package at Extension Health costs ten times as much, and superhumanity is not guaranteed. Aiming at early detection, Fountain Life runs an annual battery of tests your G.P. doesn’t do, such as an A.I.-driven scan for soft arterial plaque. Dr. Bill Kapp, the clinic’s C.E.O., told me, “Seventy per cent of people who die of cancer die of a form that’s not routinely tested for.” Testing is followed by treatments, and then by quarterly follow-up testing. Kapp added, “Just with what we know today, you should be able to get to ninety-five healthy.”
The clinic has five branches and twenty-six hundred patients. Most of them hope merely to be able to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in their seventies. For those with loftier dreams, there’s Epic, an eighty-five-thousand-dollar program that includes an exercise coach and a nutritionist, stem-cell “re-education,” and treatments such as therapeutic plasma exchange, in which plasma is filtered from your blood and replaced with albumin and antibodies from healthy donors. Diamandis has undergone five T.P.E. treatments, each costing ten thousand dollars. Dr. Helen Messier, Fountain Life’s chief medical officer, told me, “I like to say about these men, ‘They spent their health getting their wealth, and now they have to spend their wealth getting their health back.’ ”
As Diamandis was shuttled through a scanner that measures bone density, he imagined a world in which every home became a biodata-mining operation. “My V.C. fund is investing in implantables and insidables, which will be dribbling data to your A.I. at all times,” he said. “We’re going to have sensors in our toilets, sensors listening to your voice, the sound of your cough, recording how you’re walking. This is the future: passive, nonintrusive, constant management, where your A.I. will say, ‘Uh-oh—we better test for this.’ Your A.I. is going to be the best physician in the world.”
He seemed eager for that day to arrive. Having to spend three hours being poked and prodded and prevented from making phone calls rankled; Diamandis is an incorrigible multitasker. Steven Kotler, his co-author on three books, described the experience of driving with him: “You’re moving at seventy-five miles per hour, and he’s texting and also talking on his phone, closing some deal. It’s fucking terrifying.” When Diamandis visits his mother, Tula, she chides him to “go sit in the sun for ten minutes.”
After his blood draws, Diamandis rejuvenated with a “power cocktail” I.V. and chatted with his younger sister, Marcelle Diamandis-Stamatiou, a functional-medicine doctor who consults on his care. A technician came in with a questionnaire: “Stress level on a scale of one to ten?”
“I’d say six or seven.”
“What is your H.R.V.?” Marcelle interjected, referring to heart-rate variability, or the minute differences in heartbeat rhythm. A low score can indicate stress.
Diamandis checked his phone. “Last night it was a twenty.”
“A good number is fifty or sixty,” Marcelle said. She turned to the technician: “He’s a ten for stress.”
“I’m an 8.5,” Diamandis said, scrolling.
“Pete, listen to me,” Marcelle implored. “You’re chasing all this, chasing these markers of senescent cells. What you need to chase is stress. Breathing, and being present, and family, that’s what reduces stress.”
“I hear you.”
“I just want you to take care of yourself, but—”
“Arketa!” he said—Greek for “enough!”
Diamandis told me, “My personal health is to some degree sacrificed to the mission. My Faustian gamble is I will do whatever I can for my longevity within a time allotment that seems doable.” He metes out his time in pricey snippets, charging $250,000 for a speech abroad, $100,000 for one on the East Coast, and $70,000 for a talk near his home, in Santa Monica. “I measure everything in how much time I’m away from my kids,” he told me.
His friends say that he began focussing on self-care after his marriage, in 2005—he proposed to Kristen Hladecek on a zero-gravity flight, when they were in midair, like a Chagall painting—and particularly after the birth of their twins, Dax and Jet, in 2011. He told me, “I want to see my great-great-grandkids, and see the world through their eyes.” A few years ago, Diamandis undertook a three-day sequence of guided journeys on the psychedelic DMT, which, he said, “led to a complete release of my fear of death. It dissolved my ego and connected me to the love in the universe, and I got a strong sense that, when we die, we just return to that infinite intelligence.”
But he’s in no rush to return to sender. “There’s so much fascinating stuff happening right now that if I didn’t have a family I would be in meetings and conferences every second,” he told me. “I could literally be on an airplane circling the globe non-stop.”
Growing up in Great Neck, Diamandis longed to achieve escape velocity, not just from Long Island but from Earth itself. His father was an ob-gyn and expected Peter to follow his path. Diamandis was more interested in “Star Trek.” From an early age, he said, he believed that “everything we value on Earth is infinitely available in space, and we must make habitable and occupy as many niches in our star system as possible.”
