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Those with money have always historically tried to live for as long as possible, but significant investments from certain billionaires might mean that 'life-extending pills' are just around the corner.
You've likely heard of 'biohacking' experts like Bryan Johnson who have employed intense de-ageing processes to try and fight death, but the efforts of certainly rich individuals extend far beyond an individuals efforts.
Some of the world's wealthiest - including names like Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel - have invested heavily in startups, charities, and research labs that aim to pursue biological reprogramming and extending the human life.
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One particular CEO has a rather different approach to this, sparking out against the efforts of a few and predicting that these pills, if they become available, will lead to a legion of "posh privileged zombies."
Phil Cleary, founder of the SmartWater Group predicted, as reported by the New York Post, that: "At the rate technology is evolving, it will only be a matter of time before life-extending drugs become freely available to those who can afford them."
With the push of AI technologies and significant advances in key scientific fields it's hard not to believe that this will be the case in some form, but you'd also be naive to think that these pills will be anything but prohibitively expensive.
Bezos, for example, has invested $3 billion dollars into scientific research startup Atlos Labs for this very purpose, and OpenAI's Altman has sent over $180 million himself to Retro BioScience for the same cause.
Not only will these significant investments help research into bioengineering get over the line, but you have to imagine that there wouldn't be this much money thrown at the cause if it wasn't a realistic possibility.
Cleary isn't exactly convinced by the morality of these approaches though, arguing towards the more 'selfish' and 'individualistic' tendencies of these billionaires:
"Silicon Valley's dogged pursuit of the fountain of youth is a fear-led, ego-driven folly that comes at a terrible humanitarian cost to the planet and to its most vulnerable inhabitants," Cleary explains.
"A pill that keeps people alive, even by a few decades, would create an unjust, inequitable world packed with posh privileged zombies - predominantly white, middle-class folk who could afford to buy the drugs in the first place."
This certainly isn't the first time that we've seen certain billionaires put their own priorities and actions ahead of the collective or the planet, so you could argue that this isn't exactly out of turn.
Instead, Cleary believes that the money and effort should turn to more pressing matters in the world: "Keeping children alive until at least their 18th birthday is unquestionably more important to humanity than extending the run of those privileged few who have already had the chance to see the world, to have children of their own, and to realize their own special ambitions."
It certainly does raise a convincing point, that why should a select few get to live longer when many in the world die before their time? With both money and power in their hands though, it'll be hard to stop progress from being made.
