These companies hope to (literally) resurrect the dead: Life extension technologies take on new meaning when religion gets involved.

• Author: Griffin, Elle

"WHAT I WOULD LOVE TO HAVE IS a homeostatic, isometric, self-managing greenhouse that looks into my iris and my retina, takes a blood sample and looks at my breath, checks my toilet assay, and grows the stuff I need for me."

So says David Gobel who, as co-founder of The Methuselah Foundation, hopes to increase the healthy human lifespan.

He's onto something, because in 2000 NASA asked him to create the very same thing--but for space colonies. Searching for a way to grow food that is ideally suited for consumption in space, the aerospace company partnered with The Methuselah Foundation to figure out how to do it, launching a competition to that end in May 2021.

The Deep Space Food Challenge ends in September and will reward the 20 highest-scoring teams $25,000 if they can "create novel and game-changing food technologies or systems that require minimal inputs and maximize safe, nutritious, and palatable food outputs for long-duration space missions, and which have potential to benefit people on Earth."

If NASA hopes this challenge will result in the ability to feed four astronauts living in outer space for three years, The Methuselah Foundation hopes that, as a byproduct of creating this garden of the future, we will also be able to biologically engineer food that will help human beings live longer, healthier lives.

ETERNAL LIFE

I wrote about startups on the quest to increase the human lifespan before, but after publishing an article for Utah Business entitled "This startup was after immortality-then COVID killed it"--I quickly learned the subject matter wasn't done with me yet.

Shortly after publishing the article, a number of longevity enthusiasts, startup founders, and venture capitalists reached out to me excited by the prospect of living to 120 and beyond--and wanting to correct my theory that the pandemic had done something to eradicate that desire. Quite the opposite, they assured me.

"People who hit a certain level of wealth come to the realization that they can't buy everything--they can't buy this protection from aging. So they're going to continue to pour billions of dollars into that research because it's the thing that will elude them forever," says Dalton Wright, partner at Kickstart Fund.

"But I think that what I'm seeing is that it's going to be an insatiable thirst right now. And it's going to continue to attract significant capital as evidence comes out that there are things that you can do to extend your lifespan."

As an...