Johnson’s bio on X, where he has 1.8 million followers, reads “conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement.” He is now best-known for his quest to defeat age and achieve immortality, which he has branded as Project Blueprint, and for the various tech initiatives and companies he has founded or financed to help others do the same. But his original fortune came from Braintree, an online payment company, which he founded and which later acquired Venmo; the combined product was sold to PayPal for $800 million in 2013. 

The immortality influencer has dark hair, marble-white flesh, and a neutral, Tom Cruise-ish affect. His physique reflects rigorous daily workouts; he seems to have created a body much younger than his 48 years. And his posts on X are intentionally, I think, provocative: he gained notoriety most recently by posting in praise of the health of his girlfriend’s “vaginal biome.” 

In a viral post this past month, however, Johnson announced that he is suffering from a rare autoimmune disorder, AIG (autoimmune atrophic gastritis), in which the stomach lining consumes itself. AIG isn’t a death sentence, but it is a bad sign for someone who doesn’t plan to die. On July 29, Johnson made headlines again, by posting on X: “been thinking things over and wonder if I’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far.” 

Before Johnson’s diagnosis, I had already begun to see him as a tragic hero in a classical sense: larger than life but also susceptible to the kind of tunnel vision the gods punish their heroes with. So his illness, which he insists he will find a cure for, is cosmic irony. AIG increases inflammation, abhorred by biohackers, and prevents the absorption of critical nutrients like iron and B12.

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In my own play, I didn’t write a tragic ending where the Bryan Johnson character gets sick or dies, nor do I think anyone should wish for Johnson to have an encounter with death to learn his lesson. Rather, I think that we should take the ups and downs of Johnson’s immortality “journey” as early feedback on a philosophical experiment that is just beginning, and that may soon become a global, radicalizing phenomenon. 

Johnson isn’t the first techno-utopian to be an immortality influencer: Google language-recognition expert Ray Kurzweil has been a transhumanist since the 1990s. But Johnson represents the migration of these ideas to the mainstream. I know someone writing a book about Próspera, an island off the coast of Honduras that is attempting to create a year-round life-extension clinic, an immortality spa, if you will. And unlike early transhumanists, Johnson’s message arrives at a time when technology has visibly accelerated in radicalizing ways. No one used AI four years ago; now it is everywhere in everything. Many of Johnson’s posts regard therapeutic breakthroughs and many of these breakthroughs are driven by supercomputers solving problems exponentially faster than any human laboratory could solve them. 

Whether normies know it or not, elites are planning to live for a very long time; the effort is already well underway to radically alter the destiny of the human body, or at least some human bodies. Autocrats like Xi Jinping and Putin are on advanced therapeutics, it’s safe to say. They will live as long as they can, and will rule as long as they live. Business leaders, thought leaders, and athletes are having longer primes, eventually, maybe, they will have indefinite ones. Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, and LeBron James have already demonstrated that the window for elite athletes can be longer with the right practices. Getting to see our favorite athletes play longer doesn’t seem so bad; ageless autocrats, however, are less desirable.

Bioscience is also offering women the opportunity to have children much later in life. Celebrities with access to expensive health care, like Anne Hathaway, now regularly have children in their 40s; the next horizon is childbearing in the 50s.

Our quest for immortality may be active, in the form of broscience, next-generation supplements, and extreme fitness, or passive, via surgeries and organ replacement. But soon, or perhaps even now, there will be a marked distinction between those who are intending to die — and refusing any enhancements — and those intending to live. 

What this amounts to is a secular immortality cult that replaces heaven with perfected existence forever on earth — and former heaven-focused mortal activities such as prayer and religious practice with constant techno-biological self-enhancement. Among the rich and soon the merely affluent, an extremely deep piece of cultural memetics — the ultimate acceptance of mortality — will start to fade. And whether or not anyone succeeds in radical life extension, the cascade of trying will result in a change of belief.

Johnson’s announcement of his chronic illness made headlines around the world. This reflects, I think, the extent to which he has already succeeded as an influencer and quasi-philosopher. His is the first announcement from a future that believes it’s a surprise to get sick and die at all.

It is impossible to overstate how much of a change this presents. The supreme value in a society that accepts mortality is to pass something on to the future. In one that doesn’t, the direction of human activity boomerangs back upon itself. The point of life becomes biological self-maintenance. Moreover, the transhumanist ideal threatens the monopoly of all mortality-derived wisdom — and mortality-backed experience, altogether.

We can’t experience the same moments, works of art, highs, or griefs over and over, without fundamentally changing their impact on us. It may be that life is rich because it is limited, and extended life becomes a form of torture. It may also be that our cognitive hardware is well adapted to our natural lifespans, and that experience does not get better with time. For some of the characters in my as-of-yet-unstaged play, life becomes unbearably lonely as some choose to die and others choose to live out enhanced lifespans.

Longer lifespans, or the promise of longer lifespans, will also change the calculus between parents and children, and the decision-making of prospective parents. If you believe you may escape death, why have children at all? On the other hand, bringing children into a world with less death may also be an incentive to have children; but the globe cannot, in the long run, support a world with life and no death. Something will have to give.

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The most laudatory thing that one can say about Johnson’s moral framework is that it is a moral framework, and that it is not nihilistic, even if it is arguably narcissistic. He uses his own resources and he has defined his own values. It would be hard to argue that he is hurting anyone, and his self-experimentation, even if it doesn’t yield immortality, will likely end in useful therapeutics for the rest of us mortals.

