Physicist Al-Khalili: Billionaires chasing immortality are 'wasting their time'

Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist preparing to deliver the 2026 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on BBC platforms, has a blunt assessment of how some of the world's wealthiest people are spending their money: they are wasting it, and more importantly, wasting the one thing no amount of wealth can buy back—time itself.

The lectures will center on time as a subject, and in previewing them, Al-Khalili seized on the current obsession among billionaires with extreme life extension as a teaching moment about something more fundamental than physics. He pointed to tech executive Bryan Johnson, who has pursued dramatic anti-aging interventions including plasma injections from his teenage son—a treatment that ultimately proved ineffective. For Al-Khalili, such examples raise a question that goes beyond science: what are people actually choosing to do with their finite existence?

The costs of chasing immortality are staggering. Anti-aging products, supplements, and experimental treatments can drain enormous sums while delivering little in the way of proven results. For most households, this kind of spending creates real financial strain on top of already substantial health care expenses. Yet the pursuit continues, driven by the conviction that enough money and enough experimentation might unlock the secret to living forever—or at least, living much longer.

Al-Khalili's counterargument is philosophical but grounded in physics. "We have a finite interval of time in which we exist in the universe," he said. "And the more I study the nature of time, the more I think about it, the more I realise that I just want to make the most of the time that I have." He framed the billionaire quest for immortality as fundamentally misguided: spending a blink of an eye trying to extend it to two blinks of an eye may not be a worthwhile use of that blink at all.

The lectures themselves will tackle some of physics' deepest puzzles—why time appears to move in only one direction, what Einstein discovered about how gravity shapes the passage of time, and whether time travel is theoretically possible. These are genuine scientific questions. But they also serve as a backdrop for a more practical observation: that for most people, living longer and better has little to do with science fiction interventions and everything to do with ordinary, unglamorous choices.

Healthy aging, the evidence suggests, comes from reducing known risks and protecting daily health rather than betting on unproven treatments. That means cutting indoor air pollution, improving ventilation, replacing gas-powered appliances, switching to gentler cleaning products, and reading ingredient labels. It means focusing spending on measures with clear benefits rather than those built on hype. A plant-based diet may improve life expectancy for people with obesity or diabetes. Reducing exposure to forever chemicals and PFAS—substances found in common plastics and industrial products—appears to lower cardiovascular disease risk, particularly in older women.

None of this is revolutionary. None of it requires a billionaire's fortune. What it requires is attention to the ordinary conditions of life: the air we breathe, the food we eat, the chemicals we're exposed to, the habits we build. Al-Khalili's point, delivered as he prepares to discuss the nature of time itself on national television, is that this is where the real work of living well actually happens. The billionaires chasing immortality through plasma and supplements are looking in the wrong direction entirely.