Your Own Private 1,000 Year Reich

Mixed news for fans of radical life extension: Charles Lindbergh is sort of your posterboy.

Forget aviation hero. On the side, Lindbergh was a Dr Frankenstein figure, who used his mechanical genius to explore the possibility of conquering death – but only for the select few who were considered “worthy” of living forever.

“Beating death was something he thought about his entire life”, says David M Friedman, American author of the new book The Immortalists. “Even as a small child, he couldn’t accept that people had to die. He would ask: ‘Why do you have to die to get to heaven?'”

Even contemporary transhumanists – the name given to those who want to extend human longevity and possibly conquer death – are surprised to hear about Lindbergh’s contribution to machine-assisted life.

“I never knew that”, says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and President of the World Transhumanism Association.

There are three kinds of people in this world of ours — those who think nobody deserves to die, those who think that everybody deserves to die, and those who think that whoever gets to immortality with the firstest and the mostest deserves to live forever. In practice, the number of would-be immortals will always be a subset of the larger world population. In a likely exaggeration, one oft-touted theory holds that there can be only one. But there is no doubt that those among us with radically extended lives will need radically amped-up security arrangements. You’ve got to fight for your right to party eternally.