Restless at Harvard Medical School, Diamandis summoned his courage and told his father he wanted to study aerospace engineering. He got a master’s at M.I.T., finished medical school, barely (the dean offered him a degree if he promised not to practice), and looked around for a way to get to the moon.
NASA didn’t seem viable: Diamandis reasoned that, even if he was accepted, he’d likely end up a “penguin”—an astronaut who never flies. As a graduate student, he’d co-founded an “International Space University” that convened students from around the world for eight weeks to study the final frontier. Now he began to swarm that frontier from all sides: he designed a rotating bed that would forestall the health issues astronauts faced in low gravity; started a rocket-launching company; and founded Zero Gravity Corporation, which flies a 727 on a parabolic course that enables passengers to experience weightlessness. Then he read “The Spirit of St. Louis,” Charles Lindbergh’s book about his flight to Paris, and was struck that the impetus for traversing the Atlantic was to win a prize. “I was blown away by the leverage,” he told me; aviators had spent a total of four hundred thousand dollars trying to win twenty-five thousand dollars (and six of them died). Not long afterward, he announced the XPrize for commercial spaceflight.
Though Diamandis always aimed at the heavens, he kept getting knocked sideways by new ideas. In 2005, he was serving as a glorified travel agent for space tourists when he read another book that changed his life: Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity Is Near.” Kurzweil, now the “principal researcher and A.I. visionary” at Google, is the leading biotech futurist. Decades ago, he predicted that aging would be “dramatically slowed” by 2029, the same year that computers would achieve consciousness. Personalized immune therapies and organ replacements would propel us nearly to longevity escape velocity. The rest would be done by nanobots—cell-size paramedics that zip through our bloodstream repairing aging tissues—and the ability to upload our emulated brains. After our intelligence merges with A.I. in the cloud, we will become mostly digital entities a million times more intelligent than mere humans. This will happen in 2045, a moment called the Singularity.
Reading Kurzweil’s predictions, Diamandis recalled, “I thought, Oh, my God, I have to stop all this linear shit in the space business and focus on the content of this book.” In 2008, he and Kurzweil founded Singularity University, a kind of weeklong executive M.B.A. in impending technologies; its funders and supporters included Larry Page, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. Then, in a meeting with Kurzweil, Diamandis was rocked by another “ ‘holy shit’ moment,” he said. “I realized that there’s a tremendous amount of energy that hits the Earth from the sun, but that energy is not in usable form. Technology can make it usable, make it abundant. When I started thinking about it, technology can take anything from scarcity to abundance, including time.”
Yet he continues to treat time as a dwindling resource. “For someone who’s intending to live forever,” a colleague of his observed, “Peter’s patience is really short.” If an enterprise seems broken, Diamandis’s impulse is not to fix it but to start a new one. In 2013, having grown frustrated with Singularity University, he started Abundance360, a notably similar forum—so similar that Singularity was all but forced to buy A360 out. A friend of his, Eric Pulier, said, “Anyone who’s captivated by Peter’s energy is going to be disappointed when he turns his attention to something new. Removing carbon, stopping wildfires, improving life span, building a next-gen financial system—they’re all the most important thing.”
While Diamandis was in Orlando, he spent two days at the Lake Nona Impact Forum, an invitation-only gathering whose speakers included George W. Bush and Mark Cuban. Between events, Diamandis whirled around, making and cementing connections.
In the speakers’ lounge, he sought out Jamie Justice, a biogerontologist he’d persuaded to run XPrize Healthspan. She still sounded surprised that he’d talked her into it: “I told Peter, ‘Getting a ten-year gain in one domain’ ”—among muscles, cognition, or the immune system—“ ‘feels possible, but all three? That feels crazy.’ I had all these facts and figures about how you can only improve VO2 max and knee-extension torque so much. Peter looked at my data and said, ‘Great, you’ve made your point. Ten years seems very doable, so let’s go for twenty!’ ”
Diamandis laughed. “Ten years wasn’t a big enough challenge,” he said. “Twenty felt audacious but achievable.” When Justice noted that she wouldn’t have taken the job if the prize rewarded life span rather than health span, he acknowledged, companionably, that “words such as ‘rejuvenation’ and ‘age-reversal’ do tend to rile the scientific community.”
For Diamandis, the protocols of scientific caution and objectivity can seem as coercive as the hallmarks of aging. In the corridor, he hugged Hans Keirstead, the head of a biotech company called Immunis, whose latest product is an injection derived from embryonic stem cells. Efforts to rewind the aging clock often focus on stem cells, the undifferentiated cells that transform to make up our hearts, eyes, and bones. When we’re young, stem cells make us resilient; a baby can regrow a severed fingertip. But this font of renewal dries up: an eighty-year-old’s bone marrow contains two hundred times fewer stem cells than a newborn’s. A range of novel treatments attempt to restore our plasticity; some entail extracting stem cells from your belly fat and injecting them elsewhere. Many are restricted in the United States, and biohackers who’ve gone abroad to pursue therapies for facial rejuvenation or sexual function sometimes suffer adverse reactions, including death.
