The tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster, PayPal, and Netscape are pumping billions of dollars into scientific research designed to boost longevity.

Their objective: Developing technology — software programs, algorithms, and big data they used in creating an information revolution — to better understand the human body and develop life-extending medical treatments, The Week reports.

The hope is the funding can help in the rebuilding, regenerating, and reprogramming of patients' organs, limbs, cells, and DNA to allow humans to live longer and better.

The research they are funding aims to discover the longevity secrets of organisms with very long lives; develop microscopic nanobots to fix your body from the inside out; reprogram the DNA you were born with to combat cancer and other disease; and figure out how to digitize the brain based on the theory that the mind could live on after the body dies.

Peter Thiel, who made fortune developing and selling PayPal, suggests these grand efforts to defy mortality represent the “moon shot” of our generation and are well worth funding and exploring.

"If you think you can only do very little and be very incremental, then you'll work only on very incremental things. It's self-fulfilling," said Thiel, who is said to be worth $2.2 billion. "It's those who have an optimism about what can be done who will shape the future."