By James Pethokoukis
To me the billionaire space race is an obvious good. The resulting decline in launch costs, for instance, is nudging dreams of a multi-trillion-dollar orbital economy and space-based solar power a bit closer to reality. Of course, people who loathe billionaires and despise capitalism have attempted to frame the investments by people such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk as evidence of indifference toward what happens to their home planet. Hey, why should they care if climate change ravages the Earth, they can always hop the next star shuttle to the Red Planet and start over, you know?
It’s absurd reasoning — space-based solar power and orbital manufacturing would actually be good for the Earth’s environment, by the way — but we’re likely to see a repeat as the super-rich invest in longevity technology. MIT Technology Review reports that Bezos is supposedly among the deep-pocket backers of Altos, a Silicon Valley startup “pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life.”
Again, if a group of results-oriented rich folks want to invest their dough in a high-risk, high-reward venture that could have amazing benefits for all of humanity — well that seems like another obvious good. But a Financial Times piece on Altos quotes science writer Rowan Hooper, who points out the obvious criticism from Silicon Valley skeptics: “In many ways this looks like more Silicon Valley hubris, and certainly the idea of billionaires living forever while the planet fries is not something that feels like a happy outcome.” But, he adds, “Altos is recruiting world-class scientists and funding research that will spill over for the rest of science and medicine, even if it doesn’t deliver an elixir of life any time soon.”
That seems like a significant addendum. And wouldn’t billionaires living longer and healthier — with the gains from breakthrough advances eventually helping everyone as they always do — make them more invested in having a healthy planet as well? Not everyone dreams of retiring on Mars.
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