The latest promising idea is to revert normal cells to a state known as “induced pluripotent stem cells.” This process has made mice live thirty per cent longer. But taking it too far produces teratomas, tumors filled with teeth and hair. Immunis seemed to have discovered a work-around: an injection of four hundred and forty molecules secreted by embryonic stem cells. In a clinical trial, elderly people immobilized by arthritic knees, an impediment that hastens muscle wasting, experienced six-per-cent growth in their leg muscles.
Diamandis was enthusiastic about the injection, but hardly impartial; the treatment was about to be trialled on two hundred Fountain Life patients, including him. Keirstead is a Fountain Life client and a member of the Abundance community. Diamandis’s biotech venture fund invested in Immunis, he’d showcased the company on a Platinum Trip, and he’d put Keirstead on a panel he moderated at Lake Nona. Immunis is also competing for the XPrize.
These kinds of contending interests typify the Peterverse, and the world of longevity as a whole: the influencer who touts a new treatment often owns a stake in (or receives a reciprocal logroll from) the company that makes it. Jamie Justice told me that Diamandis’s conflicts posed an issue for the Healthspan prize. Along with Immunis, the competing teams include a biotech company run by his best friend and several longevity clinics that felt slighted by Diamandis’s claims that Fountain Life is superior to its peers. “We had to legally remove Peter,” Justice said. “He has no say in the judging, and he had to add distance to his statements about Fountain Life.”
Diamandis spoke about this enforced separation as a mildly regrettable consequence of his ubiquity. “I don’t want my relationships, the way I surround the field, to put a cloud over the prize,” he said. “I used to receive a salary”—$250,000—“as executive chairman, and I donated it for the next five years to the prize itself, so now I’m an uncompensated chairman.”
In the hallway, Keirstead gave Diamandis an update on another of his companies, which makes multi-pathogen vaccines. “I’ll have commercial approval in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and South Africa this year,” Keirstead said. What about the plan to merge it with a firm that Diamandis co-founded, so the two could share a factory? Keirstead shrugged, eloquently.
“Why does it take people so long to do shit?” Diamandis said. “The answer is ‘Yes, now, go!’ I’m the vice-chairman of the board, and I’ll be the loudest voice in favor of it. I’m a walking conflict of interest, but I announce them! At the end of the day, having these ideas succeed is much more important than who makes a little money on them.”
We walk around all day estimating the age of passersby from visual cues: wrinkles, hair loss, the inferred weight of sorrows. The eyeball test was long our best gauge, because biomarkers like blood pressure measure health but not aging. A twenty-year-old and a ninety-year-old could each register 110/70.
Then, in 2011, a geneticist and biostatistician named Steve Horvath found a way to estimate a person’s age using methylation patterns in the epigenome—the set of proteins and compounds that attach to your DNA and determine which of your genes get expressed. During methylation, a methyl group in the epigenome turns genes off. It’s unclear whether it causes aging, but it’s strongly associated with an increase in inflammation (bad) and a decrease in making RNA and repairing DNA (worse).
A clock that tells you how old you are turned out not to be that useful; most people already know how old they are. Subsequent generations of clocks, more helpfully, measure your biological age—allowing you to calculate both how much time you have left and whether you’re doing better than your peers. Almost everyone I spoke to in my reporting casually mentioned the test that gave him the largest delta between his calendar age and his biological age. The biohacker Dave Asprey, who is fifty-two, told me that a clock he’s developing says he’s actually eighteen. Bryan Johnson is currently atop an online biohackers’ leaderboard, aging at .503 years per year, though thousands of people would love to displace him. Dan Sullivan, an eighty-one-year-old previous leader, has fallen to 1,021st place. He predicted, “Bryan Johnson will die of a heart attack in the middle of his fifteenth erection of the night.”
I met Steve Horvath at his lab in Torrance, California, so that we could have our blood assessed by two clocks developed in his lab. One was PhenoAge, derived from circulatory proteins. The other was a methylation test called GrimAge. Horvath, a man of mournful good cheer, told me, “I named it after the Grim Reaper. You could also call it the Instantaneous Dropping Dead Probability Clock.”
