Elon Musk, chief executive officer for Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), speaks during the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2016. Musk's vision for building a self-sustaining city on Mars will require full rocket reusability, refuelling the spacecraft in orbit and propellant production on the Red Planet. Photographer: Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg via Getty Images [/caption]
by Bryn Haworth*
There is something reassuringly level about the voice of Elon Musk. Level and oddly free of geographical traces, as if he might be from anywhere in the English-speaking world, or nowhere. This is no accident. The hugely successful entrepreneur was born in South Africa. At the tender age of seventeen he moved to Ontario to study. Then, after a year he moved again, this time to the University of Pennsylvania where he studied physics and economics. Finally, he arrived at Stanford University and did a doctorate in applied physics. He’s been in California ever since.
Maybe it is the academic demeanour he acquired in these places that makes his tone so level. Or perhaps it is the absence of any traces of locality, as if the various accents belonging to these regions of the Anglosphere have cancelled each other out to create a kind of bland compromise.
Whatever the reason, the tone is deceptive, because Elon Musk is not bland, nor is he in any conventional way level-headed. Having made his fortune our of the Internet, Musk speaks with the natural authority of the self-made man as he tells you there is a strong chance this planet we inhabit may be a simulation. He does not sound crazy at all as he calmly explains how he intends to set up a colony on Mars and usher in the age of ‘spacefaring’ by the year 2040. Initially, the human population of the red planet will number 80,000 he says, as if it were an unremarkable fact, and they will have to travel around in electric vehicles not unlike the ones he is pioneering here on earth.
In the age of the geek, should we still be suspicious when we are told such things are possible? In June, Musk admitted mixing zolpidem and alcohol: "A little red wine, vintage record, some Ambien ... and magic!" he tweeted. Ambien is the brand name of the sedative which, when added to red wine, could have deleterious effects on one’s health. Is it possible that Musk’s heady talk is just a twenty first century version of California dreamin’… have the geeks turned on, tuned in and dropped out like drug-addled hippies?
The answer is surely no. It would be churlish to suggest that the man who founded PayPal is an idealistic junkie. One of the effects of Silicon Valley’s success is that money doesn’t just talk there, it wins people over. Musk, who is worried about the environment, has gone on to design electric cars (Tesla Inc.). His clumsily named Boring Company has plans to build a high-speed transportation system under Los Angeles, incorporating reduced-pressure tubes in which capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors. He has, through his company SpaceX, begun designing the technology for sending people to Mars. Surely, if that alien world is in anyone’s reach, it’s in his. Musk has even declared he wants to die there – just not on impact. If this is dreaming, it is definitely of the lucid variety.
THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE
The geeks have inherited the earth. Those Luddites amongst us are only a temporary aberration.
One can learn to live with this thought. So accustomed have we Luddites become to the improbabilities of living in the future, nothing can surprise us anymore. It may be that people like Elon Musk seem a little wacky at first, but we quickly adapt. When you enter a foreign country – and the Future is certainly foreign – you expect them to do things differently there. You expect strange utterances and peculiar mannerisms. You expect to feel as if you’ve entered some kind of parallel universe where the rules are all different and where people form lines instead of queues, or normality is replaced by normalcy. It is only necessary to accept the new normal. It’s about you, after all, this strangeness. It’s certainly not about the visionaries who have seen the way things will be, once the machine has saved humanity. So you bow your head and keep your Luddite thoughts to yourself and try, as best you can, to merge with the machine.
THE RICH WILL ALWAYS BE WITH US
Compared to the dreams of some of his fellow Californian residents, his co-creators of the future, Elon Musk’s sedated dreams are positively modest. He wants to die on the surface of an alien planet? I ask you, how quaint is that? Mars is so last century, and as for dying, these days in California the mere idea of death is considered unbelievably retro. It would be as comical as the Grim Reaper himself if it wasn’t so contemptibly defeatist. In today’s Silicon Valley people are beginning to lose patience with the idea of dying altogether. They are dreamin’ of immortality.
Take Peter Thiel, the man who helped Musk introduce the world to the wonders of PayPal and whose net worth is reported to be $2.2 billion. His politics are libertarian and distinct from his old colleague’s in many ways. He has thrown money and support behind the political campaigns of the Republican John McCain and the Libertarian Ron Paul and he sits on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group – the elite band of the rich and powerful from politics, industry and business. Above all, he is a man with a utopian belief that technology can change the world. He is convinced that America has lost its confidence and that its optimism drained away in the summer of love, around the time of Woodstock. Thiel is definitely not a drug-addled hippie.
He is also not embarrassed to go on record as being angry about those who are resigned to death. In an interview with Mick Brown of the Daily Telegraph, Thiel explained that the ‘life extension project’ is as old as science itself.
“It was probably even more important than alchemy. Finding élan vital, the water of life, was of greater interest than finding something that could transmute everything into gold. And I do think people would prefer immortality to lots of gold. On a fundamental level, the question is whether ageing can be reversed or not. Many biological processes appear to be irreversible, but computational processes are reversible. If it is possible to understand biological systems in informational terms, could we then reverse these biological processes, including the process of ageing? I do think that the genomics revolution promises a much greater understanding of biological systems and opens the possibility of modifying these seemingly inevitable trajectories in far more ways than we can currently imagine.”
Mick Brown then asked him if he thought immortality was possible.
“Well, ‘immortal’ is a long time. There are many arguments against life extension, and they all strike me as extraordinarily bad: it’s not natural; there will be too many people; you will be bored. But I don’t think it would be boring at all.” He paused. “People always say you should live your life as if it were your last day. I think you should live your life as though it will go on for ever; that every day is so good that you don’t want it to end.”
