In 2016, Zoltan Istvan ran for president of the United States on the ambitious platform of promising to conquer death. He drove a coffin-shaped “immortality bus” canvassing for transhumanism, the movement dedicated to extending human lifespans using technologies such as cryopreservation, mind uploading, body augmentation and genetic manipulation. Though Istvan didn’t make it onto the ballot in a single state, he remained sanguine: his real aim, he said, was for the Transhumanist Party to “change the culture of America.”
Attitudes to death really have changed over the past two decades. The movement to extend life is most popular by far in the US, where nearly a million Covid deaths— the highest toll in the world—led life expectancy to fall by two years during the pandemic.