As a phlebotomist drew our blood, Horvath explained, “Methylation represses junk DNA that can wreak havoc. We need methylation. But you want youthful-state methylation with peaks and valleys. In an older person, the methylation landscape is flat.” A recent paper in Cell proposed that, when cells are in need of repair, the molecules that cause methylation help by placing them in survival mode—but then those molecules stay put, causing aging. It would be as if the body dropped cones around a pothole-ridden stretch of highway, then forgot to pick them up. The dream is to collect all the cones and drive a ribbon of new asphalt. When you reprogram the epigenome of mice, you increase their life expectancy. But, again, mice.
Horvath looked out the window. “I invented epigenetic clocks, that’s my claim to fame. But what I’d really like to be known for is a great intervention, something that moves the clocks backward. I’ve hated biology all of my life! You go from one species to the next and the opposite happens—the human plasma-protein clock doesn’t work in the mouse.”
For a time, Diamandis planned to use a Horvath clock as the XPrize’s criterion, but he and his colleagues realized that the real index of rejuvenation was function: can patients be restored enough to do youthful things? Function is somewhat theoretical in middle age, when almost everyone can get out of a chair and walk across a room, but after that it becomes starkly tangible. In a study of men aged eighty-five and older, only a quarter of the slowest walkers survived five years, while nearly all the fastest walkers did. Among the elderly, having difficulty bathing is as grimly determinative of mortality as having heart failure.
For the XPrize, the protocol will be a single-year trial of healthy people aged fifty to eighty, to determine whether a therapy can improve their functional benchmarks by twenty years or more. The tests for strength currently include VO2 max, lower-body power, and muscle mass; those for cognition include appraisals of executive function, processing speed, and memory. The tests for immune function, which is harder to measure, will likely involve a blood-based biomarker.
A month after my blood draw, I Zoomed with Horvath and his colleague Bobby Brooke to discuss the results. My GrimAge was 61.2, slightly below my actual age. “You’re doing better than sixty per cent of the population!” Brooke said.
Horvath shrugged: “One way to summarize you, when it comes to methylation, is you’re a very, very average person.”
“But I am cheating death by a tiny amount!” I protested.
“You can be proud, I guess,” Horvath said. “But can I inspire you to become a little more ambitious?” He shared his screen: his PhenoAge was 42.7, more than fourteen years lower than his age. “I was average when I started, like you,” he said. “I got a scare about atherosclerosis and got serious about improving my life style. I exercise thirty minutes a day, not too much. I doubled the statins, to address cholesterol, and I take acarbose to address my glucose. I take omega-3—we just did a nice study on its benefits. In short, I take drugs. The one thing I couldn’t influence is stress. I don’t know how to tackle that.”
“You need a meditation app,” Brooke said.
“My reading of the meditation studies is that they were all disappointing,” Horvath said. “More vegetables—that’s the real secret! I’m a very lazy guy, so I go to the supermarket and I buy five bags of frozen Brussels sprouts. Few people eat more Brussels sprouts than me.”
Biohackers hear lots of conflicting advice about where to focus their energies. Luigi Ferrucci, the scientific director of the National Institute on Aging, suggests that the key is the mitochondria, the battery of the cell. Tony Wyss-Coray, a leading neuroscientist, says that “the brain is the biggest predictor of mortality.” Dr. Peter Attia, who wrote the midlife-health primer “Outlive,” believes that strong muscles are vital: they prevent falls, keep the body from accumulating fat, and even protect against dementia. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, suggests a different course of action: “Not paying for a gym membership, not struggling to eat the right things, not trying to love someone who I have a difficult relationship with!” There is only one necessity, he says. “I have to get eight hours of sleep!”
Scientists often overlook an organ that has an outsized influence on half of the population: the ovaries. Chiefly owing to the ovaries, which age about 2.5 times faster than women’s other organs, men and women decline so differently that they might almost be separate species. Men die more of heart attacks, women of Alzheimer’s. Women live seven years longer, as a global average, and their immune systems endure better—but they spend a much greater proportion of their lives in poor health. Women benefit more from exercise, because they burn lipids, a more efficient energy source than the carbs that men burn. Yet intermittent fasting can upset the menstrual cycle, and women lose muscle mass from caloric restriction more rapidly than men. So no therapy will work equally well, or even in the same manner, for both sexes. (Because so few scientists are focussed on female longevity, XPrize is trying to establish a prize for ovarian health.)
The encompassing issue is that we’re all fighting natural selection, whose sole criterion is the genes we pass on. The theory of disposable soma holds that, once we’ve reproduced, our body—our soma—is no longer useful. A corollary, with the ungainly name of antagonistic pleiotropy, holds that many of the factors that help us to produce and raise children later curtail our lives. “Cholesterol builds your brain and your gonads when you’re young—and it clogs your brain and your heart when you’re old,” Nir Barzilai, a leading geroscientist, told me. “IGF-1 growth hormone is helpful if you’re younger than fifty, because it promotes muscle growth. That same high level, in an older person, kills you. Metformin”—a diabetes drug biohackers take because some studies show that it decreases mortality—“reduces IGF-1, reduces the testosterone we need to build muscle. So, if you’re under fifty and you’re taking it, that’s an idiotic decision.”
