No, Newsweek, that’s not what Silicon Valley billionaires are seeking. They’re seeking indefinite lifespan. Immortality, if achievable, could/would be a curse. People just want to live as long as they want to live.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, read it all the way through. The last graf shows a huge failure of imagination:
Perhaps the most worrying question that arises with the prospect of having millions (and even billions) of multi-centenarians running around on Earth is whether the planet can support this kind of growth. Current projections suggest that the world’s population will rise from 7 billion today to about 9 billion in 2050—at which point it will more or less level out. And abundant concerns have already been raised about what all these billions of people will do for work, not to mention where they will get safe drinking water and the food necessary to live healthily. But those forecasts don’t consider the possibility that we’ll stop dying. If we do, the next generation of innovative health-tech entrepreneurs will face perhaps an even greater challenge: redesigning the planet to accommodate its massive population of Humans 2.0.
Planet? Where we’re going, we don’t need “planets.”
The article ignores that as mortality goes down typically birth rates go down as well. I don’t think immortality is a good idea for several reasons. I also expect that these people who are seeking immortality will just get the same thing Shi Huangdi got over 2000 years ago. Death.
Planets? We don’t need no stinkin’ planets!