In July 2024, I flew to a pop-up city named Vitalia that aimed to “make death optional.” Situated in the heart of a special economic zone on Roatan, a Honduran island, Vitalia advertised itself as a place to fast-track drug research outside of America’s burdensome regulatory constraints.The AI-generated pictures I’d seen made it look sleek and futuristic, like a cross between South Beach Miami and The Jetsons. Since its launch seven months before, Vitalia had attracted scientists, entrepreneurs, and crypto enthusiasts—among them longevity guru Bryan Johnson and Balaji S. Srinivasan, the author of The Network State. The special economic zone...