American billionaire entrepreneur Bryan Johnson visited a city called Prospera in Honduras in 2024 to receive longevity treatment. There, at a longevity clinic, he paid $25,000 for hormone injections that the company claimed could slow aging. At Prospera, located in a special economic zone in Honduras, one can freely receive anti-aging treatments that have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The city, which carries the slogan "Make death optional," was established with investment from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI.
The author, a scholar and journalist, doggedly traces how "eternal life," a long-held human dream, has turned into a massive Silicon Valley project. The book features a host of familiar magnate entrepreneurs and investors. They believe that just as Silicon Valley has overcome various technological challenges through disruptive innovation, it can conquer even "death," long regarded as a limit of human life. To realize the dream of life extension, they willingly pour in astronomical sums of investment. For these tech magnates, the eternal-life business is also a means to accumulate far more wealth than they have now.
In fact, Altman invested $180 million (about 265.3 billion won) in Retro Biosciences, a company aiming to extend human healthy lifespan by 10 years using artificial intelligence (AI). He also provided an OpenAI machine learning model exclusively for the company. Google co-founder Larry Page invested $1.5 billion in launching Calico, a company researching human aging. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, together with renowned investor Yuri Milner, invested $3 billion in a company researching cellular reprogramming, while Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin donated cryptocurrency worth millions of dollars to life-extension research.
The Big Tech billionaires the author met are convinced that human eternal life is a natural next step in technological progress. Since the human body is also a kind of machine, they argue, life can be extended by collecting biometric data in real time, redesigning it with computer code, and repairing what is broken. What has lent strength to this belief is the advance of AI. AlphaFold, an AI model developed by Google DeepMind, solved challenges in biochemistry that had gone unresolved for 50 years, opening a new era of drug design. There are forecasts that if artificial general intelligence (AGI), which learns directly like humans, emerges, research into aging treatments will accelerate. Last year, Altman said, "We can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases and have much more time with our families."
But the author does not view the future the "immortality project" will bring in a purely positive light. The utopia Silicon Valley promises is an ideal limited only to a few "ultra-wealthy." The author cites the example of billionaire Bryan Johnson, who drew his son's plasma and injected it into himself in an attempt to reverse aging. Johnson also injected his own plasma into his father. At the same moment, the harsh reality is that America's poor are selling their own plasma for $30 to $70. The author points out that the more the eternal-life industry flourishes, the more "inequality of wealth" could lead to "inequality of lifespan."
Scientists, too, believe it will take far more time for the claims of Silicon Valley's immortalists to become reality. Felipe Sierra, a geneticist who served as deputy director of the Division of Aging Biology at the U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA), said, "Even if it is possible to extend the lifespan of the nematode by 40%, applying that method to mice would extend lifespan by about 15%, and trying it on humans, 3% would be the best." He added, "That alone would be a tremendous achievement, and extending human lifespan by 40% is impossible."
In the end, the author's judgment is that what matters is the attitude of accepting death rather than the attempt to overcome it. At the end of the book, the author summons the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the protagonist fails to attain eternal life and comes to realize the truth that even though humans die, great achievements live on for a long time. The author then says, "As Gilgamesh inscribed on the foundations of the city walls, in the end what makes us immortal is what we did." It is the author's sharp warning to today's pursuit of eternal life, which has degenerated from myth into business. 368 pages, 22,000 won.
