My dear reader, splendid news! You can stop dithering over whether to scrape by as a barista or a binman. The planet is recruiting. Positions for “God” have just opened up — and this isn’t some metaphorical HR fluff. The practical phase is underway. The sole entry requirement? Immortality. All it takes is a casual ten billion in loose change to bag your spot in “Olympus 2.0”.
No billions? Then do read on. It may, in its small way, help you come to terms with your distinctly mortal lot.
Take your time. Weigh it up honestly. Some of these questions prod at nerves so raw one hesitates to touch them. Yet touch them we must. The fantasy is no longer fantasy. By posing these apparently “silly” questions now, we might just stop the whole rickety edifice from toppling in an embarrassing heap.
A decade ago, immortality or radical life extension sounded like the ravings of basement-dwelling sci-fi nerds or wide-eyed transhumanist cultists. How wrong we were. We underestimated the sheer, icy determination of the old money and old power crowd. They may not boast many great thinkers, but they have cunning and will in industrial quantities. The moment biologists and cyberneticists produced anything promising, it was quietly scooped up by the right pair of iron fists.
Now we have the leaders of two superpowers murmuring about pushing lifespans to 150, while others muse over mind-uploading, cloning, and swapping brains like hard drives. The order for eternal life has been placed — and it’s being fulfilled at warp speed. Ethics? Nobody asked.
For the rest of us, eternal life remains the stuff of ancient witchcraft. But the insiders have dropped the scepticism and are now doing proper cost-benefit sums. Make no mistake: this isn’t for the great unwashed. We’re talking about a handful of Very Important Individuals getting the upgrade. Why ever not? The planetary Olympus is already built. The gods sit enthroned, hurling thunderbolts at the malcontents. They simply lacked the staying power of the old Olympians. Toss in immortality and — voilà — they can finally rule forever.
The Hypocrisy of the “Biological Spacesuit”
It turns out that neither inherited nor embezzled billions, nor near-absolute power over millions, can quite banish the thought of the hearse pulling up. Under the TV lights they troop into cathedrals, light candles, swear on holy books. Yet they’d swap the promise of the hereafter for a few more decades here in a heartbeat.
By throwing their lot in with physical immortality, they either betray the very idea of the immortal soul — or, more brazenly, admit they never believed a word of it. This is a spiritual bankruptcy so complete it almost commands respect. The same elites who spent centuries propping up social order on religious dogmas (including divine judgment) are the first to bin them the instant a tech patch for death appears.
If they’re this desperate to cling to their “biological spacesuit”, it means they see nothing — absolute zilch — waiting beyond the meat. Metaphysical paupers at best; traitors at worst. The hypocrisy will out, and when it does, there will probably be blood. For now, though, the express steams on towards the buffers, cheerfully shunting the mummified corpses of old gods off the line.
The Technique: Building the Private Olympus
Today the world’s sharpest minds toil in secret labs, bankrolled to infinity and beyond. Cloning, mind-uploading — every sci-fi cliché is on the table. We recently heard about ER-100 from Life Biosciences: not a supplement, but “epigenetic reprogramming” to wind back the cellular clock. Clinical trials got the nod in early 2026.
The line-up reads like a who’s-who of hubris: Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Sam Altman’s Retro Biosciences, Jeff Bezos-backed Altos Labs (history’s priciest start-up). Peter Thiel, high priest of anti-ageing, pours money into the Methuselah Foundation. Rumours of his young-blood transfusions (parabiosis) sound less like science and more like Gothic vampire oligarch fanfic. Meanwhile, Google’s Ray Kurzweil assures us nanobots will be hoovering up cellular damage by the 2030s.
Politicians are scrambling to keep pace. “Longevity” is now a formal agenda item. Davos 2026 made the “Longevity Economy” a headline act. While they publicly fret about pension reform, the real action happens at closed-door “Longevity Investors Lunches” where the tech is divvied up for the elect.
One almost feels sorry for the scientists. At Madrid’s CNIO, Maria Blasco and her team chase telomere secrets to beat cancer for all humanity — only for their breakthroughs to be repurposed as blueprints for private Elysiums. What should have been humanity’s shared inheritance is being turned into the ultimate wedge for social fracture.
The End of the Universal Leveler
Death has always been the great leveller. Emperors and peasants alike got the same appointment. It reconciled the poor to the existence of the rich. Everyone carried a one-way ticket in their soul’s inside pocket.
But if you can’t reroute the train for everybody, why not pull the oldest trick in the book — simply cross your own name off the manifest? Modern tech has made the dodge credible. Let the plebs enjoy Chopin’s Funeral March on repeat.
Life Without Death
Human attachment to this world rests on the fear of leaving it. As Berdyaev put it: the utopias of earthly paradise are built on denying immortality, on disbelief in it, on a greedy lust for this miserable scrap of life and its toys. Religions have long used the next world as the ultimate disciplinary tool. Remove death, and you remove civilisation’s brakes.
The End of Stability
Extract that one stabilising element from the system and watch what happens. A citizen buries half his family over forty years, then sees the same politician — barely altered — still droning from the podium since his own youth. Thirty more years, the citizen will be dust, and the politician will still be droning.
“Ah well,” thinks the citizen, “it’s rotten, but we’ll settle accounts There.” And then… this.
“A nice yarn,” the reader may shrug, “but you’re surely exaggerating?” I don’t think so. The numbers don’t lie. Over the last century we’ve gone from leaders dying in harness at a decent age to what can only be called biological secession.
1920s–1950s: Biological Honesty. Leaders died of the same things as everyone else. Average exit age: 60–70 (Stalin, Lenin, Roosevelt). Death was egalitarian.
1960s–1990s: Golden Stagnation. Elite medicine kicks in. Average: 75–83. The USSR’s funeral-carriage relay (Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko) was nature’s last mass outing.
2000s–present: Biological Departure. Leader deaths are now statistical anomalies. Average: 90+. Carter (100+), Elizabeth II (96), Kissinger (100). We no longer worry they’ll die too soon; we worry they’ll never die at all.
This is medical apartheid. The elite has quietly ascended to a different biological plane and forgotten to tell the electorate. Biology, once the guarantor of power rotation, is now its preserver.
The Nemesis
People may forgive ill-gotten riches. They will never forgive inequality in the right to life itself. Commodifying immortality will shred every last moral norm. The prospect of a few billion humans suddenly brake-free is properly horrifying.
The old gods are dead and buried. The new ones — Davos presidents and Silicon Valley immortals-in-waiting — are grotesque pastiche. Why aren’t the elites terrified of dynamiting civilisation’s foundations? Because they’ve already prepared the riot gear for the fallout, I suspect.
Still, as one of the mere mortals stuck down here, I harbour a slender, sardonic hope: that these new Olympians — who recognise no old myths, no rules, no reverence beyond their latest term sheet — will nonetheless discover the one ancient clause they never bothered to remember. Hubris invokes Nemesis whether you credit the old stories or not. She arrives anyway, punctual and uninvited, to remind pretenders that eternity remains a gift from the true gods, never a line item on some billionaire’s shopping list. And she most certainly doesn’t take Amex.
