A tech CEO wants to make humanity immortal by 2039. He sees the rapid technological advancements of recent years, particularly through artificial intelligence, as a reason why this could actually succeed.
Who is he talking about? Bryan Johnson is a 47-year-old biotech entrepreneur who has been investing his money in various technology companies for many years.
However, Johnson gained the most notoriety for his active pursuit of eternal life. Starting in 2021, he began investing large sums of money into his “Project Blueprint.” For several years, he has been trying to slow down or even reverse his aging process. According to Business Insider, he reportedly spends around $2 million a year and takes 100 pills a day.
Immortal by 2039, but how, Johnson doesn’t know exactly yet
What does he say about immortality? In a discussion that the English-speaking magazine Fortune quotes, Johnson now has a new goal in mind: He wants to make humans immortal by 2039. However, he still needs to address some errors, as current therapies are erroneously causing cancer. He writes about this in an extensive post on X.com:
I will try to achieve immortality by 2039. A year passes, and I remain biologically unchanged.
We do not currently know how immortality will be achieved by 2039. There are new, promising therapies that can potentially turn back the clock by decades, but they are flawed. Sometimes they erroneously cause cancer. We need to fix that.
But we know that immortality is possible because nature has already solved this problem. This is not a physical problem like trying to travel faster than light, but a biological engineering problem that evolution has already solved multiple times.
In his post, he also describes why he believes that this goal is realistic for the first time in history:
- Thanks to the rapid technological advancements, particularly through artificial intelligence, it is for the first time possible to specifically combat aging.
- AI is transforming from an assistant to a scientist, enabling much faster research through data analysis, process automation, and more precise measurement of biological markers.
- The author argues that immortality is fundamentally biologically possible, as some organisms in nature have practically achieved this state.
- Aging is not an insurmountable physical problem but a biological problem that has been solved evolutionarily multiple times.
He reports on his own experiments over the past six years: At 48 years old, his body is now at the level of an “elite fit 18-year-old,” if one overlooks his hearing loss in one ear.
The desire for immortality is not entirely new among wealthy people. Various billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman, have been investing significant amounts of money in regenerative medicine for years. However, there is also criticism of the plans to develop life-extending drugs: Billionaires are developing life-extending pills – but a CEO warns that this could lead to a world full of “privileged zombies”
