tl;dr: I think people might start believing in radical life extension soon, maybe all at once.
There is plenty written about if and when radical life extension (RLE) is going to happen. I want to ask a different question: when will people come to believe that RLE is going to happen?
I think it’s increasingly likely that sometime in the next few years there’s a cascading flip in the public’s expectations about whether RLE will be available in their lifetime. I don’t mean that people will believe RLE is coming in the next few years, but that it will happen in time for them to experience direct benefits, enough so that they start considering changing their behavior around things like retirement, investment, childbearing, career choice, etc.
Radical life extension here means: notable improvement over possible human healthspan and lifespan, as distinguished from increases in average healthspan and lifespan that occur by means of shifting people toward one end of the existing outcome distribution.
There are four trends that I think together make it seem, to a normal person, like radical life extension is possible:
1. The Overton window has been blown wide open (with special thanks to Bryan Johnson)
You’ve probably seen the extensive media coverage of Bryan Johnson. It’s hard to say how much he’s directly responsible for opening the Overton window on aging and life extension, but he’s clearly received as more legitimate than early fringe-coded RLE efforts, even if half of his audience is morbidly fascinated by the prospect of his ironic early death.
(N.B. Bryan’s schtick involves doing things that are almost certainly not going to produce RLE like eating a lot of olive oil. But, he talks clearly about the more radical technologies and has very explicit DON’T DIE messaging.)
Thinking about RLE isn’t nearly as weird as it used to be. Peter Thiel and his blood boys were a whole news cycle not that long ago.[1] Now we have official looking researchers with Harvard labs like David Sinclair doing podcasts about the “longevity revolution”[2] and… lots of shortform content.[3]
2. AI progress
People keep telling me that AI is getting better at stuff. Some are saying it might be able to do things humans can do. Could some hypothetical future sci-fi AI contribute to medical research? Many are talking about this!
AI is getting better across the board. The more you think LLMs and domain-specific AI like AlphaFold are going to contribute to scientific research, and the faster you think that’s going to happen, the more plausible near-term RLE seems.
3. Funding and Funders
Money going into anti-aging research has increased by something like an order of magnitude or more over the past decade. Who is providing that funding will be more important to some onlookers than the raw dollar figure.
A disproportionate amount of early anti-aging money came from Thiel, and the people have never known what to make of Thiel. Now there are big, conventional names throwing billions of dollars into big ventures:
Jeff Bezos, Yuri Milner put ~$3b into Altos Labs at launch in 2022 — at the time the largest round in biotech history[4]
Google has been funding Calico through Alphabet since 2013, approx ~$3.5b total[5]
Sam Altman funded Retro Biosciences, ~$1b raised at ~$1.8b valuation in 2026[6]
Brian Armstrong started and funds NewLimit, working on cellular reprogramming[7]
Saudi Arabia stood up the Hevolution Foundation in 2021 specifically to fund aging biology[8]
Long tail: Cambrian Bio, BioAge, Insilico, Life Biosciences with billions more in total, plus the $101m XPRIZE for “innovative therapies that restore muscle, cognitive, and immune function by a minimum of 10 years (with a goal of 20)”
4. Visible medical miracles
Seeing people lose weight on GLP inhibitors constitutes, I think, a common medical miracle. And, it’s a medical miracle of a different type than “they cured [kind of cancer]”. It feels like a real step toward achieving mastery over our bodies, in a fight people often have experience with losing.
“They’re going to find Ozempic for aging” sounds oddly plausible. It’s the first drug that I remember being aware of that feels like an appropriate analogue for a general life-extension treatment. (I don’t think that holds up to any medical scrutiny, but.)
In large part because of widespread GLP adoption and the necessity of sparing lean mass during acute weight loss, we may see FDA approval of myostatin inhibitors and related drugs with the potential to cause significant muscle gain. People may be able to achieve steroid-like outcomes cheaply and safely. That effect would, IMO, be even more shocking, and be another directly visible bit of transhuman-ish technology.
Honorable mention: actual research progress
There’s been some actual progress in life extension research, but I think the reality on the ground is much less important than how the results are interpreted and relayed to the public.
