Silicon Valley executives are quietly betting real money against death

Bill Maris, who runs Google Ventures, gave an interview in January 2015 and was asked whether it's possible to live to be 500. His answer: yes. He backed the claim with roughly $2 billion, thirty-six percent of it going into life sciences start-ups aimed at extending life. In football terms, he said, 'We aren't trying to gain a few yards. We are trying to win the game.' Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and worth billions, put it even more starkly: when it comes to death, he said, most of society either accepts it or denies it, and he prefers to fight it. Google's own sub-company, Calico, states its mission plainly: to solve death.

Yuval Noah Harari uses these real figures to make a larger point. For most of history, death was treated as a metaphysical event, decreed by God, woven into the meaning of existence. Modern science instead treats it as a technical glitch: the heart stops because oxygen doesn't reach the muscle, cancer spreads because a mutation rewrote some cellular instructions. And every technical problem, in principle, has a technical solution. No doctor tells a patient 'you have death.' They say 'you have cancer,' or 'you have tuberculosis,' and both of those are framed as problems science might eventually solve.

Harari argues this logic has no natural stopping point. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't grant a right to life until ninety; it grants a right to life, full stop. Combine that ideological commitment with a scientific establishment that thrives on new challenges and a capitalist economy that needs an essentially infinite market, and the war against death becomes almost inevitable as a project, whether or not it succeeds.

Harari's own view is more cautious than Maris's or Thiel's. Medicine, he points out, hasn't yet added a single year to the natural human lifespan; Galileo lived to seventy-seven, Newton to eighty-four, Michelangelo to eighty-eight, all without antibiotics. Its real achievement has been preventing premature death, not extending the ceiling. Doubling life expectancy again, to 150, would still upend marriage, careers and even politics, since people like Stalin or Mao would, on that arithmetic, still be alive and in charge. Whether or not the timeline holds, the direction of effort, he argues, is now set.

Take a moment and write down the number of years you unconsciously assume you have left, then look honestly at how much that figure is steering your choices about work, money, and timing. Where you can, act on the realistic version of this fight, the checkups, the sleep, the movement, the things medicine actually delivers, rather than betting your present wellbeing on a cure that may or may not arrive in time. Then run the thought experiment seriously: if you somehow had 150 years instead of eighty, what would you actually want to be doing, and with whom. Let that answer nudge at least one decision you're sitting on right now, a career switch, a conversation you've been avoiding, a plan you keep calling premature.