Current State of Play
Let’s talk about immortality. Is it possible anytime soon? How will it be possible? Are we making good progress? Do we even want it? How will we deal with the population increase? And most importantly, can we slow down our rate of aging now, so we become more likely to still be alive when radical life extension is achieved?
On this page I pull together all the main points you need to know. Consider it the current state of play for humanity’s progress towards immortality.
By immortality, I mean indefinite life extension; the halt and reversal of biological aging. I shouldn’t use the word “immortality”, because some people assume I mean invincibility… but ugh, boring, and wow so many words. 3 whole words. Immortality is not the technical word they use in the field, but it’s more fun.
Ok, so, immortality…
The Timeline
Let’s start with the good news. I believe it likely there are people who are alive today who will reach longevity escape velocity – the point in time when medical progress adds more than one year to our remaining healthy lifespan for every year that passes.
Currently we have very clear estimations of human life expectancy. Those estimations will become difficult to determine during the 2030s, when a myriad of new medical breakthroughs are likely to be made. That is when our cultures will begin to adapt to a new world, away from the certainty of a specific retirement date. Question marks will begin to appear for everything relating to our mortality.
In the years following, we will have uncertainty of just how far we are from LEV. When we have actually reached it, we will be none the wiser. To know for sure, we will need to apply all therapies to a person from birth, and measure how long they go on to live. Therefore, to track progress we will be reliant on measuring biological markers, organ health, cognitive function, disease rates and the health of each individual tissue type.
It is only as we approach the 22nd century, as humans are breaking age records, while also showing great health in all tissues, that we become truly confident we have reached LEV.
The road to LEV is wildly unpredictable.
Due to this unpredictability, it is tough to make a confident prediction about when LEV will be reached.
The best we can do is take all possibilities, and give the date that lands between them.
I estimate this date as 2060.
The 2050s and 2060s are the decades where the probabilities are highest.
It is very possible though that 2035 is that magical date. The reason for this is the accelerated future brought about by the rapid advance of AI. That thing that everybody is angry about because it’s pushing slop in our feeds. That very same thing could be about to bring about breakthroughs that lead to the cures of diseases, and ultimately the halt of the aging process.
If AI existed without risk, and without other types of existential risks, I would go ahead and say we are very likely only 10 years away from LEV. But hey, it is more likely that we have some scary big hurdles to get ourselves over first.
The moment that you see on the news that AI has cured a major disease, is the moment that we see our immortality on the horizon. That will be the moment when everything starts to change.
Do we even want to be immortal?
You’re still reading, so my hopes are high. Welcome to the club. There are fair arguments against it though. Fair, in that they come from a good place. We tend to instinctively have a very linear way of envisioning progress. A world where people just stop dying… that is a world of endless problems. The very normal instinctive reaction is to think, well yes, but what about this problem, and this, and this, and this… and would that mean we appreciate life less? And would we not get bored? All smart reactions.
Those problems we foresee are without sight of what other advances are coming. Unless you are deep in the world of futurism or particular tech sectors, you will have no understanding of how close we are to achieving revolutionary breakthroughs. Each core possibility that I talk about on this website will revolutionise the world. Each one of them will serve our ability to sustain much bigger populations.
You can read my full exploration of the overpopulation problem, here.
To summarise: Overpopulation will be a problem, but it will be one that we will overcome.
Another common reasoning for our initial rejection of immortality comes from the combination of 2 things: Our sadness over those we have lost, and our belief in an afterlife. The effect of these 2 things are anticipation of one day once again being reunited with our lost loved ones in paradise. It is comforting. It is often fundamental to the mourning process. We know we will never see them again, but we choose to have faith that they are waiting for us when we ourselves die, and so we embrace that feeling of peace.
We hear “immortality”, and we feel that sense of peace being pulled from under us. We grab onto it and fight for it back. It is a perfectly rational initial reaction.