After several million years of evolution and two centuries of medical advances, human life spans may already be highly optimized. Whereas most mammals have roughly the same number of lifetime heartbeats, 1.5 billion, humans have about 2.5 billion. Broadly speaking, if you have a finite number of heartbeats, then the faster you live, the faster you die. “We’re all being cooked over time,” Dr. Ronald DePinho, who has done promising work to strengthen telomeres, told me. “If you want to increase longevity, you basically have to turn the oven down.”
An unhealthy person who starts eating Brussels sprouts and going to Planet Fitness can really turn the oven down. But most of us can’t be bothered. As Dave Asprey told me, “If you would live twenty years longer if you punched yourself in the face as hard as you could three times every morning, no one would do it.” Many people aren’t even willing to undergo much milder distress: in one study, most respondents said they wouldn’t be interested in a drug that made them two years younger if it had side effects such as occasional headaches and loose stool.
Biohackers would take the drug, and maybe even the punches, but their ovens are already set low. Dr. Andrea Maier, who runs clinics in Singapore, told me, “Most of the time, I’m being forced to optimize the most optimized people. What we do in longevity clinics is polish polished diamonds.” According to Dr. Michael Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic, you can make a thirty-two-year difference in your life span by implementing the no-brainer stuff (sleep, diet, exercise, etc.), but you can gain only four years by taking supplements.
Nonetheless, biohackers regularly tweak their “stack” of drugs and supplements, seeking minute advantages. The hope of “combinatorics” is that interventions enhance one another. “In biology, you have to work in combinations,” Dr. Joseph Raffaele, who runs a longevity clinic in Manhattan, told me. “If I give you urolithin A and spermidine and a hormone and nitric-acid products, and your autophagy”—housecleaning of damaged cells—“is increasing, it’s like a great recipe. I may not know exactly what’s contributing what, but over all it tastes good.”
Nathan Price, a co-director of the Center for Human Healthspan at the Buck Institute, works with “digital twins”—virtual clones of a patient that are being developed to test treatments. “Very often, multiple interventions have synergistic effects,” Price said. “Almost no one gets a benefit in staving off Alzheimer’s from Vitamin D. But people could get multiple years of benefit if they coupled Vitamin D with phosphatidylcholine and better sleep and Viagra for increased blood flow.”
Yet combinatorics often backfire: when young subjects took Vitamins C and E before strength training, it blunted many benefits of working out. There’s a pharmacological principle that when you combine three drugs you have no idea how they’re going to interact, as well as a hepatic principle that the more supplements you take, the more work your liver must do to detoxify them. (Many over-the-counter supplements are contaminated with fungus, mold, yeast, salmonella, and heavy metals.)
When I mentioned the issues with combinatorics to Diamandis, he said, “It’s a very valid critique that I’ve also heard from my mom.” He added, “I’d love to start an A.I. company where you’d tell it what you want from your stack—more energy, or nootropics, or whatever—and then give it your genetic data and your medical baseline and the number of pills you’re willing to swallow, and it tells you exactly what to take. In the interim,” he said, opening a pouch containing his midday pills, “I’m manually doing this.” He recently reduced his daily load of supplements from seventy-four to fifty-two, to spare his kidneys, but he’s still taking more than any other patient that his Fountain Life doctor sees.
Diamandis is following the evidence that we can, in fact, override our genetics. Numerous papers have concluded that genes determine only seven to thirty per cent of longevity, while behavioral choices play a much larger role. Your health, in this view, is not just an opportunity but a responsibility. If you get cancer and die young, it’s your fault for not perfecting your stack. One can imagine a future in which, if you didn’t take every conceivable step to optimize your health, you’d face not only disapproval from your A.I. doctor but denial of claims from your A.I. insurance company.
For four days in March, Diamandis held his Abundance360 conference at a resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. He began the final day by jogging onstage in gold sneakers to the strains of “Forever Young” and declaring that it was Longevity Day—“the day that will add decades of health and centuries of inspiration to your lives.”
