Tech folks are a little antsy about the whole death thing. They're putting money behind DNA 'hacking,' organ printing and tiny robots that might kill what ails you

Silicon Valley has a bit of a fetish with living forever. From PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel to Google’s Sergey Brin, a who’s who of billionaires are now pouring millions into longevity research. Thiel, for one, has claimed that his intense personal hatred of death makes him “unusual.”

Below, the leading ways the tech sector intends to stave off the reaper.

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Tiny robots to destroy disease (possibly with lasers)

If the average tech billionaire can avoid being decapitated by their self-driving car, they’re most likely going to be killed by cancer or heart disease. That’s why Silicon Valley futurists are proposing to upgrade the human immune system with tiny bloodborne robots programmed to destroy cancer, retroviruses and all the other invaders that white blood cells are bad at killing.

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“By the 2020s we’ll start using nanobots to complete the job of the immune system,” Raymond Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google, told Playboy in 2016 . If anybody’s going to see their 150th birthday, Kurzweil is very insistent that it’s going to be him. Despite being 69, Kurzweil claims that his specialized $1 million-a-year diet has lowered his “biological age” to somewhere in the mid-40s.

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Reprogramming human DNA

DNA is nothing but code, right? So what’s to stop some committed programmers from simply “hacking” the death out of our genetics? This question appears to be taking up the lion’s share of Silicon Valley’s immortality money. Google-backed Calico Labs has a mission to tackle all the aging diseases that usually start to kick in after retirement: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, macular degeneration and the like. Their work is notoriously secretive, but part of it seems to involve cracking the genetic code of extremely long-lasting creatures. A Greenland shark, for instance, can make it to 400 years old, while its cousin the tiger shark is lucky to see 50.

Photo by Washington Post photo by Michael Lutzky

Life extension pills

They’re called senolytics, a class of drugs designed to sweep the body’s senescent cells, cells that have ceased to divide and are suspected to be a key ingredient in aging. Unity Biotechnology has taken the lead in developing senolytics, and has been backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ venture funding firm. However, Unity They’re called senolytics, a class of drugs designed to sweep the body’s senescent cells, cells that have ceased to divide and are suspected to be a key ingredient in aging. Unity Biotechnology has taken the lead in developing senolytics, and has been backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ venture funding firm. However, Unity doesn’t like to frame themselves as an “anti-aging company.” So far, the technology might be able to soothe arthritic limbs and improve vision in nonagenerians, but they’re far from a unified theory to use senolytics to prevent death.

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The Six Million Dollar man option

The 1970s TV series The Six Million Dollar Man followed the adventures of a former astronaut who had his body rebuilt following an accident. Similarly, there is optimism that humans can reverse the aging process by simply replacing organs whenever they wear out. San Francisco’s Prellis Biologics thinks that they’ll be able to 3D print human organs by the year 2023. “Our vision is to create a company that uses technology to print any type of human organ,” CEO Melanie Matheu The 1970s TV series The Six Million Dollar Man followed the adventures of a former astronaut who had his body rebuilt following an accident. Similarly, there is optimism that humans can reverse the aging process by simply replacing organs whenever they wear out. San Francisco’s Prellis Biologics thinks that they’ll be able to 3D print human organs by the year 2023. “Our vision is to create a company that uses technology to print any type of human organ,” CEO Melanie Matheu said in September . The immediate plan is to sell the artificial organs to people on transplant waiting list. However, once medicine has a source for viable organs aside from donors, the door is open to a future in which we could upgrade our liver or lungs just as easily as swapping out a car’s transmission. Of course, it will likely cost much more than six million dollars.

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The blood of the young

It is likely an apocryphal story that the 16th century Hungarian serial killer Elizabeth Báthory attempted to gain perpetual youth by bathing in the blood of the young. But it is absolutely true that the It is likely an apocryphal story that the 16th century Hungarian serial killer Elizabeth Báthory attempted to gain perpetual youth by bathing in the blood of the young. But it is absolutely true that the San Francisco startup Ambrosia will inject clients with the blood of an under-25 youth for a fee of $8,000. This seems like an appropriate place to mention that Bill Gates that the tech industry’s “live forever” obsession has some questionable ethics. “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer,” he wrote in a 2015 Reddit post . Gates, of course, is using his fortune in an equally ambitious quest to abolish Third World diseases.

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Incredibly elaborate screening therapies

Medical science has long known the basics about living longer: Eat well, exercise regularly, don’t smoke, get a good night’s sleep and have an enriching social life. But of course, these folksy maxims are not enough for Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge supermen. The tech sector has been swept by a wave of enthusiasm for fad diets and other “biohacking” schemes to extend life. The startup Human Longevity Medical science has long known the basics about living longer: Eat well, exercise regularly, don’t smoke, get a good night’s sleep and have an enriching social life. But of course, these folksy maxims are not enough for Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge supermen. The tech sector has been swept by a wave of enthusiasm for fad diets and other “biohacking” schemes to extend life. The startup Human Longevity offers a $25,000 physical that includes full-body MRIs, personal genome sequencing and a battery of ultrasound and CT scans. The idea is to catch and treat disease before it can take root. In essence, it’s the exact opposite philosophy to how Silicon Valley demigod Steve Jobs fatally ignored medical treatment for his pancreatic cancer until it was too late.

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Photo by AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File

Upload your brain to a computer

It’s called whole brain emulation; the process of transforming a person’s entire consciousness into a digital file that can be preserved for eternity on manmade hard drives. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has started a company called Neuralink which is developing an artificial “neural lace” that would add extra computing power to our biological brains. And if Musk is going to make us part-cyborg in future, presumably it’s not much more of a technical leap to go full cyborg. However, Musk founded Neuralink mainly to protect humanity from a robot uprising. Without our brains getting a digital boost, “we would be like a housecat” in a future of superintelligent computers, the billionaire told a 2016 panel. Digitized consciousness also raises some bone chilling questions about privacy. Internet pirates getting ahold of The Eagle’s Greatest Hits is one thing, but it would be quite another for them to get ahold of Don Henley’s digitized soul.

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If all else fails, just freeze yourself

Pioneered in the 1960s, cryonics is the idea of freezing one’s dead body on the expectation of being resurrected by future medical science. The tech startup Numerei even offers postmortem freezing as a benefit. “Employees sign up through a life insurance policy and upon legal death, the life insurance claim is handed over to cryonics provider Alcor,” company founder Richard Craib Pioneered in the 1960s, cryonics is the idea of freezing one’s dead body on the expectation of being resurrected by future medical science. The tech startup Numerei even offers postmortem freezing as a benefit. “Employees sign up through a life insurance policy and upon legal death, the life insurance claim is handed over to cryonics provider Alcor,” company founder Richard Craib told Digital Trends . It’s a gamble, though; the cryonics patient is essentially putting their fate in the hands of a benevolent future. If civilization is eventually shattered by Elon Musk’s feared robot uprising artificial, a thawed Peter Thiel or Mark Zuckerberg might find themselves facing an embittered humanity eager to exact revenge on all things tech.