But it is also likely that his Faustian quest commences a Faustian epoch — anything short of total control over our bodies, down to the level of not only cells, but maybe subatomic particles, will be considered a failure.

In the face of such a terrifying prospect we will need powerful — and not entirely rational — protection.

Johnson was raised Mormon, and it is hard not to see that his vision of an immortal, multi-planetary species with extended consciousness resembles the multi-planetary heaven of Mormonism. In general, his message of “don’t die” is part of the message of the later phases of Abrahamic tradition; to never die is to constantly “resurrect” the youth of the aging body. 

All cults promise some kind of immortality, whether through forgiveness, salvation, consciousness-raising, bodily resurrection, or in this case, scientific super-enhancement. Thus, even if Johnson himself is having doubts, his announcement of a chronic illness, instead of discrediting his philosophy, takes part in the miraculous. He is now a prophet, attempting to perform the miracle of healing or raising the dead. And he has the world’s attention.

It is another irony that the lucid, rational promise of secular immortality seems guaranteed to produce mysticism. Transhumanism offers salvation through the supposedly knowable, but it confronts us with existential shocks. The Christian faith, which offers salvation through faith — the fundamentally unknowable — has been more stable. 

For better or worse, the latter half of this century seems like it will be more existential than the first half — and more existential than technological. Technology will be merely the foundation for a revision of what it means to be human. Casual agnostics and atheists may soon find that to not think about mortality or immortality with greater intensity and purpose is considered extremely strange or bad. And established religions may turn toward the supernatural and “proofs” of eternal life, to compete with the promise, backed by data-driven therapeutics, of indefinitely extended life.

Pascal’s Wager argued that faith was the best bet based on probability, especially considering the possibility of eternal damnation. Johnson’s Wager, on the other hand, asserts that there is no downside to seeing how far you can take biological life.

But like any philosopher, Johnson is liable (and free) to change his mind, when the thought experiment becomes a real experiment. We’ll see what the next phase of his immortality, or mortality, brings us.

This Californian elf, now the Golden State’s avatar, is the work of generations, refined over time from early Hollywood to Silicon Valley today. It’s tempting to see this mythologization as an act of idle self-absorption, a preening in the style of Barbie and Ken. But the truth is far more mercantilist. California is a massive economy, and its most defining exports are not hard goods or clear-cut services but fickle ideas.

The myth began modestly, with health seekers heading west in the late 1800s to find relief from tuberculosis in the dry air. Over time, “Go West!” became almost rote advice for chronic illness, as if the very place itself could heal. But these primordial associations weren’t enough to transform California into a global myth. The state needed a dream machine and it found one in early Hollywood.

By the Twenties, Hollywood was the face of American cinema, resplendent with all the glamor and scandal it would soon embody. Movie stars, not just movies themselves, were some of its most potent domestic exports. Studio executives understood that selling California as a paradise was essential to their business model, and they took to the task with profit-minded aplomb. Every palm-lined street, every sun-drenched beach scene, and every impossibly beautiful actor stepping out of a convertible advertised the way of life that the silver screen offered for the mere change in your pocket. 

In our day, Silicon Valley represents the latest iteration of this very same mythmaking engine. By the Eighties, Silicon Valley had surpassed Route 128 outside Boston to become the center of the technology universe, drawing brilliant founders and scientists to the beach with the very same allure that had given rise to the motion picture industry before. The visionary founder joined the starlet, and the IPO became as important as the premiere, but the underlying promise remained: California is a place that transcends humdrum human life, and if you buy its products you can get a taste.

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As we in marketing like to say, it’s “aspirational”. Even New York, the state most capable of rivaling California in cultural power, whispers about the golden elves. In Mad Men, the New York ad man Don Draper dreams of an escape to mythic California, ending the series in a wellness retreat there where meditation inspires him to make the iconic Coca-Cola “Hilltop” ad. The show uses California as an outlet for Don’s recurring fantasy of reinvention, a place where the damaged protagonist could shed his skin and emerge transformed. That’s why Don’s trips to California often involve surreal, dreamlike encounters that feel disconnected from reality. California as an idea is a constructed, aspirational export. 

And what’s more aspirational than wanting to live forever? Behold the grandest of Californian extravagances yet: immortalism, a movement of scientists and eccentrics quite literally trying to never die. Like Hollywood’s promise of stardom or Silicon Valley’s promise of money, the immortalist movement offers the ultimate Californian product — the transcendence of the one true human limitation.

Aleks Krotoski, a social scientist based in New York, has written an account of her years-long investigation into the entrepreneurs and inventors currently searching for eternal life. The Immortalists is a survey of transhumanists and their efforts: a loose confederation of scientists, entrepreneurs and true believers united by the conviction that aging is a disease to be cured. These tech elites see themselves as successors to earlier “seekers”, armed with wealth and engineering confidence, approaching death as another problem yet to be disrupted by the application of capital and expertise. Their goals are straightforward if audacious: extend lifespan by preventing typical causes of death, while extending their vital “prime years” so they can remain young forever. The connection between the latest trend and broader Californian mythmaking is clear to behold throughout the book’s pages. 