The conference curated a world of coming wonders for several hundred C-suite buccaneers who had paid up to fifty thousand dollars apiece to update their mental models and investment portfolios. One entrepreneur announced that his brain-computer interface would soon be surgically installed in primates; a venture capitalist predicted that we’d have a billion bipedal robots by 2040. There was talk of “neuromuscular activation of biohybrid mobile bots” and of modifying humans with DNA from tardigrades, the nearly indestructible micro-animals, so that we can better withstand radiation during space travel. Diamandis welcomed each innovator to the stage with a hug and jumped exuberantly to the music, urging his audience to do likewise. He told me, “I learned from Tony”—Robbins—“that, if you’re the host, and you’re having a great time, your guests are going to be having a great time. There has to be an emotional carrier wave to make the data meaningful.”
Like the Italian futurists, Diamandis is drawn to dynamism, to the promise of speed. During the first Trump Administration, he told me, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk asked if he might like to run NASA, and his response was “colorfully and vehemently negative.” Too bureaucratic! He has a venture-capital mind-set: invest in any emergent tech that shows promise, because you never know which unlikely breakthrough will bring mammoth returns.
Yet the risks aren’t just financial. In January, the Times reported that ExThera Medical, the company whose blood filters Diamandis praised at the Buck Institute, had sold thousands of its devices to a company with a clinic on Antigua that offered miracle treatments to patients with metastatic cancer. The Times described harrowingly neglectful care, and said that at least six patients had died after treatment. (ExThera maintains that patients were warned the treatments were experimental.) The story also noted that the company continued to promote the clinic, despite warnings from ExThera employees. When I asked Diamandis about the reporting, he said that it had “paused a lot of Fountain Life’s plans” with ExThera. Then he added, “Listen, they’ve also had some incredible breakthroughs.”
He sometimes gets skeptical feedback from his partners at the venture firm Bold Capital. Bold has six hundred million dollars under investment, about sixty per cent of it in health-span companies; on paper, at least, the firm is showing a more-than-fifteenfold return in Oura Ring, Figure AI, and Colossal Biosciences, which recently brought a version of the extinct dire wolf back to life. Teymour Boutros-Ghali, Bold’s managing partner, said, “Where some people imagine the fifty ways that tech can go wrong, Peter sees the fifty ways it could work, and believes that human ingenuity can take care of any problems. But our investors are very happy that we don’t do all of Peter’s deals.” One of Bold’s founders, Sergey Young, told me, “I’d never advise people to invest more than two or three per cent of their wealth in longevity—it’s still very early.”
At the Abundance conference, Diamandis’s audience seemed receptive to his reminders that “the two biggest wealth-creation opportunities are A.I. and longevity.” Part of his appeal is his insistence that extending your own life and growing richer in the process will ultimately benefit the species. He conceived of an “accredited-patient program,” an F.D.A.-backed system that would allow select people to invest in treatments unavailable to the general public. “My basic idea is I have enough money, and I’m of sound mind—I’m gonna try it!” He contends that the longevity-pursuing risk-takers he lives among are actually selfless. “Any negative effects from technologies that don’t work will be experienced by the wealthy,” he said. “You could see it as their sacrifice for others—both financial and, eventually, biological.”
Joe Polish, who helped launch A360, told me that its audience found Diamandis’s optimism reassuring, but that “what actually drives the Abundance events is scarcity and fear of missing out: I’m going to be left behind by A.I. or robotics or the fountain of youth. Even the super-wealthy people there are scared shitless and trying to buy their stairway to Heaven. And nearly all of them are deathly afraid of death.”
Most of us just want to remain in decent health and last a bit longer than the actuaries predict. The implications of extreme longevity—of a transhuman future in which we have four careers, six replacement kidneys, and eleven spouses on pods orbiting Mars—are too much for us to absorb. But Diamandis is ready for it all. Dan Sullivan, who co-hosts a podcast with Diamandis called “Exponential Wisdom,” said, “Peter really believes that immortality is a reality. I told him, ‘Living to one hundred and fifty-six seems reasonable, but living to seven hundred? I don’t know, Peter—I think you’re going to get lonely.’ ”
Our awareness of death has an upside: it imbues our lives with beauty and meaning. Immortality would redefine the nature of both empathy and morality, because it would strip us of a common fate. I once asked Diamandis about the oppressive consequences if a deathless Jeff Bezos amassed seventy trillion dollars, or if a Vladimir Putin stayed in power for a century. “Another way to look at that scenario is ‘What are the benefits?’ ” he responded. “Having some visionary single decision-maker allows you to be Queen Isabella funding Columbus. I fantasize about well-meaning wealthy leaders guiding humanity with pure intent, giving top scientists the capital to take tenfold actions.” Then he grinned, aware from his own fund-raising how fantastical that fantasy was.
