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Tech billionaires are trying to live forever – Renowned physicist says it's a waste of time

2026-09-21 22:00:25Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Tech billionaires are trying to live forever – Renowned physicist says
Jim Al-Khalili

From plasma transfusions to supplements, extreme diets and peptide injections, the quest for a longer life has become a multi-billion dollar industry.

Some of the tech world's wealthiest people are investing huge sums in research and treatments aimed at slowing aging and, in the most radical versions, pushing the limits of human lifespan.

But British physicist Jim Al-Khalili thinks there's a problem with this whole effort.

According to him, the search for immortality is a waste of time.

Al-Khalili, a professor of theoretical physics and one of Britain's most renowned science communicators, has made this argument ahead of his upcoming Royal Institution lectures.

Their theme is time.

And to a physicist, time is much stranger than the way we experience it in everyday life.

We think that time moves equally for everyone: a second is a second and the past is gone, the present is here, while the future has not yet happened.

But Albert Einstein's theory of relativity changed this idea.

Time can pass at different rates depending on speed and gravity.

A clock that is moving very fast or is in a different gravitational field does not necessarily measure time in the same way as another clock.

The effect is very small in ordinary life, but it is real and measurable.

For Al-Khalili, these scientific questions are also related to a very human question: why are we so afraid of the fact that our time is limited?

He argues that the very limit of life is one of the things that gives it meaning.

If time were infinite, the urgency to love, create, travel, learn, or spend time with the people we love might not have the same weight.

This does not mean that science should give up on efforts to extend healthy lives.

There's a big difference between seeking to prevent age-related diseases and trying to live forever.

But the obsession with immortality, according to the physicist, risks distracting us from a much more important reality: the time we have now.

In his lectures, Al-Khalili will also address one of the greatest mysteries of physics: why time seems to only move in one direction.

The fundamental laws of physics do not always make the distinction between the past and the future as clear as our everyday experience.

Yet we remember the past, not the future. A glass may fall and break, but we do not see its pieces spontaneously come together and fall back onto the table.

This is known as the "arrow of time".

Al-Khalili has announced that during the lectures he will also propose his own way of explaining this problem.

It will also talk about time travel, which in some mathematical scenarios of physics is not as absurd as it sounds, although it creates major paradoxes and does not mean that there is a time machine that we can use.

In the end, between Einstein's physics and billionaires' efforts to combat aging, Al-Khalili's message is much simpler:

Instead of wasting our lives searching for a way to never die, it might make more sense to understand and appreciate the time we have.


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