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It’s obvious why such an initiative would make its home in California. For one, the state has a high concentration of extant scientific talent, with one third of the nation’s aerospace companies headquartered there. The balmy beachside lifestyle attracts reliably high earners, while Silicon Valley provides both the capital and the risk tolerance necessary for a moonshot venture like overcoming death. But there’s also a mixture of cult experimentation and alternative medicine which led to the boom of the wellness industry from the Seventies onwards. In the last few decades, the wellness craze has taken hold of Los Angeles. Erewhon, the upscale organic grocery chain, is now basically a temple, with $20 smoothies you’re supposed to be seen consuming. The logical next step after trends such as sound baths, micro-dosing and therapeutic IV drips, was always going to be living forever. 

In The Immortalists, Krotoski floats from oddball to oddball, listening intently and giving each person their due when it comes to their views on mad science, but there’s one recurring star who sits above the rest: the entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. He has gained significant online fame largely by posting provocative erection-related statistics and cultivating a vampiric look. He has smooth, hairless cheeks, a piercing gaze, and much plastic surgery. He has turned himself into the vampire king of California, obsessed with rare elixirs and draining blood from the young. 

Krotoski spends so much of the book quoting Johnson verbatim. It’s easy to see why: “When my body, when my mind is like, let’s go eat pizza or let’s go drink… that’s non-cooperation. I relabel those things to violence.” You can almost hear the California dialect just from the words on the page. It’s a particular blend of tech-speak optimization language and therapy-influenced self-actualization rhetoric and rapport, part Silicon Valley efficiency gospel and part Venice Beach spiritual woo. Simultaneously earnest and performative, vulnerable and branded, there’s nothing else like it, and that’s partially the point.

Krotoski’s mocking portrayal of her subjects, as vain, anxious or bored in their pursuit of immortality, is probably fair. But it misses something key in its portrayal of Californian weirdness: it’s all embellished. She doesn’t fully capture, and may not even realize, that her Californian subjects are fully aware of what they are. In reading Johnson’s words, one can find a detectable wink to the audience in everything he says. He has made himself into the character, physically and verbally, to get attention. Take his vampiric appearance. In one telling exchange with Elon Musk on social media, Johnson wrote: “the difference between Elon and me: I’ll nourish you and drink your blood; he’ll fire you and leave you to die” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to his publicized blood transfusion experiments. The darkness of the imagery, perhaps as a shield against criticism, is part of the performance.

Johnson is not the first to do this, and he won’t be the last. The routine is commonplace, especially in the health space. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, after all, knowingly markets products like “This Smells Like My Vagina” candles, a deliberate provocation that generated discourse (and thus notoriety) far in excess of the actual candles sales. The entire “Valley Girl” phenomenon of the Eighties was both authentic dialect and conscious performance, with Frank Zappa’s daughter Moon Unit simultaneously embodying and parodying the accent in her hit single. Even the garage startup myth acknowledges its own absurdity while simultaneously perpetuating itself. The mythology of the billion-dollar garage startup has become an exportable, addictive idea that drives many to apply to places like Y Combinator each year.

California has always needed to find new dreams to sell as the old ones lose their luster. Film’s cultural dominance has waned with the rise of streaming and global production. New York has been aggressively courting film production back from California with tax incentives, and other cities like Atlanta have successfully challenged Hollywood’s monopoly. As traditional Hollywood loses ground, new innovations in the myth are needed to keep it both economically relevant and socially potent on the world stage. Californians understand this, and this is why there is such an effort to continue the myth creation. 

The immortalist movement may succeed in refreshing the California myth for another generation, proving that the state can still produce world-changing ideas. On the other hand, if it spectacularly combusts, it may reveal the myth’s exhaustion, showing that we’ve reached peak California, where the only frontier left is literally trying in vain not to die.

The truth is that California has always sold impossibility. From the gold rush’s promise of instant wealth to Hollywood’s promise of stardom to Silicon Valley’s promise of changing the world with an app, the state’s primary export has been dreams that statistically just won’t come true for most people. Yet, occasionally, just often enough to make the news, someone actually does strike gold, become a star, or build a billion-dollar world-changing company. As such, the myth rolls on, renewed.

The immortalists represent the logical endpoint of this tradition of gambling for glory. They’re selling the ultimate prize of all with just enough scientific merit to make it seem faintly possible. Whether Johnson and his cohort achieve immortality matters less than what their quest reveals about California’s enduring power to make fortune seem inevitable, to turn personal neurosis into cultural movement, and to perform transcendence so convincingly that performance itself becomes a kind of truth.

In the end, Krotoski’s book captures California early in the act of creating its next great myth. Like all the best California stories, it’s obviously fake yet somehow real. The author herself, by taking these eccentric immortalists seriously enough to write about them, becomes part of the myth-making machine she observes. She’s another New Yorker drawn into California’s orbit, unable to look away from the golden elves even as she rolls her eyes at their antics.

It’s a very old story. Johnson and his fellow immortalists are the people who went West seeking transformation and in the end decided to put on a show about it. The fact that their particular show involves blood transfusions and supplement regimens rather than surfboards and sunshine doesn’t change the fundamental dynamics. They are performing California, and in performing it, they make it real.

