More Everything Forever; Review

What It's About

Adam Becker says Silicon Valley is selling an old religion. The billionaires pitch eternal life and a galaxy filled with our descendants, and the package repeats the promise heaven has always made. Becker makes his case by walking back to where the dream starts, and the start is stranger than you would guess.

In the 1800s a Russian librarian named Nikolai Fedorov taught that science had a moral duty, and he meant it literally. Science was supposed to bring back every person who ever died, then resettle all of them among the stars. His student Konstantin Tsiolkovsky worked out the math of rocketry partly to make that resurrection possible. Once you have met Fedorov you keep seeing him. The same promise now drives Ray Kurzweil's countdown to immortality and Elon Musk's long push to put a colony on Mars.

Becker holds a doctorate in astrophysics and works as a science journalist, and both show on the page. He follows the dream from the Russians up through Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic priest who pictured every human mind merging into one planetary consciousness. Then he brings it to the present. Kate Crawford and Meghan O'Gieblyn had already argued that these dreams are Christian ideas told in scientific language, with mind-uploading standing in for resurrection. What Becker adds is the checking. He takes the claims seriously, then he runs the math underneath them.

What I Think

Becker names his target the ideology of technological salvation, and the sales line sits in his title. More everything, forever. The vision is trillions of nearly immortal people spread across the galaxy, tended by machines smarter than any of us. It gets sold as the one acceptable future, and usually as an unavoidable one too.

His answer is plain. There is no good evidence any of this will happen, and even less that it should. The visions rest on shallow futurism. Under that layer sit strands of eugenics, the old pseudoscience of breeding better humans. The believers rarely examine those roots, because a close look would spoil the dream.

The belief cluster even carries an academic label. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres bundled seven overlapping movements into one acronym they call TESCREAL. It runs from transhumanism at one end to longtermism at the other. Becker mostly skips the label, which is the right call. He would rather show you the people and the claims than hand you jargon. The pattern he keeps returning to is insularity. A small, well-funded circle keeps talking to itself and calling the result a consensus about where the species is headed.

What It Gets Right

The book pulls off a hard trick. It takes unserious ideas seriously, without mocking them and without going soft. Becker reads the believers more closely than they read themselves. He lays each claim out in its strongest form, and only then does he show why it fails.

The Kurzweil chapter is the high point. Becker is generous about where the obsession comes from. Ray Kurzweil lost his father young and built a whole philosophy around the day technology would beat death. He calls that day the Singularity, the moment machines out-think people and progress takes off on its own. Then the checking starts. The Singularity rests on a misreading of Moore's Law, the observation that computer chips doubled in power every couple of years. Becker shows the endless speed-up is partly a trick of memory, because we recall past invention on a squeezed scale. Every trend of that kind ends, and the chip trend ended exactly the way Gordon Moore himself said it would.

Longtermism gets the same treatment and earns it. Longtermism is the belief that helping enormous future populations matters more than helping people alive today. Its backers put invented probabilities into their math so the reasoning looks like science, then run the numbers until they produce a straight-faced verdict. Fund artificial intelligence (AI) safety research, the output says, and you do trillions of times more good than handing out malaria nets. The same arithmetic says something worse. A billion people suffering today weigh less than a small chance at a future population written as a one followed by 52 zeros. That trade tells you what the movement values, while real people need help right now.

Becker walks the reader through Trajan House in Oxford, the office that William MacAskill and Toby Ord share with Nick Bostrom, the movement's leading philosophers. MacAskill wrote the best-known book on our duties to the future. He also vouched for Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto executive, in the months before Bankman-Fried's exchange FTX collapsed and took its customers' money with it.

The Mars chapter stands beside Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's book A City on Mars, and the two add up the same sober facts. Martian soil is full of perchlorates, salts that poison people. The radiation never lets up, and human bodies come apart in low gravity. The colony is not landing this century.

Becker also checks Sam Altman. With his colleague Ilya Sutskever, Altman floated the idea that a strong enough machine intelligence would simply solve climate change. Ask it for cheap clean energy, then hand it the job of pulling carbon out of the sky. Altman is confident enough in that plan to gamble the real climate on it, and the machine he is counting on does not exist.

The method behind all this came out on StarTalk, the science show Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts, in Nov 25. Becker read the predictions, then carried each one to the experts who work that exact field. When he asked the executives themselves to defend the claims, they refused to talk.

What It Gets Wrong

The honest weakness is economics. Becker ends on one policy, a 100 percent tax on wealth above 500 million dollars. The logic is sound. Without the money, the fringe stays fringe, and these dreams never take over the conversation. But he argues the tax in a single paragraph and moves on. He is sharper at showing how concentrated wealth bends science and culture than at showing how a real redistribution would work. A reader who wants the mechanism never gets it.

The other limit is the audience. Becker writes for readers already uneasy with the tech aristocracy, so the strongest version of the believers' case rarely gets a fair turn. He is fair to Kurzweil the man and fair to the pull of the dream. But the pro-acceleration crowd, the people who want the machines built as fast as possible, mostly show up already positioned to lose. A skeptic will enjoy the book. A true believer will find it easy to dismiss. The science holds either way.

What I'd Add

Here is the move the book points at and never quite makes, and I think it matters most. The religion is doing real work, and the work is fundraising. Salvation is the one offer that has always moved people to hand over everything they own. The promise of forever is what brings the money in.

The cost lands here, on the only world we actually have, among the people who keep it running. Every dollar and every hour of attention poured into immortality and Mars comes out of the upkeep of the world we already live in. Upkeep means the grid staying energized and the water staying clean, and it gets done by people who touch the physical world for a living. The same work keeps the soil good enough to grow food.

The money economy has always been skilled at capturing the value of that labor without naming it, and longtermism completes the job. It discounts living people down to nearly zero against an imaginary future population. That is an old way of taking value from the people who make it, now defended with arithmetic.

The tradition Becker really stands in is older than Silicon Valley. John Muir, the naturalist who fought for the national parks, insisted this world is already enough. Henry David Thoreau wrote that most of what we chase is a way of avoiding where we already are. The billionaires keep drawing a line between this flawed world and the perfect one they are selling. The line does not survive a steady look. No other world is coming. The upkeep of this one is the work that counts. That is why the wealth cap, thin as Becker leaves it, still points the right way.

Carl Sagan said it in Pale Blue Dot: every person who ever lived, lived here, and no rescue is coming from anywhere. Becker closes near the same spot, and without despair. The answer to the sales pitch is smaller and slower than the pitch, and it already exists. It looks like neighbors keeping things repaired and running, and people who own their work and answer for it.

Verdict

Read it. Becker drew the clearest map yet of how a handful of very rich men turned an ancient longing into an investment pitch. He did it with discipline, taking the believers seriously before taking them apart. Keep it next to the news any given week. It will help you tell a sales pitch from a plan.