My argument against that is merely: What is the rush? Assuming there is an afterlife outside of this world, even with our achievement of immortality, we will one day die and find ourselves there. The universe itself is facing an eventual heat death. Perhaps a paradise exists outside of what we experience as time anyway. Maybe we are consecutively already in that place that exists beyond death.
Even just with that tiny contemplation, we are left with our heads spinning.
So let’s just put our time alive into some perspective.
We can think of the vastness of time in this universe, and see our time in it as being less than 0.00000000001%. Double that number is still virtually nothing by comparison. 10x that number is still nothing. 100x is still nothing, and wow, that is one hell of a life… ~8,000 years.
It is a massively laughable overstatement that we are living in the blink of an eye of our universe.
If a god made this universe then maybe he would want us to experience a little more of it?
Maybe ahead of us are incredible experiences that he will want us all to experience as much of as possible.
We don’t know for sure what exists outside of our universe, and our time here. Perhaps if we can extend our lifespans we will be alive when discoveries about what is out there are made. Maybe we will one day die with a certainty about where we are going next. That’s really possible, right? Why not think big?
The most religious of us will be thinking that immortality is the betrayal of God’s design; that our mortality was given to us for a reason, and the natural time we were allocated was not supposed to be cheated and extended. My argument here is that if we are capable of achieving immortality, is that not also by design? You may say we were also given the power to murder, but that doesn’t mean we should do that. But the core of the argument here is morality. If there is nothing fundamentally immoral about life extension, then is it not fair game to explore? Potentially the overcoming of our mortality is just a stage in the evolution of life in this universe, which was always by God’s design.
I could get super rebellious about this and say that if the big guy has a problem then he should come down here and tell us about it.
My point really is that we should be free to follow morality as it is in line with truth. The existence of god does not sit alongside truth. It sits within an unverified faith. My argument is that what we know to be true should be what we prioritise in the creation of our values. If there is a God that wants us to act against those values, then he can’t judge us negatively by following them, unless he was to prove his existence and explain why we should act differently.
Causing needless death is the ultimate immorality. Our pushing of a narrative that makes people reject life extension should not come in service of any faith in preference to what we know as truth. The alignment with an ideology that promotes death could only ever find a moral home if it is with certainty tethered to the truth of a greater good.
So, okay, hopefully I’ve done enough there for you to agree that there won’t be a God frowning at you as you go on to live longer than your genetics intended.
Even if we see it as morally and spiritually okay though, we are still left here without our lost loved ones.
That pain is going to live on with us, forever. And the longer we live, the more people we will lose: Even with immortality, death will still come through accidents, mental health struggles, and war.
We can ease that by focusing instead on the future people we are yet to meet.
There will be new people you meet who you will love as much as the people you have lost. By accepting death, you are losing them before you have even met. That person in the future who needs you, would never have you. Their lives will be worse because you are not there. You don’t owe your death to the people you have lost. They will not thank you for joining them in non-existence. If anything, if they could see you die on their behalf, they would be devastated. If somehow they are watching, they will be willing you to go on and make the absolute most out of your life.
We live our best possible lives on behalf of the people we have lost. They contributed to what we have so far become. Their existence is a part of us.
We carry on living, we carry on evolving, for the people we are yet to meet, for the people who will benefit from having met us.
The people we have lost therefore have an effect on the lives of the people we are yet to meet.
They would want us to live so that their lives can carry on meaning something.
How Will It Be Possible?
Immortality will most likely arrive through hundreds of breakthroughs working together. A single treatment capable of keeping every cell youthful may eventually become possible, but that is a far away future.
There are many reasons why we age. Damage builds up faster than our bodies can repair it. DNA becomes damaged. Cells stop behaving properly. Waste accumulates. Our immune systems weaken. Stem cells become exhausted. Our organs gradually lose their ability to function.
Scientists organise these processes into 12 hallmarks of ageing. I have a series of articles exploring these hallmarks on my Substack.