For example, the kind of cellular reprogramming that Life Biosciences is now trialing[9]in humans with the OSK subset of the Yamanaka factors is the kind of big-boy therapy that seems like it could actually produce a “rewind” effect, rather than a mere slowing of aging. But, my ability to actually assess this line of research as a relatively up-to-speed observer is limited. I imagine that from further outside the field it all sounds like “scientists discover new science thing! This will revolutionize everything, unless it doesn’t!”
Why would it happen fast?
I claim that the above features of the information landscape make it generally more plausible to a moderate-information observer that RLE might happen in the next few decades. But how long will it take for people to change their minds?
I think it’s likely that at some point a combination of preference falsification cascade and adaptive preference dissolution will snowball and cause a lot of people to flip in a short period of time.
Right now it’s still weird to say you really want to live longer, and even weirder to say you’re going to go out of your way to try to make that happen. We have a lot of cultural baggage around not trying to cheat death or obsess over our mortality. (And that’s probably been both individually and societally adaptive!) It’s particularly strange to “obsess” over RLE when it seems like a fantasy. But, as RLE gets more and more plausible, being excited about it makes you less of a blood-boy-vampire and more of a blood-boy-enthusiast. The implausibility of RLE has held some number of people to keep quiet about their true preference for living longer. A preference falsification cascade seems likely once that wears down enough.
Maybe more importantly, when RLE becomes plausible, it becomes less psychologically dangerous to reckon with the brevity and finitude of our fleshy existence. Not wanting to live a lot longer is a textbook adaptive preference. Thinking about your own lifespan, the timing and manner of your death, sucks when there’s nothing you can do about it. Less so when there’s hope. Or: when not getting hit by the baseball bat becomes a live possibility, people may find they don’t really like getting hit with a baseball bat.[10]
Living a (much) longer, healthier life is an appealing idea when a person is allowed to consider it.
I think there will be plenty of candidate moments that could set this process off over the next few years. The ones I’m looking out for, in roughly decreasing order of coherence:
Trivially: a concrete RLE-relevant treatment (like OSK cellular rejuvenation of the eye) works in humans and is enthusiastically received by the scientific community
AI achieves or helps achieve a scientific breakthrough, in medicine or otherwise, that makes people firmly believe it will accelerate scientific progress
Reports about “elites” spending [exorbitant amount of money] on [new aging treatment]
Myostatin / Activin A inhibitor rollout (have you ever seen a really buff cow?)
Bryan Johnson starts actively experimenting with e.g. cellular reprogramming in a legible way, with the narrative “this might actually do it”
A blockbuster movie from Marvel or Christopher Nolan includes compelling, societally-naturalized RLE[11]
The FDA approves an aging endpoint for clinical trials, number of targeted anti-aging studies explodes
Other viral content, e.g. Mr Beast competition where the winner gets $1m life extension treatment
A government or government-adjacent report for the US, China, South Korea or other country discusses RLE as a means of mitigating demographic consequences of falling birth rates, extending healthspan of aging workforce
A high profile person gets plastic surgery that’s a bit too good, causes visceral reaction and goes viral
The Pope comments specifically on the desirability or undesirability of RLE treatments
Something Trump-related that causes media cycle about “what if politicians kept living forever”
Putin, Xi or similar revealed to be doing even crazier life extension stuff than we know about[12]
It’ll probably be something silly that’s not on my list. But, I think once it starts, it’s going to pick up steam quickly.
Or not! My theory of mind here could be hopelessly mis-calibrated because I’ve believed in RLE for a long time. Maybe Bryan Johnson will die of olive oil poisoning and trigger a life-extension winter.
Even if the update is far away, I think it’s worth considering what people might think, and do, if they start to believe too.
People might start believing in radical life extension soon
tl;dr: I think people might start believing in radical life extension soon, maybe all at once.
There is plenty written about if and when radical life extension (RLE) is going to happen. I want to ask a different question: when will people come to believe that RLE is going to happen?
I think it’s increasingly likely that sometime in the next few years there’s a cascading flip in the public’s expectations about whether RLE will be available in their lifetime. I don’t mean that people will believe RLE is coming in the next few years, but that it will happen in time for them to experience direct benefits, enough so that they start considering changing their behavior around things like retirement, investment, childbearing, career choice, etc.