Bob Richards, a close friend of Diamandis’s, told me, “Peter believes that technology will lead us to be kind to each other, to be explorers and artists, not militaristic and greedy and self-serving, the way we are now. But just living forever is not going to change that.” Diamandis told me that our hardwired inclinations toward selfishness did trouble him sometimes, in the middle of the night. He added, softly, “I am hopeful that when there is no scarcity, the better angels of our nature will prevail.”
Nearly every longevity advocate believes at least two things that can’t yet be proved: we will soon discover the secret to eternal life, and we will be better off once we do. Bryan Johnson, like many others, maintains that A.I. is on the verge of unlocking the medical obstacles to immortality. But, he acknowledged, “I don’t think that anyone knows” exactly how it will do so. Faith without proof is a religious outlook, and Johnson announced earlier this year that a religion is what his Don’t Die movement would become. “The words ‘community,’ ‘ethical framework,’ ‘philosophy’—humans won’t devote their whole identity to them,” he told me. “Religion, for better or worse, is a framework that has motivated people to do phenomenal things.”
Diamandis bridles at this idea, worrying that framing the quest as a religion will “discredit longevity in people’s minds.” Yet he knows that his own prognostications are impervious to fact checking. “Some people tell me, ‘Well, you’ve created a religion around abundance,’ ” he said. “And there are elements of faith in that mind-set.” During A360, Diamandis interviewed his own avatar, which had supposedly time-travelled back from 2082. The avatar, which resembled a young Rafael Nadal, reported that the Singularity took place on schedule and that artificial intelligence “essentially solved all material-scarcity problems,” so that “the jobless became the free, living better than 2025’s billionaires.”
Implicit in this narrative is the belief that technocrats aren’t hogging resources for vanity projects; they’re fixing the world. One XPrize Healthspan donor, Daniel Krizek, a biotech-fund manager who plans to invest a billion dollars in longevity, espouses the values of effective altruism. That principle, popular in Silicon Valley, holds that philanthropists should save the most lives they can, including the billions of future lives that might be enabled by a particular action. “You could put a trillion dollars into Africa and feed the continent forever,” Krizek told me, “but I believe it’s better to spend the trillion on going to space, because all the scientific advances that come from that will save many more lives in the future.” Bryan Johnson’s movement aligns with this belief: his ultimate goal is “species maximization—trying to get life in this part of the galaxy to flourish.”
Unlike some of his peers, Diamandis is eager to save current lives on Earth as well as future lives in space. He told me, “I think there is a single tide that floats all boats. A.I. will feed the hungry, solve the climate crisis, and get us to space.”
At seventy-seven, Ray Kurzweil takes eighty supplements a day, has an artificial pancreas to manage his diabetes, and appears to be in great shape. As he waits for technology to tide humanity onward, he is bewildered that some people have other plans. He used to have lunch with the economist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel for his work on how irrational factors cloud our decisions. Over lunch in late 2023, when Kahneman was eighty-nine but in decent health, they debated the wisdom of extending your life. “We’re at a point where problems can be reversed,” Kurzweil said. “Your kidneys are failing? Well, so what? It could be solved next week.” Kurzweil told me that Kahneman wasn’t persuaded. “He said, ‘Look at history! Billions of people have lived, lost most of their capabilities, and then died! Nobody’s escaped that!’ ” Three months later, Kahneman wrote to his family and friends that he had decided to die by assisted suicide: “I have believed since I was a teen-ager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief.” Kurzweil sighed, recalling the loss. “People really don’t want to be nonfunctional. But it’s death that’s the tragedy. Death is the loss of information, beauty, love—everything we know!”
For many biohackers, the ultimate goal is simply the preservation of their own consciousness. One constraint on retaining information forever is that our neurons mostly don’t replicate themselves; they just shrink, deteriorate, and die. But Kurzweil has a fix for that, too. Decades back, he predicted that we’d soon be able to scan and copy our connectome—the intricate web of a hundred billion neurons that constitutes the human brain.
At A360, a nanotechnologist named Michael Andregg declared that Kurzweil’s prophesy was all but realized. Andregg co-founded a startup called Eon Systems. His hypothesis is that, because consciousness arises from bioelectric signals, you’ll be able to turn your digital brain on in the cloud and experience a thoroughly satisfying life up there (or out there, or wherever), because A.I. will predict your neuron’s next signal: brain autocomplete. He showed an emulated fruit fly whose connectome had been copied to a Kinko’s level of fidelity. It skittered around onscreen, in a somewhat staccato fashion, and it knew enough to groom itself and to avoid bitter tastes (though how there could be bitter tastes in the digital realm was never explained).
Andregg said that the human connectome was only a million times more complex than a fruit fly’s, so all we have to do is model our brains’ structure and activity and, voilà, emulation. We could be scanned and wake up in a digital body by 2030. “This is a whole new body, a whole new brain—this is transcendence!”
