The Immortality Bus is a brown, 40-year-old Blue Bird Wanderlodge with a top speed of 55 mph that we rarely reach. Everything inside is some shade or other of brown: brown faux-wood-panelled walls, brown carpet, brown ceiling, brown curtains, brown trim, brown print patterned lounges, and brown single beds. Liquor bottles litter the brown table tops. King Hussein of Jordan and Johnny Cash once toured in Blue Birds. Every time the Immortality Bus starts up successfully we cheer, especially Zoltan who says brightly though seriously, “I hope it starts!” whenever he turns the key in the ignition.

“In a car you’d be fine, probably. In this thing you’d be dead.”

The AC is down, and once we hit the freeway out of San Diego on Monday morning, the Wanderlodge fast becomes a sweat lodge. Zoltan, his two party volunteers, and I then spend a disconcerting amount of time talking about all the ways the bus could kill us: the brakes could give out, a tire could blow. The coffin mod has messed with the aerodynamics of the bus, and freeway winds could easily blow us off course. Zoltan points out that the low cement walls of overpasses and bridges would do nothing for us if we ran into them, “In a car you’d be fine, probably. In this thing you’d be dead.” Then there’s the scalding hot engine oil spitting up and coating one whole side of the bus. “Alexey! Close that window,” Zoltan shouts over the thundering engine, meaning the window next to my head. “I don’t want her getting hot oil in the face.”

Zoltan’s traveling companions are Alexey, a somewhat anxious but enthused cohort who has come all the way from Moscow, and Roen, a local party volunteer who offered his services as a videographer in exchange for riding along. There’s also the party mascot, Jethro, a robot programmed with more than 1,000 unique commands, none of which include driving, so he sometimes rides shotgun.

Left to right: Roen, Zoltan, Jethro, Alexey. Existential risk diagrams line the bus’s walls.

Alexey is stocky and in his 40s and balding a little. His wire-framed glasses give him the look of a slightly frazzled faculty member, which is essentially what he is: Alexey works for a Russian existential risk think tank and spends a lot of time thinking about all the ways the world could end.

Despite signing on as the videographer, Roen, 28, has never previously used a video camera. Nor does he own a mobile phone, or a credit card. He lives in his parents’ basement, where he sleeps on the floor. He comes from a family of hippies who eschew most material possessions and so he doesn’t have a job, either. For him, the bus is a luxurious comfort, and he happily spends nights sleeping in the sauna-like space while the rest of us opt for mercifully air-conditioned motels.

“We must know death so that we can avoid it.”

Roen is very tall and thin and pale, ethereal in appearance with long black hair and a soft and friendly way of speaking in a California drawl. He subsists almost exclusively on boiled vegetables and is fond of quietly intoning koans like, “We must know death so that we can avoid it.”

On my flight to meet Zoltan I caught a flu so debilitating it has me wishing for a quick death. I take as much DayQuil as I can ingest and migrate to the back of the bus to try and sleep on one of the beds, at the foot of which hangs a poster advising me on how I can live to 150 (Tip number 4: Sleep and Rest).

As I pass in and out of consciousness, lulled by the gentle rhythm of our very slow ride with the dusty desert passing by the window, Alexey commandeers the stereo with his idea of the ultimate road trip soundtrack: Alphaville’s “Forever Young.”

Alexey keeps up with his contacts back in Russia.

By late Monday afternoon, Zoltan has successfully brought us all the way to Yuma, Arizona, and to celebrate he wants to stay at a casino because two things he greatly enjoys, he says, are gambling and drinking. We park the bus in the vast, windy parking lot, where it stands conspicuously alone in the RV section. We step outside feeling as though we’ve opened a door to a blast furnace and drag our luggage across the gravel towards the casino, the only building visible for miles.

Before we’ve even checked in, Zoltan loses three hands of blackjack, hitting on 17 twice in a row. “Oh well, I’ll come back later. When I can drink,” he shouts above the pinging whirligig sounds of slot machines, as we head up to our rooms. Roen gets comfortable in the foyer, where he will end up spending the whole night awake, uploading video for Zoltan over glacially slow Wi-Fi.

Next morning Alexey and I grab a quick breakfast. He tells me his boss at the think tank sank a chunk of money into Zoltan’s publicity-drumming Indiegogo campaign, which is what paid for getting the Immortality Bus on the road. In exchange, Alexey came to the US to join the tour.

Alexey tells me that his first brush with mortality came when he was in primary school in Russia. He was in love with a girl, and when he was about 12, she died. She was in Hungary at the time, and he never found out what happened to her, but years later, he found her grave. That’s when he became obsessed with being able to bring her back to life. That’s when he got into transhumanism.

Alexey’s mother was once co-director of a state-run gallery in Moscow and was very well regarded. When she died, she consented to Alexey’s wish: her brain was cryonically frozen. She didn’t believe in cryonics, but she knew it was important to him. Alexey is signed up for cryonics too; he wears a dog tag with instructions for the occasion of his death. Because of a rift with his step-mother, his father was cremated, much to Alexey’s upset. This means they will never be able to all be together again in the future.

Alexey’s dog tag instructs that his body be frozen upon his death.

As Yuma is right on the border, later in the day Roen, Zoltan, and I walk into Mexico to pick up some tacos and cheap booze while Alexey waits for us back on US soil.

