Some of the world’s richest tech moguls are pouring fortunes into living forever, but one of England’s most respected physicists reckons they’re fighting a battle they simply cannot win.
Professor Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist at the University of Surrey, has spoken out against the growing obsession with radical life extension among Silicon Valley’s elite, saying that the very nature of time makes the dream of immortality a fool’s errand. He’s set to explore the science behind why in an upcoming series of lectures at the Royal Institution in London, where he promises to tackle one of physics’ most enduring puzzles: the so-called ‘arrow of time’.
The arrow of time is basically the reason everything moves forward and not backwards. Things age, decay, and fall apart. Eggs don’t unscramble. People don’t get younger. Al-Khalili says he’ll be offering what he describes as a solution to this long-standing problem in physics, and the implications stretch well beyond the lecture hall.
His comments come as a wave of extreme anti-ageing behaviour has gone mainstream, at least among those who can afford it. While ordinary people are experimenting with cold plunges, fasting regimes, and unregulated peptide injections they’re ordering online, the ultra-wealthy are going much further.
Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who made his fortune selling a payments company to eBay, became one of the most talked-about figures in the longevity space after spending millions on a hyper-optimised health protocol designed to reverse his biological age. He made international headlines after trying plasma transfusions using blood taken from his own teenage son, though he later admitted he saw no real benefit from it. The experiment was widely criticised by doctors and scientists who said there was no solid evidence it worked.
Johnson is far from alone. A whole industry has grown up around the idea that ageing is not inevitable but a problem to be solved with enough money and technology. Supplements, gene therapies, cryonics, and even brain uploading have all attracted serious investment from people who believe death is optional if you throw enough resources at it.
Al-Khalili isn’t buying it. His argument isn’t just that these interventions don’t work in practice, it’s that the fundamental laws of physics are stacked against anyone hoping to cheat time indefinitely. The second law of thermodynamics, which underpins the arrow of time concept, essentially says that disorder increases over time in any closed system. Biological ageing is, at its core, an expression of that process.
The Royal Institution lectures are a big deal in British scientific culture. Founded in 1799, the institution has hosted some of the most important public science talks in history, and its Christmas lectures have been a fixture on British television for decades. Al-Khalili taking the stage there to address the arrow of time suggests the topic is being taken seriously at the highest levels of scientific communication.
For Al-Khalili, the issue isn’t just academic. He’s been a vocal advocate for science literacy and has often pushed back against pseudoscience and wishful thinking dressed up as cutting-edge research. His scepticism about the longevity industry fits into that broader mission.
The irony, he suggests, is that the billionaires funding these projects may actually understand less about the nature of time than the physicists who study it. Spending vast sums trying to outrun something as fundamental as entropy isn’t ambition, in his view. It’s a misunderstanding of how the universe works.
Whether his lectures change any minds among the tech elite remains to be seen. Johnson and others like him have shown they’re not easily put off by sceptical scientists. But for the rest of us watching from the sidelines, Al-Khalili’s message is a reminder that some things really are beyond the reach of a bank balance, no matter how large.