Since ancient times, human beings have had an instinctive resistance to aging.
The Chinese emperors who pursued immortality in successive dynasties were incessant. Qin Shi Huang sent Xu Fu to the sea to find the immortal Medicine on Penglai Island; Emperor Tang Taizong took “immortal pills” and practiced the method of prolonging Life; Emperor Yongzheng plunged into the Yuanmingyuan in his later years and secretly made pills…
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Although a variety of youthful-looking magic tricks and magic pills to delay aging and postpone death are always emerging, but almost without exception, the emperors have ended up in a “quick death”.
Since the rich have traded money for immortality since ancient times, when Time travels back to modern times, the dream of immortality is being perpetuated by the Silicon Valley bigwigs who are leading the way in technology.
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But what possibilities will these new age “immortality seekers” bring to mankind when the former “alchemy of immortality” is put on the mask of science?
Full Body for Blood: Facing Death, Fighting to the End
In the fourth season of the HBO series “Silicon Valley”, the egotistical billionaire Gavin Belson, in order to maintain his own health, viciously and perversely raised a young boy, regularly extracted blood from him, and then fed into his own body.
The “bloodthirsty” tycoon believes that young, fresh blood is the endless power of life.
Gavin Belson in “Silicon Valley” is exchanging blood with a young man Photo credit: Silicon Valley
Although it sounds a bit creepy, the character from the TV show really exists in the reality of Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel, a famous Silicon Valley investor, author of the best-selling book “0 to 1” and co-founder of Paypal.
In the circle, a widely circulated gossip is that he injected young people’s blood into his body in order to achieve immortality. The story of Peter Thiel’s obsession with “immortality” has long been known in Silicon Valley circles.
Peter Thiel image source: fortune.com
Back in 2006, Thiel began investing in research to extend human lifespan.
Using his philanthropic Thiel Foundation, he has spent $7 billion investing in nearly 24 startups, and most of them are in the biotech field researching anti-aging drugs. One of these companies, Unity, has also announced that it will eliminate 1/3 of human diseases related to aging in the near future.
Not only has Thiel bet a lot of money on anti-aging organizations, but he himself has also been trying out various “miracle cures” for “immortality”.
Peter Thiel photo credit: Google
Thiel once said he wanted to live to 120 years old, in order to this goal, he insisted on taking hormones every day, and even scheduled a “body freezing plan”, that is, their own bodies in ultra-low temperature (-196 degrees Celsius) environment frozen, dreaming of the future through advanced medical technology, will be thawed after the resurrection and treatment.
In recent years, the injection of young blood into the body is one of Till’s latest attempts.
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To this end, Till invested in this Silicon Valley startup called Ambrosia to carry out this “blood exchange” experimental project.
The experiment is simple: “recipients” over 35 years old can receive blood transfusions from “donors” under 25 years old for $8,000, and then the researchers observe the recipients’ health and aging indicators over the next two years. changes in the recipients’ health and aging indicators over the next two years.
Currently, recipients of this blood transfusion therapy range in age from 35 to more than 80 years old, and Till is one of them.
Photo credit: The Guardian
The conclusion that young blood improves physical aging comes largely from research published by Stanford University in 2014. A team removed some blood from mice, removed the blood cells, and then injected the remaining plasma back into the mice’s bodies.
While the study was very limited, the results were impressive. In several different tests, the mice that received the young blood behaved like young mice. The findings, published in Nature, are entitled “Young blood reverses age-relatedimpairments in cognitive function and synaptic plasticity in mice. function and synaptic plasticity inmice.
Image credit: Multiple Sclerosis Research
In fact, there was a pioneer who tried the “blood reversal” experiment long before Thiel. In the 1920s, the philosopher and physician Alexander Bogdanov claimed that he could increase his energy and improve his eyesight by injecting young blood, and conducted experiments on himself.
However, just a few years later came the news of Bogdanov’s death. Scientists said: there is every reason to believe that he died due to blood type mismatch or from blood transmission of malaria and tuberculosis.
Although there are many scientists criticized that the application of research results from rats to humans in such a way is simply the result of being brainwashed by vampire stories. But Till apparently relishes the idea, with one outlet called Gawker writing, “Peter Till spends $40,000 every quarter to get fresh blood from an 18-year-old.” This earned him the nickname “vampire”.
Media coverage of Till’s blood-buying story Photo credit: the register
In November 2018, Till had to come out and respond at the New York Times’ annual forum, “I’m not a vampire!” But no matter how much he tossed it around, his attitude toward death remained the same from start to finish.
“When faced with death, you usually have three approaches: either accept it, deny it, or fight it. Most people in society choose to accept it, or deny it, but I choose to fight it to the end.”
Getting high, injecting: mysterious biohacking techniques
While Till has opted for the slightly creepy “blood exchange” therapy to fight death, some other bigwigs are considering biohacking.
The so-called “biohacking technology” refers to the strengthening of human physiology through dietary regulation, human implants, and chemical ingestion. Don’t think this term sounds strange and distant, recall the “Marvel” series of Captain America and the Hulk, they are actually the product of this technology transformation.
Image source: screenrant.com
As scientists become more microscopic in their understanding of the human body, down to the subtle level of genes, the mechanisms of aging are being uncovered little by little, and humans are thus beginning to discover potential tools to fight aging, investing large amounts of energy in the fields of drugs, gene editing, and regenerative medicine.
