VC vampire: Peter Thiel wants to live forever

I don't know what to think; I need to hear Steve ¡Bong!'s take...

...this was just a little nocturnal humour about the children of the night, yes? Yes?!

Damned with faint praise

"not demonstrably wrong," according to MIT's Technology Review.

Well, that's something I'd bet my life on then.

It appears that someone has been reading Heinlein's 'Time Enough For Love'. So SF leads the way again.

Thiel's been watching too much Simpsons?

(Mr. Burns and Smithers visit the morgue.)

Mr. Burns: Ah, nothing lifts my spirits like shopping. Let's see, (Points) I'll take his liver, a case of Adam's apples, (Points) that motorcycle man's mustache.

Smithers: Oh, the money you've contributed to anti-helmet laws has really paid off, sir.

Mr. Burns: Well, young people are my future.

Would laugh if he ended up with an incurable blood-borne pathogen from all these transfusions.

Is this really surprising?

Most people fear death. Lots of us idly imagine ways to cheat it. Billionaires can put money to work indulging those idle dreams.

If this were all he did that would be pretty strange, but if I were super-rich I'd take a passing interest in life-extension efforts and throw a few bucks at some of them.

The ones he's chosen are... unusual. The principle? Not so much.

Living Forever

I'm going to live forever and you are too. Yup. All you need is the right technobabble. What you do is combine the anthropic principle with the many worlds theory. The universe is the way it is because it has to be that way for me to be alive and perceiving it. If there are an infinite (or just a sufficiently large enough) number of universes where every possibility unfolds, there's one where through some freak but nevertheless physically possible coincidence I turn out to be immortal. Clearly that's the branch of the universe my existence will necessarily have to follow. Granted, life might suck a few million years from now, but I won't have a choice but to keep on collapsing the old waveforms for the sake of the universe. And, of course, it goes without saying you all are pretty lucky that I was born. Those of you who were born before me, you don't count. My ancestors in particular.

Someday we'll conquer aging

And unfortunately it means bastards like Thiel will be around forever. Hopefully we both kick it before that happens.

Good times if you can afford it

This isn't going to make him live forever -- it's just going to make the present more pleasent.

Death is caused by heart failure subsequent to arteriosclerosis, or cancer, or car accidents, or stuff like that.

On the other hand, blood transfusion affects your steroid levels (better knees, back, and eyesight), and oxygenation levels (makes old people smarter, quicker, and more alive).

For whatever reason, he's going with blook transfusions instead of injectable steriods and EPO. If I was insanely rich, I might do the same.

Around every rich idiot there are people with good ideas to separate him from his money...

He might want to live forever, but he'll probably die trying.

He has the wrong name for a vampire, though. Aubrey de Grey, though - that just screams vampire name to me.

If you're looking at oblivion & have a billion in the bank...

It must be tempting, perhaps even compelling... Such is the fear of dying / aging.... A while back I wrote a screenplay about billionaires doing experiments on 3rd world kids hoping to find the 'elixir of youth'. Still looking to get it made into a film, but reality & fiction meet once again I guess...

Perpetual life will arrive too late for Thiel...

.....But for the children of Paypal, Google, FB, MS, Apple, Amazon founders, it is a possibility....

.....Certainly some kind of extended life. Imagine the dynasties of Wall-Street / Silicon-Valley easy money dominating every aspect of life. All little Dorian Gray's....

.....I have to work because there is no early retirement for the forgotten working middle class... Certainly no way to grow that kind of wealth or escape taxes etc. So live well for now I say.... I'm glad I won't be around to see this....

Wow. I guess VCs really ARE blood sucking parasites.

So what to do with Mr Thiel

Stake through the heart (if you can find it), hail of silver bullets or cut off the head?

Actually there is hard science behind this

They did a trial on mice where they found that infusing old mice with young mice's' blood got rid of age related markers in the blood, and seemed to rejuvenate the mice. Made them healthier and lice longer too.

There's also some science to suggest that aging has a lot to do with the robustness of your mitochondria, the 'factories' in your cells that process energy and create proteins that the cells need. A quick way to imp[rove those is to take L-Glycine, available at Amazon or your local health food store.

Eerily reminiscent of Bug Jack Barron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_Jack_Barron

Prior art?

Didn't Keith Richards do something similar years ago...basically getting all of his blood replaced?

I've often wondered whether vampires like stuffing themselves with black puddings.

What Peter Thiel is referring to is called Parabiosis and the evidence suggests young blood is beneficial but Peter is not that old. More interesting is Aubrey De Grey because one of the things he considers a vital area of research is senescent cell removal and the evidence very much supports him see http://www.nature.com/news/destroying-worn-out-cells-makes-mice-live-longer-1.19287