Home to one of the world’s highest concentrations of scientific talent, Altos Labs is pursuing a lavishly funded quest to unearth the secrets of ageing. The Stanford-meets-Soho House décor is enough to show that here, health is wealth. But even in the notoriously well-compensated field of biotechnology it stands out. Last year, the Silicon Valley venture revealed it had raised $3 billion from investors, making it one of the best-financed start-ups in history.

Its mission? Depending on who you ask, anything from reversing chronic diseases and deferring the helpless twilight of old age to cutting the keys of eternal youth and creating a race of immortal supreme beings. This furrow of science, which piques our hardwired anxiety of ageing and fear of death, has always been accompanied by disproportionate incentives for hype. Nor has it been helped by wealthy obsessives, who in recent years have very publicly taken their own anxiety to macabre new heights, such as the software entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who injected himself with his son’s blood and spends $2 million a year in the hope of achieving the body of an 18-year-old.

Altos’s leaders, however, are in the business of managing expectations. Hans Bishop, the president, has said his focus is on increasing “healthspan” rather than lifespan, and that any extension in longevity would be “an accidental consequence”. The idea is that, by focusing on “reprogramming” cells with various proteins, Altos can find medicines that treat many diseases at once by targeting the underlying problem: ageing.

Bishop and his co-founders Rick Klausner and Yuri Milner are late entrants in the arena of anti-ageing research. Calico was set up a decade ago by Google co-founder Larry Page, though it has yet to unveil a product. Other players include Unity, BioAge, BioViva and AgeX Therapeutics. Billionaires — including Milner himself, Page, and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel — are regularly glimpsed behind the scenes.

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So what makes Altos stand out? Again, that war chest is immense. Its team is a fleet of Nobel prizewinners, lured from governments and top universities with the promise of “sports star” salaries. As for famous backers, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself is believed to be one of Altos’s investors. When rumours of Bezos’s involvement broke in 2021, fellow billionaire Elon Musk quipped: “If it doesn’t work, he’s gonna sue death!”

Altos is global, with two hubs in California, one in England near Cambridge, and one in Japan led by famous stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka. Given that all my imaginative efforts to visualise these mines of youth ended with giant brains in tanks, I am intrigued to be offered a tour of the UK hub by the building’s owners. My goal is to peer a little closer through the hype and see what $3 billion gets you.

Upstairs in the Cambridge branch, I am taken past rows of brand-new labs and a sterile area named the Science Kitchen, where some of the 160 scientists prepare for experiments on, among other specimens, mice and fruit flies. (You may recall from biology lessons that drosophilas are ideal for research since their rapid life cycle allows multiple generations to be bred in a single day.)

A vivarium, for raising and keeping animals, is being built downstairs, but I am refused entry as it is still undergoing environmental testing. It must be signed off by the Home Office, the facilities manager explains. Of all government departments, why that one? An answer is not forthcoming.

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Science is a power-hungry enterprise, as evidenced by the colossal HVAC system out back, almost the size of the lab itself. The whole building is kept on backup power so that if there is an outage on the National Grid, Altos can continue to keep its industrial-strength freezers at -70°C. As we pass a room of these freezers, I point out that they are conveniently human-sized. “Is Walt Disney in that one?” I ask. No one laughs.

The superlative sci-fi element, however, is “Ken’s Egg”: a wood-panelled, 130-person lecture theatre on the ground floor named after Dr Ken Raj, one of the principal investigators. “I felt the egg was good,” Raj says. “What the auditorium is for is to bring our ideas, to give birth to life.”

Those ideas continue to advance. Raj, alongside his colleague Steve Horvath in the US, is an expert in epigenetics, measuring how molecules called methyl groups attach themselves to our DNA as we age. Most people’s DNA methylation age corresponds accurately with their chronological age, but those with diseases such as Parkinson’s have an older epigenetic age.

A couple of years ago, the big question was whether the methyl groups are driving the ageing process, or merely a consequence of it. Now, we know. “We can see now that yes, the methylation is actually the driver,” Raj tells me. “Not all of the methylation that happens in your genome drives ageing, but there are methylation genomes that actually do the driving.”

Some aspects of the science being pursued at Altos are more controversial than others. Charles Brenner, department chair at City of Hope medical centre in Los Angeles and a vocal critic of lifespan-extending hype, tells me that there is “a cart-horse problem” with DNA methylation. “There’s no evidence to my knowledge that a change in [epigenetic clock] means that a person is going to live longer,” he says.

Brenner says that epigenetic resetting “is real and will certainly turn into real medicine”, such as when your cells are used to create a tissue that has an exact genetic match for, say, your damaged liver. In vivo “reprogramming”, however, is in his opinion “unlikely to ever be tested in humans” because “everyone who works with these genes knows that they produce tumours and teratomas in the process of producing well-behaved stem cells”.

At conferences, Brenner shows his audience a letter from an anti-ageing scientist who claimed: “We can control ageing at our caprice… it’s going to revolutionise everything.” It was written in 1990. “It arguably could have been said by any anti-ageing biotech guy in the last 33 years,” he says. “And they were all wrong.” Despite this, Brenner expects that the “excellent scientists” at Altos will still “discover useful things”. However, he says, “it’s not obvious to me what new technologies would making drugging the ageing process to achieve lifespan extension suddenly possible. I suspect that some of the investors were sold a bill of goods.”

