Billionaires Are Trying to Cheat Death — but a Physicist Calls Their Efforts a ‘Waste of Time’

Tech billionaires who dream of living forever may literally be wasting their time. That is the view of British physicist Jim Al-Khalili, who believes that instead of engaging in an endless race to extend human life, it is far more important to learn how to appreciate the time we have already been given, The Guardian reports.

In recent years, the quest to defeat ageing has become something of an obsession among the ultra-wealthy. While some experiment with dietary supplements, cold plunges and unproven peptide injections, members of the tech elite are prepared to go even further.

One of the best-known advocates of radical life extension is entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. Among other things, he experimented with receiving plasma transfusions from his 17-year-old son in the hope of slowing the ageing process. Johnson later admitted that he noticed no benefit from the procedure.

But Professor Jim Al-Khalili, who this year will deliver the Royal Institution’s traditional Christmas Lectures in the UK, devoted to the nature of time, believes the very idea of pursuing immortality is highly questionable.

According to Al-Khalili, human existence amounts to little more than a fleeting moment compared with the age of the universe.

“We have a finite amount of time that we exist in the universe. And the more I study and think about the nature of time, the more I realise that I just want to make the most of the time I have,” the physicist said.

In his view, attempts to stretch human life at any cost do not necessarily make sense.

“We’re here for just a fleeting moment compared with the age of the universe. If I spend that fleeting moment trying to turn it into two fleeting moments, I’m not sure that’s really a worthwhile way to spend my life,” Al-Khalili said.

The physicist has devoted a significant part of his career to studying time. As a child, he was puzzled by a remark from his engineer father that scientists did not actually understand what time was. Later, while studying physics, Al-Khalili came to appreciate just how far our everyday understanding of time is from the scientific picture of reality.

One of the most remarkable ideas is connected to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. It turns out that time does not flow at the same rate for all observers.

Al-Khalili explains this with a simple example: if one person were to fly past another in a rocket travelling at an enormous speed, their clocks would measure the passage of time differently.

Gravity also affects the passage of time. The stronger the gravitational field, the differently time passes.

According to the physicist, this feature of spacetime is one of the most fascinating aspects of the theory of relativity.

Einstein’s work may also help explain one of the famous mysteries of Christmas literature — the simultaneous appearance of the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

According to one interpretation of relativity, the past, present and future all exist simultaneously — rather like all points in space exist simultaneously. Human beings, however, can perceive only the present moment.

That is why the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, who is visited in a single night by the spirits of the past, present and future, unexpectedly echoes ideas found in modern physics.

Al-Khalili will also discuss time travel in his Christmas Lectures. According to him, travelling into the past is not mathematically inconsistent with certain solutions to the equations of relativity.

One theoretical possibility involves what is known as a closed timelike curve — a region of spacetime so severely warped by gravity that an object moving forward through time could, in a certain sense, return to a moment before the beginning of its journey.

But there is a serious problem: travelling into the past creates numerous paradoxes, which is why most physicists remain highly sceptical about the possibility.

Travelling into the future is somewhat simpler — at least in theory.

One way would be to travel at an enormous speed close to the speed of light. Another possibility resembles the plot of the film Interstellar, in which the characters venture close to a supermassive black hole.

Because of the extraordinarily strong gravitational field, time passes much more slowly for them than it does for people far away from the black hole. As a result, one hour for the travellers could correspond to years on Earth.

Another mystery Al-Khalili plans to explore in his lectures is why time appears to move in only one direction.

We watch things fall apart, batteries run down, balls roll downhill, people grow older and children’s bedrooms gradually become more and more chaotic — unless someone deliberately tidies them up.

All of these processes create the impression of a clear direction to time. Yet, as the scientist points out, the fundamental equations of physics do not single out any one direction of time as preferable.

The question has occupied Al-Khalili for so long that it has repeatedly kept him awake at night. Now, however, the physicist claims that he appears to have found an explanation for what is known as the “arrow of time.”

He is not yet revealing the details.

“In the lectures, I’ll explain how to solve this problem. I’ve solved the problem of the arrow of time,” the scientist teased.