[caption id="attachment_55254519" align="aligncenter" width="900"]
KrioRus is a company that specialises in cryonics for animals and humans . The photo shows a container with cryopreserved bodies in liquid nitrogen and Valeria Oudalova the director and her assistant Danila Medvedev on May 23, 2016. (Photo by Vlada Krassilnikova/Paris Match Via Getty Image)[/caption]
A NEW RELIGION?
It is a curious fact that Thiel is a Christian and, one would presume, living in the hope of salvation in the afterlife. However, for Calvinists like his parents, membership of the elect was always something of a lottery, and having so much success in this life tends to make one nervous about the life to come. For today’s Californian Calvinist, the chance of post-mortem redemption is simply not enough.
So Thiel has arranged to be frozen after his death. He sees this as a gesture mainly and believes the real hope is that the power of computers can be brought increasingly to bear on biology. As he told Mark O’Connell, the author of To Be a Machine, computers will permit us to “reverse all human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer program … Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.”
This kind of thinking is known as ‘transhumanism’. Its Silicon Valley followers often employ software metaphors and dismissively refer to human bodies as mere “meat”, with the brain as “wetware”. Transhumanism is well on the way to becoming a new kind of religion, one that eschews salvation and a deity altogether in preference for the fabrication of gods from the raw material of ourselves. In comparison with these visionaries, Nietzsche was so pedestrian.
Everyone has heard of very rich people who went mad, from Howard Hughes living in isolation and growing his fingernails, to Michael Jackson turning an ever whiter shade of pale and dangling his children from a balcony. These are the tabloid traits of extreme wealth. They are a meagre consolation to the rest of us, proving, somehow, that great affluence is a poisoned chalice. The rich are separated from the reality of their surroundings. The rich are insulated from real life. They cannot be happy. And besides, when Donald Trump visits Mar-a-Lago and claims it’s the nearest he will ever get to paradise, he’s probably right, given the notorious difficulty of threading camels through the eyes of needles.
But with the craze for “transhumanism” among a select group of people made rich by their grasp of modern technology, the madness has gone far beyond fingernails and skin tints, and paradise is not confined to some opulent, over-priced club in Florida. Today’s rich people are not superannuated real estate developers whose money was inherited from their dad. They are practical wealth creators and they are outwardly sane. In truth, they are ‘radical optimists.’ Their insanity is not skin deep at all; it resides deep in a psyche that thinks the unthinkable and makes it happen.
Imagine a world where the majority of people are born and die, often in a very quick succession, while the very rare members of the elite never die. They might have bodies that the most sophisticated medical knowledge money can buy keeps from dying, constantly replacing the parts that fail until, like Cuban cars, their entire body is made up of spare parts, yet looks and moves exactly like the original Chevrolet.
Or else they could be getting around in robotic extensions, living in several places at once, immortals with powers such as the ancient Greeks dreamed of, above the rest of us somewhere, perpetually amused, or else so far removed from us mere mortals that they no longer even find us entertaining.
Salvation will come from the reservoir of human knowledge. The American futurist Ray Kurzweil, Google’s head of engineering, proposes not resurrecting the body, but shedding it altogether and uploading our minds into cyberspace. In The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, he suggests that an explosive acceleration in the growth of scientific knowledge is under way, which will enable people to migrate into a virtual world of their own creation. According to Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, the eternal future is already here. We can start preparing for immortality through a programme of vitamin supplements, diet, exercise and preventive medical care, which will enhance longevity until it becomes possible for us to leave the flesh behind.
The gospel tells us that the poor are always with us, but maybe that is in need of amendment. If the rich get their way, it is they who will always be with us. In the early years of the twenty first century it seems more predictable than ever that poverty will continue to grow and that rampant inequality will widen the gap between the rich and the poor countries, but our modern billionaires are no longer content simply to retreat into fortified villas, travel in limousines and outlive their poorer counterparts by a few decades. Increasingly fanciful in their ambitions, nowadays they have their eyes on the prize of immortality. They will always be with us.
THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH
Or will they? While it’s certain the rich will continue to exist longer than entire civilisations have lasted, their lifetimes measured in hundreds, possibly thousands of years, at the same time they will not necessarily inhabit the same planet as us. We can predict this more confidently than any of their other pipe dreams, because the conditions are already in place. What mere mortal who compared their life with that of, say, “Javanka” (the glamorous power couple currently residing in the White House) would think they inhabit the same planet? Such people would never dream of being invited to attend the annual meeting of the Bilderberg Foundation. They probably haven’t even heard of it, regardless of the possible effects it might have on their lives. To all intents and purposes, the rich are already living on another planet.
However, they are obviously not living long enough, and this particular planet – largely as a result of their drive to exhaust its resources – is frankly not the paradise it once was. You can only sail around it in a cruise ship, avoiding the crowds and the natural disasters, for so long before you get caught in a storm and forced to dock in a port. It is high time the rich decamped altogether and started exploiting the rest of the solar system.
It seems so obvious when you think about it. You can see why some very successful people see death and being earthbound as appalling admissions of failure. But perhaps I should end with the wet blanket words of an English philosopher, John Gray, who has exercised a good deal of his considerable wetware on transhumanism and its dreams of eternal life.
In his book The Immortalisation Commission, Gray says ‘Freezing our bodies or uploading our minds into a supercomputer will not deliver us from ourselves. Wars and revolutions will disturb our frozen remains, while death will stalk us in cyberspace – also a realm of mortal conflict. Science enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.’
But then, whoever said the world’s elite were human?
*Bryn Haworth is an English writer living in Kent. He has previously worked in many diverse fields, including as an academic in Prague, where he set up an MA programme in literature at Charles University. He has also lived in Greece, Ecuador and Saudi Arabia, and has recently started work on a comic novel