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The political and ethical questions around Altos Labs are equally unsettled. The debates are familiar by now. Proponents see the quest for longevity as morally noble, arguing that it will eventually benefit all humanity. Detractors say there’s no evidence to suggest the benefits would trickle down to the non-billionaires.

David Sinclair, chief executive of the International Longevity Centre UK, tells me the key challenge is “helping us live better now rather than longer, and that is arguably a policy issue as much as a science issue”. The cynical view of Altos and its ilk, he says, is that there are “quite a lot of men in their 30s who want to live forever, and that they’re throwing lots of money into this. Actually, if you asked their 95-year-old mums, what would they say? Would they say you’re much better off making sure you’re doing it well, rather than living longer?”

Sinclair believes the investment in Altos is useful, but suggests policymakers will have to tackle the increased inequalities that might result from the science. “The people who will have access to it first are the people who are already living longer and are going to be wealthier,” he says. At the same time, “once you have new medications that work, it’s very difficult for governments not to offer them.”

Is it safe to say these companies have an image problem? Scepticism comes naturally in the field, ever since Herodotus lied (or, if you’re being charitable, was duped by a myth) about people bathing in a fountain of youth in the fifth century BC. It also strikes me as noteworthy that so many cultural depictions of eternal life and the quest for immortality, from Gilgamesh to Indiana Jones to Dr Manhattan, are cautionary tales.

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Professor Tom Kirkwood, head of the department of gerontology at Newcastle University, tells me that research on ageing “is at quite an exciting stage” but sometimes the enthusiasm for innovative treatments “doesn’t pay sufficient regard to what we know already about the complexities of the ageing process”. It’s a great deal easier to alter the life history of short-lived animals such as fruit flies and mice than to alter the lifespan of humans, after all. As for Altos, Kirkwood believes it has the potential to be “slightly disruptive”, but, he says, “it would not surprise me if it should turn out that for all the investment that’s made, the breakthroughs prove to be elusive”. Yet he points out that researchers will continue to make bold claims in order to have their work recognised by the capricious attention of the media.

The wacky Bay Area sheen doesn’t help either. It brings to mind “transhumanists” such as Zoltan Istvan, who ran for US president in 2016 promising to conquer death, and philosopher Ingemar Patrick Linden, who calls the suggestion that everyone should die at a natural age “appalling”. Super-rich investors may not use this precise language, but there is undoubtedly a grain of transhumanism in their thinking. As he stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, Bezos urged shareholders to stay nimble, quoting Richard Dawkins: “Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at… If living things don’t actively work to prevent it, they would eventually merge with their surroundings and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

Altos’s scientists are all in, obviously. “This is what the world needs,” Raj says. Bezos and the rest have created lavish sanctuaries for these talents to thrive. And many would see nothing wrong with that. There are far worse ways to be a billionaire: look at Philip Green.

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Yet the furtiveness with which he conducts his involvement (his investment firm, Bezos Expeditions, has still not commented on the Altos reports) speaks volumes about his self-interest. There are plenty of simpler ways Bezos could improve the lives of others. Let’s be clear: he really does want to be immortal. And I’m not sure there’s anything noble about that.

Surprisingly, one of Bezos’s fellow tech titans articulated a very different philosophy of ageing. In his 2005 commencement address to Stanford graduates, Steve Jobs reflected on his pancreatic cancer diagnosis and offered a powerful rebuke to Silicon Valley-style transhumanism. “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there,” he said. “And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.”

But that is as it should be, he said, because “death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

In the Metamorphoses, the greatest anthology of classical myth ever written, the Roman poet told of Actaeon, a hunter who inadvertently stumbled upon Diana as she was bathing. The goddess, outraged that a mortal had seen her naked, turned the intruder into a stag. His own hounds then pursued him, dragged him down, and tore him to pieces. “Only once the life had left his mangled flesh, so it is said, was the rage of the goddess finally slaked.”

Today Princess Diana would have turned 60. What life she might have gone on to live had she not died trying to escape the photographers who, like a pack of hounds, pursued her into the Pont de l’Alma tunnel that fateful night in Paris 24 years ago? It is impossible to know, of course. One thing, however, is clear. The car crash that killed Diana at the age of 36 brought her immortality. It transmuted her once and for all into legend. Just as the break-up of the Beatles in 1970 set the seal on their status as the ultimate icons of the 60s, so did Diana’s untimely death ensure that she would ever afterwards be remembered as the archetype of a beautiful princess.

The parabola of a story, if it is to rank as great, requires a perfect ending. The ending of Diana’s story — so surprising, so unsurprising — seemed scripted to such a flawless degree that it has generated an entire multitude of conspiracy theories. Yet the attempt to blame “dark forces” for the car crash, to pin the blame on MI6, or Prince Charles, or Prince Philip, is really only a displacement strategy. We all of us knew in our hearts, when the news came through from Paris, who the guilty people were. We — the global public, hungry for every last sensational story, every last prurient snap — were the ones who had driven her to her death. Actaeon had never intended to intrude on Diana’s privacy. We, by contrast, had no such excuse.

“And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind.” It was a measure of Diana’s star quality that she could be compared at her funeral to more than one kind of goddess. Elton John, whose musical tribute to her directly preceded the Earl Spencer’s eulogy, sang lines that originally had been written to commemorate Marilyn Monroe. Everyone who listened to him perform at the funeral in Westminster Abbey knew this. Palimpsest-like, the two versions of the song co-existed. The ghost of one set of lyrics haunted the other. “Even when you died,” Elton had originally sung, “Oh the press still hounded you.”

