Can Technology Help Us Outrun or Outsmart Death?And Should We?

I just came back from Egypt. And it made me think about the ultimate SpaceBetween: the one between life and death.

Ancient Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife. With bringing as many goods as possible into it. At first this was reserved for pharaohs. Later, the afterlife was democratized and “opened” to ordinary people too.

We seem to have entered a new era of that same obsession. Those in power are pouring resources into trying to outrun or outsmart death. Three categories of effort are underway.

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Efforts of Life Extension

 

While many of us try to biohack our way to better health and longer lives, Bryan Johnson is probably pushing this the furthest. Through an extreme and expensive regime, Johnson reports an epigenetic aging score of 0.48 and says his blood pressure is lower than that of 90% of 18-year-olds. He is 48.

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Jeff Bezos has backed Altos Labs, a cellular reprogramming company aimed at reversing aging at the biological level. Mission: "to restore cell health and resilience through cell rejuvenation to reverse disease, injury and the disabilities that can occur throughout life." No products or clinical results yet.

Sam Altman has put money into Retro Biosciences, working on similar rejuvenation science with the tagline: "We're Adding 10 Years to Healthy Human Lifespan." One therapy appears to have reached Phase 1 human trials.

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Peter Thiel has been one of the most prolific longevity investors for years, funding companies including Unity Biotechnology. Unity formally liquidated in 2025. A useful reminder that this science is still in its early days, regardless of how much money is behind it.

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Few of these treatments will be affordable in the short term. But I hope the pharaohs of our time, Bezos, Altman, Thiel, continue their work, so that the rest of society can eventually benefit. Just as the afterlife was eventually democratized in Egypt.

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One caveat I cannot ignore: I have not heard of women investing heavily in this space. That matters. Whoever invests steers which problems get worked on. As Dr. Stacy Sims puts it: women are not small men.

 

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Efforts of Life Preservation

 

Cryonics is the fallback plan if the science does not arrive in time. Companies like Alcor Life Extension Foundation preserve people in liquid nitrogen after legal death, either the entire body or, in the cheaper "neuropreservation" option, just the brain and head. The bet: future technology will be able to revive and cure them.

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The most speculative effort moves from preserving the body to preserving the mind digitally. Nectome, a Y Combinator startup, proposes a brain-preservation technique intended to keep neural connections intact well enough to someday be scanned and simulated digitally.

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Efforts of a Digital Afterlife

 

Companies like StoryFile record someone while they are alive, capturing hours of video interviews answering thousands of possible questions, so that afterward people can converse with a video avatar pulling up relevant pre-recorded answers. It is worth noting that most of these companies have shut down, reorganized, or pivoted. That alone should give us pause.

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The more controversial category is what some call deadbots or griefbots. People feed a chatbot old texts, emails, voicemails, and social media posts from someone who has already died, without that person ever having consented, to generate new conversations with them.

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This one scares me. What if I never consented and a digital version of me is created anyway? What if AI distorts my answers? What if loved ones hold on to a griefbot instead of going through the stages of grief? What if it is used to manipulate them?

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I have signed a directive that says: do not recreate me. I suggest everyone does the same. The harder question is who enforces it once I am gone.

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The Human Perspective

 

I was 17 when I saw the first person dying.

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I had just started my training as a nurse for dementia patients in a closed psychiatric ward. My colleague sat beside the old woman and said: "It's okay. Feel free to let go. I wish you a great journey."

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That moment changed me. I have used those same words every time I have sat with someone dying since.

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No matter how advanced the dementia, in my experience, there was almost always a clear moment before death. People seemed to wait. They waited to see loved ones. They seemed to wait for permission to go. And when family members desperately clung to their life, it felt as though it became harder for the person to die.

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I believe technology may extend life. Technology may even be able to preserve our bodies, our brains, our memories, our voices and our personalities beyond death. But I don't think it can ever preserve our soul.

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What matters, in my view, is not how long we lived. It is whether we felt alive while living, the impact we had on the people we loved, and the difference we made in the world.

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And once our time comes, we have to be willing to let go. We have to give ourselves permission to die.