The main street of the border town is lined with dental clinics, discount pharmacies, and liquor stores. People in medical scrubs hawk dental services, fillings for $40 each. Just about every other gringo we see is elderly — drawn, Zoltan says, by the cheap medications. Roen is very excited because he has never left America before and also because Mexico is home to the Day of the Dead, which holds a great fascination for him. “Memento mori, right? That’s so cool,” he says, eyebrows shooting up at the thought. Despite it being a Latin phrase, Roen asks the first person he sees if they know what it means. He is disappointed to learn its translation is “Remember that (you have to) die.”

Once we cross back over to the United States, Zoltan raids the casino’s convenience store for almost all the motor oil they have and then we’re off, rumbling and sputtering and kicking up dust.

It is an inescapable fact of the Earth that all its resources are finite: there will be a time when planes no longer fly unless an ever-renewable fuel source is discovered. There will be no more concrete buildings made of construction sand. We only have so much arable land on which to grow our food. There is no future in which our growing population can enjoy our current rates of consumption forever; we will one day come up against our planet’s limits.

We will one day come up against our planet’s limits

Many transhumanists who advocate for physical immortality, like Zoltan, are always careful to stress that eternal life would be available to everyone. It wouldn’t be the purview of a tiny, wealthy elite, but a medical enhancement available commonly and cheaply. If we take these transhumanist predictions of the Singularity at their word, and it comes to pass by the middle of this century with physical immortality shortly to follow, it would raise an extraordinary set of problems: how will so many immortal people, and their immortal offspring, compete for the planet’s limited resources without wreaking total havoc?

In October 2014, the Pentagon presented a report detailing the many ways in which climate change will pose an increasingly significant global security threat: escalating military tensions over rising disease outbreaks, food and water shortages, and growing numbers of displaced persons whose lands will no longer be liveable.

Temperatures in the Persian Gulf are set to rise to 35 degrees Celsius by 2100, making parts of that area periodically uninhabitable. Well before then, in the next 10 years, desertification could uproot as many as 50 million of the world’s poorest people, and pose an enormous challenge to the sustainability of drinking water reserves. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposed that climate change, in the form of severe drought, forcibly displaced Syria’s farming population and became a contributing factor in that country’s civil war.

Some prominent transhumanists believe that these are not the kinds of existential risks we should be concerned with. , one of the philosophers most closely associated with transhumanism today, founder of the Future of Humanity Institute and advisor to the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, says that climate change is a “very, very small existential risk.” Bostrom says climate predictions only mean that conditions in some parts of the world will be “a bit more unfavorable.”

Bostrom argues that the most pressing threat to the future of human life is an out of control artificial intelligence that could destroy us. To illustrate his point, Bostrom sometimes invokes what’s come to be called the “paperclip maximizer” thought experiment; a hyper-intelligent, sentient, and infinitely powerful machine is tasked with making as many paperclips as it can. What’s to stop it from turning all matter in the universe into paperclips, destroying everything in its wake?

Bostrom says that ensuring AI will be friendly towards future human beings is a moral imperative, “an enormous good that will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria” today. For people so concerned about living to see the future, many transhumanists are profoundly ambivalent about the present.

“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” Eliezer Yudkowsky

In 1972, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, a report produced by MIT that laid out multiple scenarios for population increase and the future management of the world’s available resources. The report’s models indicated that barring major changes to consumption levels and emissions, global collapse would be a likely economic and environmental outcome beginning in the mid-21st century. A 2008 update to the original report found its “business as usual” scenario, in which no resource management changes were made, to have tracked fairly closely to real-world data.

The first comprehensive report of its kind to suggest that unlimited post-industrial economic growth was undesirable for sustainability, The Limits to Growth received significant pushback, particularly from free market economists. But it would come to influence two major strains of transhumanist thought, both of which are active areas of research and development today: molecular nanotechnology and outer space mineral mining.

Physicist and engineer K. Eric Drexler, while still a student at MIT, offered a two-fold solution to Earth’s resource strain: mining in space and developing atomic scale, self-replicating machines that could mechanically position reactive molecules in order to make everything from anything. This was laid out in Drexler’s book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, and its microscopic robots soon became an excitable point of transhumanist discussion.

Intelligent nanomachines are nowhere near close to becoming a reality

Nanotechnology is today the focus of billions of dollars worth of research investment. So far, its payoff as salve for our resource crunch has been scant: nanotech developments in energy production have been rebuked by some, and so far its carbon manufacturing processes are some of the most energy intensive in existence. Drexler’s intelligent nanomachines (“assemblers”) are nowhere near close to becoming a reality, if they are physically possible at all. Nonetheless, believes Drexler’s nano assemblers will be here within the next five to 10 years.

As for space mineral mining, no human has set foot on a foreign celestial body since 1972, the year The Limits to Growth was published. Successfully launching the Rosetta mission, which put a lander on a comet for the first time last year, cost more than $1.4 billion euros. Any program to bring back essential resources to Earth from a comet or asteroid would pose a significant question of cost vs. benefit. In spite of the enormous engineering challenges, private space initiatives like these remain a well-funded pet project in Silicon Valley.

Between 1950 and 2050, the global population will have quadrupled. By 2100 — total annihilation at the hands of malevolent AI notwithstanding — there will be 11 billion of us, all vying for whatever is left of the world’s resources. Everything we now know about the carrying capacity of the planet indicates that we will have to make drastic changes to our consumption habits well before then in order to avoid disaster. But transhumanism’s visions of human immortality largely disregard this, promising a world in which there will only ever be more of us — never less.