As a superstar himself, he felt a natural sympathy for a woman plagued and tormented by journalists. Even so – unlike Diana, whom he had known well – Marilyn had been a stranger to him. He was just a kid, after all, when her candle burned out. He sang about her, not as a friend, but as a worshipper at the shrine of her celebrity, one of the numberless multitudes of her fans, a young man in the 22nd row. In 1973, when the song was recorded, Marilyn had been dead for over a decade.

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She had come, in that time, to serve as the paradigm of a peculiarly modern form of immortality: the celebrity cut off in her prime. Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s long-term collaborator, had been inspired to write “Candle in the Wind” after hearing the phrase applied to Janis Joplin. Aligned at her funeral with the gods of ancient Greece, Diana was aligned as well with more recent deities: James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Jim Morrison. In death, she had come to possess many different shades of immortality.

Yet if it was, in a Christian place of worship, startling, perhaps, to be informed that Diana’s name had appeared in the heavens, and that her footsteps, like some guardian spirit of the landscape, would always fall along England’s greenest hills, that did not render Elton’s song inappropriate to its location. Diana, unlike Marilyn, had married into the world’s most celebrated royal family. The tombs of her in-laws stood everywhere in Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, had been married to England. Diana had been the country’s rose. Here, then, was yet a further burnishing of her myth. The Princess of Wales was hedged about by a mystique that did not derive solely from fairy stories.

A thousand years and more before her birth, a sister of England’s first king, Athelstan, had travelled to Germany, there to marry Otto, the heir to the Saxon throne. Eadgyth, according to one admiring witness, was a woman “of pure noble countenance, graceful character and truly royal appearance.” She provided, at the court of her hairy and martial husband, a touch of feminine glamour. Famously beautiful, she was renowned as well for her compassion and her concern for the wretched. When she died, at the tender age of 36, she was mourned across the whole of Germany, and commemorated as the people’s princess.

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Few today, of course, remember Eadgyth. No one watched her wedding on television; no one splashed her photo on the cover of a magazine. Yet the potency of Diana’s fame was precisely that it had a venerable as well as a contemporary cast, and was no less rooted in the traditions of Christian monarchy than it was in the fashions of pop culture. Eadgyth stood at the head of a long line of queens and princesses in medieval Europe who served their people as counterweights to the ideals of masculine royalty: as paradigms of mercy, compassion, care.

Eadgyth was not alone in being hailed by her subjects as a saint. Holiest of all royal women, perhaps, was Elizabeth, a descendant of Hungary’s first Christian king who, in 1221, married the ruler of Thuringia. She tended to the sick; treated their wounds; mopped up the mucus and saliva from their faces. When she died at the age of 24, no one doubted that she belonged to heaven. Proof of this was manifest in the numerous miracles reported from her tomb. A woman who had stuck a pea in her ear when she was a young girl regained her hearing; numerous hunchbacks were healed. To this day, Elizabeth of Hungary is revered by Catholics as a model of charity and compassion. Unlike Eadgyth, she continues to be commemorated as a saint.

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Diana, of course, was no saint. Her own brother, in his funeral address, acknowledged as much. She died, after all, in the back of a car alongside her lover. Yet her affairs, her fallibilities, her vulnerabilities only led to her being the more loved. This would not have been the case had she been merely a fashion icon. Medieval hagiographers had been deeply moved by the spectacle of royal women such as Elizabeth of Hungary tending to the sores of lepers in their expensive jewellery and finest robes. Diana’s admirers, when they saw her shaking hands with AIDS sufferers, were touched and inspired in a similar way. Dread of what tabloids called the “gay plague” ran deep in the Eighties. The role played by Diana in combatting the taboos surrounding it had required courage as well as compassion. When Elton, performing his threnody in Westminster Abbey, sang of how she had “whispered to those in pain,” he did so from the heart.

In the Middle Ages, the Matter of Britain was the story of King Arthur and the Round Table. Today, thanks to the inherent drama of the narrative, amplified and repackaged as it has been by The Crown, it is the story of Princess Diana. That there were many who found her shallow and manipulative, and who regret the loss of nation self-control that her death seemed to prompt, makes no difference to the potency of her renown. Myths are not bound by the rules that trammel mere mortals. Diana’s candle burned out long before her legend will.

But this time, the thing that got me thinking about mortality was digging a series of dams and waterworks on a British beach with my children, and thinking about doing the same when I was their age; my father bringing the proper gardening shovel from the shed in the house we were staying in, so he could shift some serious tonnage. (I have started doing this. If you go to the beach with a metal spade, you are King Dad, and the other dads have to build you a throne of sand.)

Those summers seemed to go on forever and there seemed to be an infinite number of them. These ones slip by in a rush: the children are speechless gurgling babies one minute; lanky-limbed argumentative great monsters the next. And the gap between my being the child and my being the spade-wielding, sunhat-wearing dad seems much smaller than it ought.

Anyway, middle-aged dad freaking out about mortality: breaking news, more at 11. But I read something recently that made me stay with the topic.

