Al-Khalili: Chasing Immortality Is a 'Waste of Time' — SkimNews
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- Prof Jim Al-Khalili says tech billionaires trying to live forever are "wasting their time," arguing humans should focus on making the most of their "finite interval" of existence in the universe.
- Bryan Johnson tried injecting plasma from his 17-year-old son in pursuit of anti-aging but later said he saw no benefit, cited by Al-Khalili as an example of the ultra-rich's extreme interventions.
- Al-Khalili will deliver this year's Royal Institution Christmas lectures on the topic of time, supported by CGI and broadcast on BBC and iPlayer in late December.
- Al-Khalili claims he has "solved the problem of the arrow of time" — why time flows in one direction despite physics equations showing no preferred direction — with details reserved for the lectures.
- Einstein's theory of relativity, Al-Khalili says, shows time runs at different rates depending on speed and the strength of gravity, with stronger gravitational fields slowing time.
- Al-Khalili says time travel to the past is mathematically possible via "closed time-like curves" in space-time so warped by gravity that forward motion loops back on itself, though most physicists consider it impossible due to paradoxes.
- In the film Interstellar, orbiting a supermassive black hole makes every hour equal seven years on Earth — a real physics-grounded route to travelling into the future that Al-Khalili plans to explore.
Why it matters: Al-Khalili's Christmas lectures give a leading physicist a rare mainstream BBC platform to argue that Einstein's relativity makes time far stranger than everyday intuition suggests — and to unveil his own answer to one of physics' longest-standing puzzles, the arrow of time. For viewers, the practical takeaway is his philosophical pitch: the time spent chasing extra blinks of life may itself be the life wasted.
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