Tech billionaires attempting to live for ever are, quite literally, wasting their time, a leading physicist has said. While some normal people are turning to unregulated peptide injections, cold plunges and supplements in an effort to defy ageing, the ultra-rich are aiming for immortality with even more drastic interventions: the tech chief executive Bryan Johnson has even tried injecting plasma from his 17-year-old son – although he later said he saw no benefit from it. Prof Jim Al-Khalili, who will be giving this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures on the topic of time, has said people expending their energy on trying to live for ever may be missing out on the here and now.
And the more I study the nature of time, the more I think about it, the more I realise that I just want to make the most of the time that I have,” he said. If I spend that blink of an eye trying to extend it to two blinks of an eye, I’m not sure if that is actually a worthwhile thing to be spending my life doing.” Al-Khalili has long been fascinated by time. As a child he was baffled when his father, an engineer, said no one really understood what time was.
And you’ll say, no, actually, five seconds have gone by. You’re doing everything in slow motion.” Gravity, he added, had an effect too. Al-Khalili says that according to Einstein all times coexist – past, present and future – in the same way as all points in space exist.
That maybe we can join with people, someone from the past, someone from the future. But of course, in relativity, that means time travel.” Time travel is another topic Al-Khalili plans to explore in the Christmas lectures. The reality, however, is a little more complicated – akin to travelling a rollercoaster’s loop-the-loop.
It’s the same sort of thing [with time travel]. What’s called a closed time-like curve in relativity, is somewhere in space-time which is so warped and curved by gravity that you’re travelling what you regard as forward in time, but in fact you’re looping back through space-time to a moment before you started,” he said. But now he thinks he has the answer: for those who tune in.
I have solved the problem of the arrow of time.” The Christmas lectures from the Royal Institution supported by CGI will be broadcast on the BBC and iPlayer in late December
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