No one can fully emulate a C. elegans worm yet, despite fourteen years of trying; the best program can’t even make the worm move backward. Yet Andregg told me that the difficulties he foresaw were chiefly psychological: “The first person to do the upload, it will be destructive. We pause you, lock down all your proteins, and slice your brain with a big deli slicer—but much finer, at the hundred-micron level.” Nonetheless, he said, “We have at least ten volunteers who want to be the first to do it. Well, the second.”
When I asked Diamandis about the plausibility of whole-brain emulation, he pointed out that Andregg was featured in the “Moonshots” part of his program. He was ambivalent about eventually uploading his own connectome: “Destroying myself to upload feels like suicide. And if I’m somehow still here after the upload, destroying myself because my peer in the cloud says, ‘I’m good, you can kill yourself’—I’m not sure I’m ready for that.” Uncharacteristically, he acknowledged having qualms about Kurzweil’s nanobots, too, particularly if they cross the blood-brain barrier. “I’d probably do nanotechnology,” he said. “But it begins to enter a reëngineering of the brain, and of our personas. You have to ask, ‘At what point do we stop being human?’ ”
In May, at an auditorium near Gramercy Park, in Manhattan, XPrize Healthspan introduced the hundred semifinalists who’d advanced from the more than six hundred teams that signed up. Before the ceremony, in a conference room upstairs, Diamandis and Jamie Justice gave thirty investors a preview of the competition and urged them to fund teams that fired their imaginations.
“We aren’t just going to slow aging,” Justice said, “but to improve function in just one year.”
Diamandis clarified: “Effectively a functional reversal. I want to get the word ‘reversal’ in there.”
Downstairs, he welcomed a standing-room-only crowd by asking, “Who wants an extra twenty years of healthy life?” Everyone, pretty much. “Who wants more than that?” Woo! He went on, as if the prize had already been won, “That twenty years will be the bridge to the next twenty years, and that twenty years will be the bridge to the twenty years after that!”
The semifinalists, from more than thirty countries, were pursuing an extraordinary array of approaches, including A.I.-based short-chain fatty-acid modulation; extracellular vesicles derived from cow plasma; ultrasound to target senescent cells; kidney-strengthening tinctures; olfactory enhancement with forty odors, including eucalyptus and lavender; coffee that targets the mitochondria with exogenous ketones; and a longevity village called FuturVille, where the health practitioners are holograms. Perhaps because the testing period doesn’t begin until 2026, the room shimmered with the optimism of a hundred as yet undisproved hypotheses.
Aubrey de Grey was present, delighted that the competition he’d suggested nearly twenty years earlier was robustly under way. And yet, he told me, the tests for strength, cognition, and immune function that will determine a winner “are unlikely to be sufficiently spanning of all the pathways of aging that they would increase life span. For life span, every pathway has to be delayed. If you delay changes in ninety per cent of the pathways, you’re still going to die—and probably right on schedule.”
Even many of Diamandis’s close friends don’t quite believe that we’ll reach longevity escape velocity anytime soon. Dave Blundin, his partner in an A.I. venture fund, told me, “When you’re Peter’s age, you’re right on the longevity cusp. That’s the tragedy of the whole Peter story—he could live forever, or he could miss by a year and not live any longer at all. It’ll be close.”
When I asked Diamandis about his friend’s observation, he looked stricken, as if Blundin were consigning him to an early grave. “I acknowledge that a lot of the initial research hasn’t panned out, that rapamycin, caloric restriction, NAD+ are individual pebbles dropped in an ocean of biochemical complexity,” he said. “We don’t really understand the biology of aging yet.” He fell silent, running projections. “If we’re not able to move the needle so everyone gets twenty to thirty more healthy years in the next twenty-five years, I’d consider that a failure.”
Then he brightened: “That’s about the buffer in years that I’m going to need to get to the moon.” He mentioned one more seminal book, Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi collection “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” The man in question, D. D. Harriman, longs to go to the moon, but his vision and salesmanship are so vital to the moon-colonization program that his colleagues maneuver to keep him on Earth. “Anyway,” Diamandis explained, “Harriman finally sneaks up to the moon on an illegal flight and dies there.” He laughed. “I don’t want to die on the moon, exactly. But I’d love to start a city there, a base we could mine asteroids from! The last time something like this happened is when the lungfish crawled out of the ocean onto land.” Diamandis looked off, somewhere between ahead and above. “The equation of humanity moving into the cosmos is complicated,” he admitted. He knew that it might not happen, or be optimal for all of us if it did. “But it still gives me permission to dream.” ♦
