According to reports from telegraph, billionaire Peter Thiel is on a mission to cheat death. Will he succeed? Read more details below according to the telegraph of the UK.....
The co-founder of PayPal and likely the most successful venture capitalist in Silicon Valley is on a mission to change the world through technology – and to find a cure for death.
An hour into my conversation with Peter Thiel the conversation turns, as it seems conversations with Thiel often do, to the question of death. ‘Basically,’ Thiel says earnestly, ‘I’m against it.’
Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was the first outside investor in Facebook, is probably the most successful – and certainly the most interesting – venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He lists among his passions chess, the works of Tolkien and ‘intellectual conversations with friends’. And what he calls ‘the problem of death’ is a topic that he returns to often. ‘I think there are probably three main modes of approaching it,’ he says. ‘You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it.’
The long history of mankind, I say, suggests this might be a losing battle.
‘But I still think we should not go gently into that good night…’
Thiel is an amiable, softly spoken man who gives the impression of thinking out loud. Questions are frequently greeted with a series of ‘ums… aahs… I think… let me put it this way…’, beginning a thought, stopping, trying another, and then another, as if he is testing the best way to be as precise as he can possibly be. ‘Hobbes said that in the state of nature life is nasty, brutish and short,’ he says. ‘And, um, I do think we want to overcome the state of nature. It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they’ve made their peace with death. In some ways it’s a microcosm of the whole complacency of the Western world. I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I’d like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.’
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