Radical life extension here means: notable improvement over possible human healthspan and lifespan, as distinguished from increases in average healthspan and lifespan that occur by means of shifting people toward one end of the existing outcome distribution.
There are four trends that I think together make it seem, to a normal person, like radical life extension is possible:
1. The Overton window has been blown wide open (with special thanks to Bryan Johnson)
You’ve probably seen the extensive media coverage of Bryan Johnson. It’s hard to say how much he’s directly responsible for opening the Overton window on aging and life extension, but he’s clearly received as more legitimate than early fringe-coded RLE efforts, even if half of his audience is morbidly fascinated by the prospect of his ironic early death.
(N.B. Bryan’s schtick involves doing things that are almost certainly not going to produce RLE like eating a lot of olive oil. But, he talks clearly about the more radical technologies and has very explicit DON’T DIE messaging.)
Thinking about RLE isn’t nearly as weird as it used to be. Peter Thiel and his blood boys were a whole news cycle not that long ago.[1] Now we have official looking researchers with Harvard labs like David Sinclair doing podcasts about the “longevity revolution”[2] and… lots of shortform content.[3]
2. AI progress
People keep telling me that AI is getting better at stuff. Some are saying it might be able to do things humans can do. Could some hypothetical future sci-fi AI contribute to medical research? Many are talking about this!
AI is getting better across the board. The more you think LLMs and domain-specific AI like AlphaFold are going to contribute to scientific research, and the faster you think that’s going to happen, the more plausible near-term RLE seems.
3. Funding and Funders
Money going into anti-aging research has increased by something like an order of magnitude or more over the past decade. Who is providing that funding will be more important to some onlookers than the raw dollar figure.
A disproportionate amount of early anti-aging money came from Thiel, and the people have never known what to make of Thiel. Now there are big, conventional names throwing billions of dollars into big ventures:
Jeff Bezos, Yuri Milner put ~$3b into Altos Labs at launch in 2022 — at the time the largest round in biotech history[4]
Google has been funding Calico through Alphabet since 2013, approx ~$3.5b total[5]
Sam Altman funded Retro Biosciences, ~$1b raised at ~$1.8b valuation in 2026[6]
Brian Armstrong started and funds NewLimit, working on cellular reprogramming[7]
Saudi Arabia stood up the Hevolution Foundation in 2021 specifically to fund aging biology[8]
Long tail: Cambrian Bio, BioAge, Insilico, Life Biosciences with billions more in total, plus the $101m XPRIZE for “innovative therapies that restore muscle, cognitive, and immune function by a minimum of 10 years (with a goal of 20)”
4. Visible medical miracles
Seeing people lose weight on GLP inhibitors constitutes, I think, a common medical miracle. And, it’s a medical miracle of a different type than “they cured [kind of cancer]”. It feels like a real step toward achieving mastery over our bodies, in a fight people often have experience with losing.
“They’re going to find Ozempic for aging” sounds oddly plausible. It’s the first drug that I remember being aware of that feels like an appropriate analogue for a general life-extension treatment. (I don’t think that holds up to any medical scrutiny, but.)
In large part because of widespread GLP adoption and the necessity of sparing lean mass during acute weight loss, we may see FDA approval of myostatin inhibitors and related drugs with the potential to cause significant muscle gain. People may be able to achieve steroid-like outcomes cheaply and safely. That effect would, IMO, be even more shocking, and be another directly visible bit of transhuman-ish technology.
Honorable mention: actual research progress
There’s been some actual progress in life extension research, but I think the reality on the ground is much less important than how the results are interpreted and relayed to the public.
For example, the kind of cellular reprogramming that Life Biosciences is now trialing[9]in humans with the OSK subset of the Yamanaka factors is the kind of big-boy therapy that seems like it could actually produce a “rewind” effect, rather than a mere slowing of aging. But, my ability to actually assess this line of research as a relatively up-to-speed observer is limited. I imagine that from further outside the field it all sounds like “scientists discover new science thing! This will revolutionize everything, unless it doesn’t!”