Understanding the hallmarks makes the different approaches to fighting ageing much easier to understand. Without that foundational knowledge, it all gets very confusing.
The important part here is that every hallmark represents a physical problem taking place inside the body. If these are physical problems, there is reason to believe they can eventually be prevented or repaired.
Slowing the damage
The road towards repairing ageing begins with slowing down the damage being done.
We are already capable of reducing chronic inflammation, protecting our DNA, improving our metabolism and increasing the ability of cells to repair themselves.
Clearing the damage
On top of slowing the damage, we can help our bodies clear some of it away.
Some cells reach a point where they stop functioning properly but refuse to die. These are known as senescent cells, or “zombie cells.”
As these cells accumulate, they release signals that cause inflammation and damage the healthy tissue around them.
We can already help our bodies with some of this clean-up. Fasting activates autophagy, through which cells break down and recycle damaged components. Exercise supports these cellular repair systems, strengthens the immune system’s ability to identify dysfunctional cells and has been shown to reduce markers associated with senescent cells. Calorie restriction has produced similar results.
These things will not remove every senescent cell, but they support the body’s maintenance systems and slow the accumulation of cellular damage.
Scientists are also developing treatments known as senolytics. These are drugs designed to identify senescent cells and trigger their destruction while leaving healthy cells unharmed. Several potential senolytics have successfully cleared these cells in animals, and some have now entered early human trials.
Resetting our cellular instructions
Up in the next layer of difficulty, we may be able to reverse aspects of ageing by resetting our epigenetic instructions.
Every cell in our body contains a copy of our DNA, but different cells use different parts of it depending on their role. As we age, the systems controlling those instructions become increasingly disorganised. Cells gradually lose their ability to behave like younger versions of themselves.
Partial cellular reprogramming attempts to reset these instructions without erasing the identity of the cell. Instead of replacing an old cell, we may be able to remind it how to function as a young one.
This is one of the most exciting possibilities in longevity science because it could reverse aspects of ageing rather than merely slowing the damage or clearing up the mess.
It is also dangerous. Reset a cell too far and it may forget what type of cell it is or begin growing uncontrollably.
This technology has now entered human testing. In 2026, the first participant received an experimental cellular-reprogramming therapy designed to restore function to damaged cells in the eye, with the ultimate aim of recovering lost sight. Details here.
Replacing what cannot be repaired
Another exciting approach involves using stem cells to regrow damaged cells, tissues and eventually entire organs.
When an organ becomes too badly aged or damaged, we can simply replace it.
Organs may eventually be grown from our own tissue, printed, repaired outside the body or sourced from genetically modified animals. Gene editing could then even correct problem DNA and give cells greater resistance to age-related damage.
We are already beginning to see early versions of this future. In a small trial involving people with type 1 diabetes, laboratory-grown pancreatic cells restored insulin production in all 12 participants, with 10 no longer requiring insulin after one year. Details here.
Gene-edited pig kidneys have also been transplanted into living patients, demonstrating that organs from other species may eventually help replace failing human ones. Details here.
Preserving the brain
The greatest challenge will be preserving and rejuvenating the brain.
Our memories, personality and identity are stored within an incredibly complicated network of connections. The brain will therefore need to be repaired gradually, preserving that information while restoring its cells, blood supply, immune environment and ability to remove damaged proteins.
For now, just be healthy
Right now, our strongest defence is still to live as healthily as possible.
Exercise, maintaining muscle and cardiovascular fitness, eating well, sleeping properly, fasting or avoiding constant overconsumption, not smoking and limiting alcohol can all reduce the damage being done. They will not halt ageing, but large studies suggest that healthy habits can add more than a decade to our lives. Details here.
Every additional healthy year increases the chance that we will remain alive long enough to benefit from the therapies that come next.
For now, that is the entire game.
How we are progressing
SoP writing in progress, check back for more tomorrow 🩵
