Every person who has ever lived has died. 100 billion humans across 300,000 years of the species. Hunter-gatherers, pharaohs, philosophers, scientists; every mind that ever formed a thought about its own mortality. Every one of them faced death with no alternative, no recourse, no technology that could change the outcome. Death was as fixed as gravity.
That is about to change. And the change is so close that the single most important thing you can do right now, more important than your career, your portfolio, your politics, is stay alive for the next four years.
You are probably going to have the option to live forever. As long as you survive the next few years.
The Accelerant
The reason the timeline is years instead of decades comes down to one thing: AI.
AI is the primary driver, and every other longevity advance is downstream of it. Genomics, drug discovery, clinical trial design, protein engineering; all of these are accelerating because AI is accelerating them.
AlphaFold solved protein folding in 2020, a problem that had stalled biologists for 50 years. Proteins fold into complex three-dimensional shapes that determine their function, and predicting those shapes from amino acid sequences alone had been considered one of the grand challenges in biology. DeepMind's system cracked it in months, producing accurate models for over 200 million proteins. That single result handed biologists a map of molecular machinery that would have taken centuries to assemble through traditional methods.
The same class of system is now scanning millions of molecular interactions and surfacing drug candidates in days. Insilico Medicine used AI to identify a novel drug target and design a molecule for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 18 months, a process that historically takes four to six years. The compound is in human clinical trials. Recursion Pharmaceuticals is running automated wet labs where AI designs experiments, robots execute them, and the results feed back into the model. The cycle that used to take a graduate student six months now takes a week.
And AI itself is improving on a curve that makes these early results look primitive. The systems doing drug discovery today are narrow tools, specialized for specific tasks. By 2028, AI agents will be designing experiments, running simulations, and iterating on results autonomously, connecting insights across disciplines that no human researcher could hold in a single mind. By the early 2030s, artificial general intelligence will reason about biology at a level no human can match; not because it is slightly smarter, but because it operates millions of times faster, never forgets, and can run thousands of parallel lines of investigation simultaneously.
Think about what happens after that. A recursively improving superintelligence will treat aging the way we treat software bugs: identify the root cause, implement the fix, verify the result, deploy. You do not build a mind a million times more capable than any human and then fail to cure the thing that kills every human. The Singularity does not merely accelerate longevity research; it makes aging a solved problem.
The Bridge
This creates one imperative: survive long enough for the technology to catch up.
Ray Kurzweil calls it the bridge. The destination has a name: Longevity Escape Velocity. LEV is the point where each year of medical progress adds more than a year of remaining life expectancy. Once you cross that threshold, you are outrunning death faster than it can catch you. The difference between a finite lifespan and an indefinite one comes down to whether you reach that line.
Aubrey de Grey has argued that the first person to live to 1,000 is already alive. Given the pace of AI-accelerated biomedical research, I think he is right. The threshold is close. Probably by 2030.
The interventions that will get you there are not glamorous. Exercise, sleep, nutrition, stress management, regular screening. Metformin, which costs pennies and may slow aging at the cellular level, is in a major clinical trial specifically to test its effects on age-related disease. Rapamycin analogs are showing promise in extending healthy lifespan in animal models and moving into human longevity trials. Senolytics, drugs that clear the senescent cells your body accumulates with age, have moved from laboratory curiosity to human clinical trials in under a decade.
These sound pedestrian next to cellular reprogramming and nanobots. They are also the difference between being alive when those technologies arrive and not.
The math is unforgiving. A heart attack at 52 does not care that senolytics will be widely available in a few years. A cancer caught at stage 4 in 2027 will not benefit from the AI-designed therapy that would have caught it at stage 1 in 2029. A stroke at 60 erases a mind that was three years from never needing to fear stroke again. The bridge is not about radical interventions; it is about not dying of something preventable while the radical interventions are being built.
What Is Already Assembling
The technologies beyond the bridge are not hypothetical. They are in labs, in trials, in preprints.
Yamanaka factors have reversed cellular aging in mice, restoring youthful gene expression to old tissues. David Sinclair's lab at Harvard demonstrated that epigenetic reprogramming can restore vision in aged mice, suggesting aging is not irreversible damage but a loss of cellular information that can be recovered. If aging is information loss, it is recoverable. That reframes the entire problem from managing decline to restoring a backup.
Bryan Johnson's Blueprint protocol has demonstrated, with obsessive transparency, that aggressive intervention can measurably reverse biological aging in a human body. At 47, his measured organ ages are decades younger than his chronological age. He publishes all his protocols, data, and results, creating a roadmap others can follow and iterate on. The value is not just one man's health; it is proof that the direction of biological aging can be reversed with today's tools.
Gene therapies for mitochondrial diseases are already in clinical use. CRISPR-based treatments have been approved for sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. The infrastructure for editing the human genome at scale is being built right now, for other reasons, and it will be repurposed for longevity the moment the targets are identified. AI will identify those targets.
These are early results. They will look primitive within five years. But they are proof of concept for the claim that aging is an engineering problem, not a law of physics.
And if your health is already compromised, there is a backup plan: cryonics. Identity is information encoded in the physical structure of the brain, and cryopreservation halts its degradation. The technology to repair cryopreserved tissue does not exist today; the technology to build it is coming. My father is cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan. I signed up my entire family in 2009, because I could not accept the alternative. For those who may not survive to the threshold, the door is left open.
The Asymmetry
Here is what makes this moment unique in 300,000 years of human history.
If you die in 2028, you lose everything. Not just the remaining decades of a normal lifespan, but centuries and millennia of existence. You miss the Singularity, the end of aging, the expansion into space, the merger with superintelligence. You miss the entire future of consciousness. Every experience, every relationship, every thought you would have had across an indefinite lifespan; erased because you fell short of the finish line by a handful of years.
If you survive to 2030, you likely cross the LEV threshold and survive indefinitely. Death becomes an accident rather than a certainty. Actuarial analysis suggests that eliminating aging would extend the average lifespan to roughly 1,000 years based on current accident rates alone, and that number assumes no further improvements in safety, medicine, or the ability to repair traumatic injury. A post-Singularity civilization will improve all of those.
The window between those two outcomes is four years.
No generation before ours has faced this choice. 100 billion people lived and died with no option. They could rage against death, accept it, build religions to deny it, but they could not avoid it. We are the first generation with a credible path to choosing otherwise. We have one.
The most important thing you can do for your future, for everything you care about, for everyone you love, is unremarkable and urgent: stay alive. The rest is coming faster than you think.
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