Why would it happen fast?
I claim that the above features of the information landscape make it generally more plausible to a moderate-information observer that RLE might happen in the next few decades. But how long will it take for people to change their minds?
I think it’s likely that at some point a combination of preference falsification cascade and adaptive preference dissolution will snowball and cause a lot of people to flip in a short period of time.
Right now it’s still weird to say you really want to live longer, and even weirder to say you’re going to go out of your way to try to make that happen. We have a lot of cultural baggage around not trying to cheat death or obsess over our mortality. (And that’s probably been both individually and societally adaptive!) It’s particularly strange to “obsess” over RLE when it seems like a fantasy. But, as RLE gets more and more plausible, being excited about it makes you less of a blood-boy-vampire and more of a blood-boy-enthusiast. The implausibility of RLE has held some number of people to keep quiet about their true preference for living longer. A preference falsification cascade seems likely once that wears down enough.
Maybe more importantly, when RLE becomes plausible, it becomes less psychologically dangerous to reckon with the brevity and finitude of our fleshy existence. Not wanting to live a lot longer is a textbook adaptive preference. Thinking about your own lifespan, the timing and manner of your death, sucks when there’s nothing you can do about it. Less so when there’s hope. Or: when not getting hit by the baseball bat becomes a live possibility, people may find they don’t really like getting hit with a baseball bat.[10]
Living a (much) longer, healthier life is an appealing idea when a person is allowed to consider it.
I think there will be plenty of candidate moments that could set this process off over the next few years. The ones I’m looking out for, in roughly decreasing order of coherence:
Trivially: a concrete RLE-relevant treatment (like OSK cellular rejuvenation of the eye) works in humans and is enthusiastically received by the scientific community
AI achieves or helps achieve a scientific breakthrough, in medicine or otherwise, that makes people firmly believe it will accelerate scientific progress
Reports about “elites” spending [exorbitant amount of money] on [new aging treatment]
Myostatin / Activin A inhibitor rollout (have you ever seen a really buff cow?)
Bryan Johnson starts actively experimenting with e.g. cellular reprogramming in a legible way, with the narrative “this might actually do it”
A blockbuster movie from Marvel or Christopher Nolan includes compelling, societally-naturalized RLE[11]
The FDA approves an aging endpoint for clinical trials, number of targeted anti-aging studies explodes
Other viral content, e.g. Mr Beast competition where the winner gets $1m life extension treatment
A government or government-adjacent report for the US, China, South Korea or other country discusses RLE as a means of mitigating demographic consequences of falling birth rates, extending healthspan of aging workforce
A high profile person gets plastic surgery that’s a bit too good, causes visceral reaction and goes viral
The Pope comments specifically on the desirability or undesirability of RLE treatments
Something Trump-related that causes media cycle about “what if politicians kept living forever”
Putin, Xi or similar revealed to be doing even crazier life extension stuff than we know about[12]
It’ll probably be something silly that’s not on my list. But, I think once it starts, it’s going to pick up steam quickly.
Or not! My theory of mind here could be hopelessly mis-calibrated because I’ve believed in RLE for a long time. Maybe Bryan Johnson will die of olive oil poisoning and trigger a life-extension winter.
Even if the update is far away, I think it’s worth considering what people might think, and do, if they start to believe too.
Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People’s Blood ↩︎
The Longevity Revolution Is Here | Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair — S2, Ep. 1 ↩︎
one, two, three ↩︎
Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley’s latest wild bet on living forever; Fierce Biotech ↩︎
AbbVie, Calico raise their age-related disease alliance funding to $3.5bn ↩︎
Longevity startup Retro Biosciences says latest fundraising values it at $1.8 billion ↩︎
NewLimit raises $435M Series C, valuation hits $3.1B ↩︎
Hevolution Foundation ↩︎
Life Biosciences — First Patient Dosed in Phase 1 Trial of ER-100 ↩︎
How to Seem (and Be) Deep ↩︎
The most compelling life-extension movie is still Twilight. ↩︎
Xi and Putin Discuss Becoming ‘Immortal.’ Their Countries Are Investing In It ↩︎