In September 2017, SergeFaguet, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur, published an online article titled “I’m 32 years old and have spent over $200,000 on biohacking technology. I’ve become more sedate, outgoing, healthy and happy.” In the article, Fagett emphasizes that he is smarter than ever before, while becoming more proactive in terms of gender and more comfortable with hitting on women.
These two changes alone attracted the attention of hundreds of thousands of readers, mostly men, and Faguet’s subsequent sequel became one of the most-read articles on the Internet that year.
Serge Faguet photo credit: Google
Born in 1986, Faguet studied at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business before dropping out and starting his own business as the founder of Mirror AI.
In life, Faguet is a very practical person, and he brings this practical spirit to his only hobby, biohacking.
In Fargate’s room, there was a large bag of pills and tablets packed in separate categories, some were nutritional supplements, such as garlic capsules, and some were prescription drugs, such as SSRI antidepressants, lithium salts (generally used to relieve dryness), estrogen receptor blockers, etc.
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Every day, he would swallow 60 of these various pills, even including a number of prohibited drugs, and inject himself with a synthetic human growth hormone (somatropin), used to promote muscle growth.
In order to improve efficiency, Fagait will give himself a small injection of LSD, and said his intelligence has been in a large dose of LSD (900-1000mcg) after a permanent boost. In addition, Fagait will also use ecstasy when dealing with some emotional matters.
It can be said that Fagait is an uncompromising drug jar.
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Although Fargate is extremely crazy in the matter of drug use, but compared with the next Silicon Valley big shot to appear, Fargate is still lucky.
Like Fargate, Aaron Traywick, CEO from Essendons Biomedical, is also extremely obsessed with biohacking technology.
At the Biohacking Conference (BDYHAX) in February 2018, the heavyweight calmly stuck a needle containing 20 milligrams of pharmaceuticals, into his thigh in front of a crowd.
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The agent that was injected into his body, which has neither undergone any clinical testing nor been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is a herpes treatment gene developed by Trevek itself.
As a weblebrity in the biohacking world, Trevik is always happy to promote various biohacking technologies, and his bold performance at this event won the audience’s warm applause and cheers.
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Only, just two months after the conference, Trevick was found drowned in a Washington, D.C. spa with many bottles and cans floating next to his body.
The coroner found through an autopsy that his body contained ketamine, a drug that causes a neurotoxic reaction in which a person’s consciousness and senses are temporarily separated, which became the main reason for his drowning.
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Human-machine integration, digital immortality
In addition to the method of physical immortality pursued by Fagat and Till, there is another school of thought represented by Elon Musk, the “Iron Man” of Silicon Valley, who is also eager to take the plunge.
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What Musk wants is to change humanity itself through AI.
He believes that “we can either be eliminated by machines or explore new ways to achieve symbiosis and integration with AI, there is no other way.” Ray Kurzweil, chief futurist at Google, who predicted that humans will achieve immortality in 2045, has described this vision of digital immortality on nine levels.
To this end, if the human brain is connected to a computer through technologies such as human-computer interaction or brain-computer interface, human consciousness can be uploaded to the computer side, which can enhance human cognitive ability in the short term and achieve a kind of digital immortality in the long term. As for human limbs, they will probably eventually merge with machinery and the cloud, or even be completely replaced by the latter.
There is a similar technology in the movie “Attack the Block” Photo credit: Google
Imagine if humans could save their memories, thoughts, feelings and all other intracerebral consciousness in the cloud, wouldn’t we be able to achieve eternal survival in a broader sense of space? If coupled with the maturity of 3D printing technology, wouldn’t it be completely out of the question to replicate a body?
For this reason, after electric cars, space rockets and super high speed trains, Musk quietly founded Neuralink, a medical research company in San Francisco in July 2016 to develop “neural net technology”.
To achieve this goal, in short, Neuralink is trying to fuse the human brain with a computer. In this way, even if your physical body dies, you can upload your consciousness to a new vehicle and live forever.
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Since its inception, Neuralink has kept an extremely low profile, and there is very little public information available. But according to SEC filings, Musk’s brain-machine interface company Neuralink has raised $26.96 million, and this dream of making humans into AI is moving from Science Fiction to reality through investors.
Some inside sources speculate that Neuralink is already in the product development phase, with extensive hiring underway, and that the first product will treat conditions such as epilepsy and major depression through implanted electrodes.
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It’s no coincidence that Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov founded a project called Russia 2045 in 2011, which also invests in research in fields including artificial intelligence, neurology and artificial organs to create a human “immortality”.
This plan is divided into four steps: the first stage, by 2020, to achieve the remote control of the human brain to the robot “avatar”; the second stage, by 2025, to transplant the human brain into the robot; the third stage, by 2035, to solve the mystery of the human brain, to create ” artificial brain”; the fourth stage, by 2045, to create a real version of the holographic “virtual human”.
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Itzkoff believes.
The ultimate goal of this plan is to make humans immortal, if a person has his own high-tech perfect “avatar”, then after his death, his high-tech “avatar” will continue to live in society.
At that time, everyone will say goodbye to “death” forever and achieve “immortality”.
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