Part 6 will be available soon.
Part 6 will be available soon.
Tech Oligarchs
6 Parts
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Part 6 will be available soon.
Traveling to Mars and beating death: The futurist creed of tech's apostles
Investigation'Tech Oligarchs' (5/6). Faith in the possibility of 'enhancing' humankind – the extension human abilities and lifespan by any technological means – has flourished as an alternative to religion in Silicon Valley.
In the hours immediately following Peter Thiel's death, a specialized team will arrive to freeze his body and brain in liquid nitrogen. His corpse will be preserved in the hope that science will one day be able to bring him back to life. The co-founder of PayPal and Palantir was among the first Silicon Valley leaders to sign up for cryonic preservation through Alcor, a company founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970s. Thanks to this new kind of life insurance (quite literally), nearly 200 corpses, all Alcor policyholders, are already stored in a large facility in Arizona, far from the earthquake risks of California.
"I stand against (...) the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual," Thiel wrote in "The Education of a Libertarian," a piece in which, in 2009, he laid out his political philosophy. As if it were possible to decide that dying is something that only happens to other people. A few years later, he said he was taking growth hormone pills in the hope of living to 120. He has even explored parabiosis, a rejuvenation technique involving transfusions of blood from the young.
Thiel's quest to outrun death has been a lifelong obsession. His venture capital firm, Founders Fund, launched in 2005, invested early in Halcyon Molecular, a startup that aimed to combat aging through genomic sequencing. The company went bankrupt in 2012, but Thiel kept going. He also funded the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, both led by the controversial scientist Aubrey de Grey, who has said he is "quite sure" humanity will one day achieve indefinite lifespans.
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