John Nerst, the blogger behind Everything Studies, read my first book recently. The book is kind of about AI, and whether it will kill us all; but it’s also about some people who worry about it, known as the rationalists. The rationalists are many things, but a lot of them are transhumanists: people who think humanity can and should change its base form, to extend life and become more than we are. And one key thing they want to change is the inconvenient “death” business.

Nerst doesn’t want to live forever. Our psychology, he thinks, requires finite story arcs – he doesn’t trot out the simple “death brings life meaning” thing, but starts from there, and he finds that the idea of living forever doesn’t work. “I want to live a long and happy life,” he says, “but I think I do want to come to a point when I’m satisfied, a point when I feel like it’s a good time for the story to end.” I really recommend you read the whole thing, partly because everything Nerst writes is worth reading, and partly because I can’t do the whole thoughtful piece justice with a few excerpts. But in essence, he thinks we don’t want immortality.

I’ll come back to whether I agree with him, later on. But for now I thought it was worth noting that the idea of hugely extended human life isn’t crazy. It’s already happened, to some degree: if you’re blessed, as I am, to be living as a well-off person in the rich west in the 21st century, you can already expect several decades more than could 99% of humans who have ever lived. 

Transhumanists just want to do that more. They get held up as cranks and weirdos — partly because lots of them are into cryonics, which I think is unfair: surveys suggest they’re no more likely than the rest of us to think it will work; they just think the bet is a worthwhile one. And on the subject of ageing, I think they’re right that ending it, or at least hugely changing it, is a plausible goal.

I spoke recently to a couple of scientists who are looking at human life extension. One of them, Wolf Reik, works at the Babraham Institute, a life-sciences establishment outside Cambridge. He studies a process called DNA methylation.

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The DNA in our cells is made up of four “letters”: C, G, A, T, the nucleotides cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine. Each is a tiny bundle of atoms; when strung together into long sequences they form the famous double helix shape.

Sometimes, the cytosines change a little, gaining another group of atoms called a methyl group. About five years ago, scientists at UCLA noticed something interesting. If you measured the percentage of the cytosines which had this methyl group, it told you — with remarkable accuracy — the age of the person you took it from.

“It’s the best biomarker for ageing that exists,” said Reik. “It is accurate to within 3.6 years.” And more than just predicting your chronological age, it also told you important things about your health. Reik found the same process happened in mice, accurate to within 3.3 weeks, which is very similar, proportional to the length of a mouse’s life, to the accuracy in humans.

There are two possible explanations for this. One is that this epigenetic “methylation” process is a sort of readout, tracking the real processes of biological ageing. That would be exciting in its own right — you could use it as an important health indicator, and, in the future, the patterns of DNA methylation could provide information on risks of specific cancers or other diseases.

But the second possibility is that this is the underlying process of ageing. And that would mean that, if you can change it, you would go some way to halting — or reversing — the ageing process itself.

At the moment it’s too early to say whether that’s the case. But Andrew Steele, a computational biologist whose book Ageless comes out next year, told me that there are a few interesting hints. First, this methylation process tracks ageing from fertilisation to death. At first it’s a rapid change, up until the age of about 20; then there is a slower, steady increase. “If this were just some random phenomenon,” he said, “you wouldn’t think you’d see the same changes from development to adult life, when you’re not developing. It’s suggestive, but not conclusive, that it’s something fundamental, something causal, about ageing.”

There have been some experiments that support the idea. If you turn an adult cell into an induced pluripotent stem cell, by inserting four genes called “Yamanaka factors” into its DNA, its methylation clock reverts to zero.

And in some experiments, scientists used the same process on mice, inserting the Yamanaka factors into their DNA. It was, said Steele, a catastrophe: the mice’s cells in their organs tried to turn into stem cells, meaning that they weren’t doing their jobs; the mice had systemic organ failures. And the stem cells also caused the mice to develop grotesque cancers called teratomas, horrible balls of teeth and hair and blood.

But when another group of scientists did the same, but this time with the Yamanaka factors switched off except in the presence of a particular drug, and then gave that drug at periodic intervals, they found that the mice aged more slowly than normal mice. It’s inconclusive – they observed proxy measures, rather than simply waiting to see how long the mice lived – but it’s tantalising. “There’s no guarantee it will work in humans,” says Steele, “but these processes are fundamental and appear to be conserved across biology, in mice and flies and rats and dogs, so there’s a strong possibility.”

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If methylation really is the driver of ageing, then the dream, of course, is to create some drug that will slow the process. The Yamanaka-factor mice were all genetically modified, so that precise model wouldn’t work on adult humans. But the Yamanaka factors are a “sledgehammer”, says Steele, forcing all the cells back to age zero. “Reprogramming like this resets the clock,” says Reik. But in theory we can find a more precise method. “We could say, instead of zero, I want to go back to 20. That’s quite an exciting prospect.”

The first step is still to make sure that this really is a driver. Reik and colleagues have plans for more research — manipulating the mouse genome, seeing how methylation interacts with gene expression. He plans to look at certain developmental disorders, such as kabuki syndrome, that affect ageing, and see if they work via the methylation system. His lab has made, he says, “exciting breakthroughs” in rejuvenation since we first spoke about it two years ago.

