Most books I’ve seen about “life extension” and immortality are written by advocates of various ways of living much longer, or even forever. These include Ray Kurzweil, the noted tech guru, and Dave Asprey, the inventor of “bulletproof coffee”, among many others. But this book is different. Ward is a skeptic — quite hostile to Asprey but more open to some of the others, including Aubrey de Grey, whose scientific credentials he doesn’t challenge. The book begins with cryonics — the freezing of dead bodies in the hope of eventual resuscitation in the future — and continues through various other ideas, such as ‘uploading’ one’s brain. Research in slowing (or even reversing) ageing in some living creatures is quite intriguing. Kurzweil and others have put forward the idea of ‘escape velocity’ for ageing, arguing that anyone who can survive another 20 or 30 years might find medical breakthroughs then give them a few more years, and this process repeats until they live indefinitely. Though not yet tested or proven, it’s an intriguing idea.