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Bruce Klein founded The Immortality Institute (Imminst) in 2002 as a non-profit organisation with the aim of ‘conquering the blight of involuntary death’. Klein was brought up in the town of Americus, ‘a jewel of Georgia’, in Bible Belt America, the deep south. ‘Yeah, I’m a southern redneck!’ he jokes. His family was not especially religious, though he did observe the Catholicism of his mother until the age of eleven when he took a phone call from their priest. ‘I said to him I didn’t believe any more. He got kind of upset and I hung up the phone. It was some kind of visceral thing.’

Klein was thirty-one when I met him at Imminst’s conference at the Georgia Tech Conference Center, Atlanta, in November 2005. The conference turned out to be a snapshot of the immortalist front line. It is a movement that is part cult and part serious science. But all were united by the fervency of their belief in the rightness of the project of extending life and by their vehement rejection of deathism and scepticism. The participants saw themselves as visionaries and frequently beleaguered pioneers of the only new frontier left to mankind. Klein is a groomed, fit-looking man. His wife and ‘wonderful friend’, Susan Fonseca-Klein, co-founder and director of the institute, is round-faced and pretty. Together, they have the air not of a threateningly glamorous but of a consolingly ideal couple – young, healthy, good-natured, extravagantly friendly, ambitious, optimistic, glowing. One could imagine them in an advertisement for breakfast cereal.

Most of their work is involved with running Imminst, though Klein does say he manages some property and investments. His degree from the University of Georgia is in finance. He had just moved from Atlanta to Bethesda, Maryland. He is also president of Bethesda-based Novamente, a small firm devoted to the construction and commercialisation of the Novamente AI Engine, an ‘artifical general intelligence oriented software system’, and he wished to be closer to that project and its presiding thinker Ben Goertzel.

Goertzel, who was also at the conference, is aggressively scruffy with tangled, heavy metal hair and jeans barely clinging to his hips. As he queued to ask a question of one of the speakers, I took him for a bum who had wandered in off the empty downtown streets and was preparing myself for an embarrassing incident culminating in his ejection from the hall. In fact, he was himself a speaker and a maths professor, though whatever normality that implies is swiftly detonated by the discovery that his first son is named Zarathustra Amadeus and his second Zebulon Ulysses. The more restrained Klein is, in spite of his wife’s protests, putting off having children until he has made the world ‘a safer place’, ideally by banishing death.

Along with increasing numbers of people in the immortality field, Klein believes artificial intelligence may be the best way forward, hence his new partnership with Goertzel. There are two possibilities arising from AI. Either a super-intelligent computer could master the medical problems of human ageing that currently baffle us or, more speculatively, we could back-up our personalities by downloading them on to such a machine.

Imminst has been highly successful. It is primarily webbased – you can find it at www.imminst.org – and the quality and responsiveness of its site is extremely high. The moment I joined, some months before the conference, I was (electronically) welcomed by Klein and invited to host a web chat, which I did rather sleepily between one and two in the morning. Atlanta is five hours behind my house in Stiffkey, Norfolk.

Within the context of the pursuit of immortality, Imminst fills a gap in a very crowded field. Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Cryonics Institute in Clinton, Michigan, specialise in advocating and practising the deep freezing of people immediately after death in the hope that they can be revived by superior medical technology at some point in the future. The Extropy Institute and the World Transhumanist Association focus on all the ways in which we can technologically transcend our biological condition. In Silicon Valley, California, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence pursues the AI route, particularly studying the ways in which we could guarantee the ‘friendliness’ of any such machine. SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) follows a tightly focused medical programme defined by Aubrey de Grey, a scientist based in Cambridge in the UK. The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine seeks to push the boundaries of mainstream medicine in the direction of increased longevity. The Methuselah Foundation primarily runs the Mprize aimed at encouraging research into increasing longevity in mice. And so on. But only Imminst acts as an open-minded forum for all ideas about increasing human longevity. It is neither general like Extropy nor specific like Alcor, SENS or the Singularity Institute, it is simply concerned with the pursuit of human immortality by whatever means seem most promising.

Why? Because, says Klein, ‘oblivion is the issue’. He says: ‘I came to a point about five years ago where I realised I can’t do all of this unless I’m alive . . . The thing that human beings, I think, are evolved to do is put the issue of oblivion to one side. What I try to do is address that problem with writings, with film scripts and the thing is not only to address it but to provide a solution, the solution of infinite life span.’

He speaks, as does everybody in this business, of the 150,000 people who die in the world every day, 100,000 of them from the diseases of old age. For him, this is not acceptably explained as the natural order of things, rather it is a disaster to which we are called to respond.

‘I call it the Silent Tsunami, every day more than 100,000 people die quietly and acceptingly, saying their time has come or some other euphemism. But, with a real tsunami, they say this is a tragedy, we must do things to prevent this in the future.’

Most people who have become immortalists do so because of this paradox. We are horrified by the millions of deaths caused by wars or natural disasters. Humanely, we are determined, in the present, to help and, in the future, to do what we can to prevent such things happening again. But, on the other hand, confronted by this other daily carnage, this background slaughter, we pass by on the other side, uncaring, almost unnoticing except when we or those we know are involved.

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