More Everything Forever; Review

The Oldest Promise, Repackaged

Adam Becker says Silicon Valley is selling an old religion. The billionaires pitch eternal life and a galaxy full of our own descendants, and the whole package is the promise of heaven with the serial numbers filed off. Becker makes his case by walking back to where the dream actually starts, and the start is stranger than you would guess.

In the nineteenth century a Russian librarian named Nikolai Fedorov taught that science had a moral duty, and he meant it literally. Science was supposed to resurrect every person who ever died and then resettle all of them among the stars. His student Konstantin Tsiolkovsky worked out the math of rocketry partly to make the 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 colonize Mars. More Everything Forever follows that oldest promise, eternal life in a perfect world, as it gets restated in engineering language and funded with venture money.

Becker has a doctorate in astrophysics and works as a science journalist, and you can see both on the page. The scientist checks the claims while the writer keeps them readable. He follows the dream from the Russian cosmists up to Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who pictured every human mind fusing into one planetary consciousness and merging with God.

Then he brings it all into the present. Kate Crawford and Meghan O'Gieblyn had already made the case that these dreams are Christian ideas told in scientific language, with mind-uploading standing in for resurrection and the dream of heaven in orbit carried over almost unchanged. What Becker adds to their work is the demolition. He takes the claims seriously and then he checks the math under them.

The Thesis

Becker calls it the ideology of technological salvation, and the sales line sits right in the title. More everything, forever. The vision is trillions of functionally immortal people spread across the galaxy with superintelligent machines tending them, and it gets sold as the one acceptable future, usually as an inevitable one too.

His answer is plain and unsentimental: there is no good evidence any of this will come to pass, and even less that it should. The visions rest on a layer of shallow futurism, and under that layer sit strands of eugenic and frankly racist pseudoscience, the kind believers rarely examine, because a close look would spoil the dream.

The belief cluster even carries a clumsy academic label, the TESCREAL bundle that Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres assembled. Their acronym packs seven overlapping movements into one word, with transhumanism at one end of it and longtermism at the other. Becker mostly leaves the label on the shelf, which is the right call, since he would rather show you the people and the claims than hand you a wall of jargon.

The thread he keeps pulling is insularity. The same faces recycle and the same ideas get repackaged and shipped out again, so a small, well-funded circle keeps talking to itself and calling the result a consensus about where the species is headed.

Where It Lands

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

The Kurzweil chapter is the high point. Becker is generous about where the obsession comes from, because Ray Kurzweil lost his father young and built a whole philosophy around the day technology would finally beat death. Then the checking starts. The Singularity rides on a misreading of Moore's Law as proof that progress speeds up forever.

Becker shows the speed-up is partly a trick of memory, since we recall past invention on a squeezed, logarithmic scale, and the inverse of an exponential is a logarithm. Every exponential trend ends, Moore's own included, exactly the way Gordon Moore himself said it would.

Longtermism gets the same treatment, and earns it. The rationalists put invented probabilities into their math so the reasoning looks like science, then run the numbers until they produce a straight-faced verdict. Fund 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 sliver of a chance at 10^52 people who might exist in the deep future, and that trade tells you what the movement actually values while real people need help right now.

Becker walks you through Trajan House in Oxford, the address that William MacAskill and Toby Ord share with Nick Bostrom. MacAskill wrote the best-known book on our obligations to the future, and he also vouched for Sam Bankman-Fried in the months right before FTX collapsed.

The Mars chapter stands next to Zach and Kelly Weinersmith's A City on Mars, and both books add up the sober reasons Elon Musk's colony is not landing this century. The soil is laced with toxic perchlorates, and the radiation never lets up. On top of that, human bodies come apart in low gravity.

Becker also goes after Sam Altman. With Ilya Sutskever, Altman floated the idea that a powerful enough superintelligence would simply solve climate change. You would ask it for cheap clean energy, then hand it the job of capturing the carbon and building the planet-scale factory to do both. Altman is confident enough in that plan to gamble the real climate on it, and the machine he is counting on does not exist.

On StarTalk in Nov 25, across the desk from Neil deGrasse Tyson, Becker laid out his method. He read the predictions and carried each one to the experts who actually work that field. When he asked the CEOs themselves to defend the claims, he got stonewalled.

Where It Misses

The honest weakness is economics. Becker ends on one policy, a 100% tax on wealth above $500 million, and the logic is sound: without the money, the fringe stays fringe and these dreams never take over the conversation. The moral clarity is bracing, but he argues the tax in a single paragraph and moves on. He is sharper at diagnosing how concentrated wealth warps science and culture than at showing what a real redistribution would do or survive, and a reader who wants to see the mechanism never gets to see 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 the floor on its own terms. He is fair to Kurzweil the man, and fair to the pull of the dream, but the e/acc and rationalist arguments mostly show up already set up to be knocked down. A skeptic will enjoy the book, and a true believer will find it easy to wave off. The science holds either way.

The Trades View

Here is the move the book gestures at and never quite lands, and I think it matters most. The religion is doing real work, and the work is conversion. The way you raise a fortune and turn public attention toward living forever and paving the galaxy is by promising salvation, because salvation is the one offer that has always moved people to give up everything they own. The promise of forever is what pulls the money in the door.

And the cost lands here, on the only world we actually have, among the people who keep it running. That is the part the believers cannot afford to look at straight on.

Every dollar and every hour of real attention poured into immortality and Mars gets pulled out of the upkeep of the world we already live in. That upkeep means the grid staying up and the water still running, 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 in.

The money economy is very good at capturing the value of that labor without ever naming it, and longtermism perfects the trick. It discounts living people down to nearly zero against a fantasy population, which is an old way of taking value from the people who make it, now defended with arithmetic.

The tradition Becker really stands in runs back through the naturalists and the transcendentalists. John Muir insisted this world is already enough, and Thoreau said most of what we chase is a way of avoiding where we already are.

The billionaires keep drawing a line between this fallen world and the perfect one they are selling, and the line does not survive a steady look. No other world is coming, so the upkeep of this one is the work that counts. That is why the wealth cap, underbuilt as it is, still points the right way.

Carl Sagan made the same point in Pale Blue Dot, that every person who ever lived, lived here, with no rescue inbound from anywhere, and Becker closes near the same place. None of this has to end in despair. The answer to the sales pitch is smaller and slower than the pitch, and it is already real. It looks like neighbors keeping things repaired and running, and like people who own their work and answer for it.

Verdict

Read it. Becker has drawn the clearest map yet of how a handful of very rich men turned an ancient longing into an investment thesis, and he did it with rare discipline, taking the believers seriously before he took them apart. Pair it with the news any given week and it will help you tell a sales pitch from a plan.