Why Death Makes Us Human

I. Debugging Death

At dawn in Venice Beach, Bryan Johnson swallows his 111 pills with monk-like devotion. His kitchen counter gleams with stainless steel containers, biometric monitors, and precision scales. A wall screen displays his liver enzymes and arterial elasticity as if they were stock tickers. On his head: a laser helmet, beaming red light into his scalp. Next to his bed: a device tracking his nightly erections, scored like sleep cycles (Vance, 2023). For breakfast he eats a slurry of ground-up superfoods measured to the calorie. Exactly 1,977 per day. No more, no less.

To Johnson, a cookie is not a treat. It is, as he once told a reporter, “an act of violence against my future self.”

The forty-six-year-old entrepreneur, who made his fortune selling a payments company, has already poured millions into Project Blueprint, his effort to halt — and perhaps reverse — biological aging. His goal is not merely to live longer but to never die at all. He believes death is optional, and he intends to be the proof.

Johnson is not alone in his defiance. Silicon Valley, having disrupted books, taxis, and dating, has turned its gaze toward the oldest problem of all: mortality. Ray Kurzweil, longtime futurist and now Principal Researcher at Google, predicts that by the 2030s humans will merge with AI, upload their minds, and live in digital eternity. He swallows hundreds of supplements daily in what he calls “bridge therapy” — the attempt to stay alive long enough for technology to finish the job. Elon Musk speculates that Neuralink, his brain-computer startup, might someday let us back up our consciousness like a hard drive. Effective Altruists — that rationalist sect of utilitarian mathematicians — debate whether curing death is humanity’s highest moral project.

In Arizona, cryonics companies warehouse frozen bodies and heads, suspended in liquid nitrogen, waiting for science to reanimate them. Visitors describe the facility like "a cross between a morgue and a server farm": stainless steel tanks, frost in the air, silence except for the hum of machinery (Howley, 2016). Rows of patients who believed enough in tomorrow to buy tickets for it.

Out west, in the crisp California light, death has been rebranded as a design flaw.

But what if death is not a flaw at all? What if it is the very feature that makes consciousness possible?

II...

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