Methylation won’t be the whole story. There are other forms of cell damage that accumulate over a lifetime and that this won’t fix — Steele’s book looks at ten “hallmarks of ageing”, things that drive and aggravate the ageing process. But it seems centrally important, and understanding it could lead to breakthroughs. Besides, there are other hopeful avenues. “The most promising current research is probably senolytics,” says Steele: “drugs that kill senescent cells, and which have made mice live longer, helped with arthritis and other age-related conditions, and are currently in trials for the same in humans.

“I think that curing ageing is a totally legitimate medium-term medical goal, and maybe short-term if we get lucky.”

And lots of other animals (Steele mentions tortoises and some salamanders as especially good examples) don’t age as we do. It’s not some inevitable fact about life. It could well be that we find something which will dramatically change how humans age. Major life extension is not wild speculative madness.

So let’s get back to whether we’d want it. I entirely agree with Nerst on one thing: actual, you-cannot-die immortality is likely a curse, not a blessing. No one reads vampire stories or ghost stories – souls forced to wander the earth long after all their loved ones have died, unable to rest – and thinks “Yup, gotta get me some of that.” Immortality is the archetypal monkey’s-paw wish-that-goes-wrong. 

But on the other hand, ageing — look, I am sorry to say it, it feels like something you shouldn’t say — sucks.

Not getting older. I like getting older. Mainly, I like how little I care about what other people think about me, now. I wear practical, comfortable clothes and engage in pastimes I enjoy, rather than wearing and doing things I hope will make people think I’m cool. (They never did.) I feel I am much more myself than I was in my teens and twenties, as though for all those years I was building a personality, and now it’s ready to be taken out and used. There’s a lot of good stuff about getting older.

Ageing, though. Cancer is a “disease of ageing”, we’re repeatedly told, and it is. But almost all diseases are diseases of ageing, to some degree. All your organs start to go wrong. You get weaker, you get slower. Your senses lose acuity. Even your brain changes; there is real decline in your mental faculties which gathers pace as you reach the end of middle age. Then there’s dementia, which scares the shit out of me. Anything incapacitating does, really. 

I’m still too young to really notice any physical decline; if there is any, it’s likely being offset for the time being by the fact that I drink less and exercise more these days. But I see older friends and relatives getting cancers and heart disease and all these other things, and they’re not that much older. I can remember when they were my age, and it doesn’t feel very long ago. So it would be nice to sort the whole ageing thing out.

“It’s crazy that more biologists aren’t focusing on ageing,” said Steele. “The potential is there to reverse the greatest cause of disease and suffering in the modern world, and yet there is surprisingly little interest.” Living fit and healthy lives right to the end: that seems worthwhile.

But I’m kind of dodging the question. Nerst wasn’t talking about making everyone healthy. I think most people would want that. How about real transhumanism? How about living for hundreds of years? Thousands? 

Nerst suspects we wouldn’t want it. “My grandmother, who I spent a lot of time with as a child, passed away just about a year before turning 100,” he writes. “She remained present and independent until the end, but had for years casually commented that she was ready to go. I believe her. I think she felt her story was over.” And, he thinks, a lot of elderly people feel the same. I suspect he’s right.

I have three questions, though. First: how much of being tired of life is a product of being literally tired, just from living in a slowly failing body? Everything is harder work when you’re very old, and you can do fewer things, and learning new skills is harder. If we were capable of learning judo, or kite-surfing, or Go, at age 90 as easily as we are at age 15, would we still be so bored?

Second, how different would it be if all your friends and relatives didn’t have an unfortunate tendency to die? If we all could live on as long as we wanted, wouldn’t it be more appealing?

Third: maybe many people would still feel they have had enough after 80 or 90 years. Maybe most people would. Maybe almost all people would. But … what if I don’t? What if a few people get to their century, still healthy and fit, and think: actually this is still pretty good, I want to carry on for a few more years? What if they think the same after their second century? Their fifth?

I would like to have the option. I don’t know how I’ll feel when I’m ten thousand years old. Maybe I’ll still be bang up for another ten thousand. And I think everyone else should have the option too.

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Of course there are real practical difficulties. Our growing population right now is caused by people not dying quickly enough — birth rates are stable and will probably start declining soon, but the people who are already here are living longer, so the population is still going up. If people start living for millennia, we would struggle; it’d be like putting the plug in the bath but leaving the tap running. It’s not a coincidence that the rationalists, the transhumanists I write about in my book (all good bookshops!) are also keen proponents of getting humanity off Earth and to the stars. 

Also, if you want to choose when you go out, you need to be able to choose. You can’t have laws against assisted dying in the glorious transhumanist future.

But they are practical difficulties. Maybe they’re insurmountable, but maybe not. I agree with Steele that ageing is probably the greatest cause of suffering and disease in the world, and we ought to try to do something about it. I sincerely doubt it’ll happen in my lifetime, but it’s a nice thing to hope for my children, or theirs.

Maybe this is all just a nerd’s version of praying for the afterlife, although I think not. But I like life, and being healthy, and learning about the universe. I’d like all those things to carry on. So even if I don’t want actual immortality, I would like to be able to choose the time of my leaving, without having to feel my body and brain slowly lose the fight against entropy.

In case that doesn’t happen, though, I have ordered the lesser dads on this Kentish beach to build me a mighty pyramid, and store my mortal remains in there, ideally with twenty or thirty of them entombed with me to serve me in the afterlife. It’s a long shot, but I may as well take advantage of being King Dad while I can.