Computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil believes humanity will achieve \u201clongevity escape velocity\u201d in just three years.<\/p>\n
The concept basically states that due to medical and technological advances, we will soon reach a point where our life expectancies lengthen by more than one year per year, effectively giving us time back on the clock.<\/p>\n
This is a very controversial concept, and one that\u2014even if possible\u2014would require widespread access to cutting edge medical technology.<\/p>\n
Death and taxes\u2014the twin inevitabilities of human life<\/a>. At least, for the moment. If you ask some of the most prominent futurists in the world, death may not be on that (admittedly short and clich\u00e9) list for much longer.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a controversial idea floating around the futurist community of \u201clongevity escape velocity.\u201d It sounds super sci-fi<\/a>, but it\u2019s basically the idea that as our life extension technology gets better, our life expectancy could increase by more than we age over a set period of time. For example, as medical innovations continue to move forward, we would still age a year over the span of a year. But our life expectancy would go up by, say, a year and two months, meaning we would functionally get two months of life back.<\/p>\n In March 2024, Ray Kurzweil\u2014former Google engineer and prominent AI-centric futurist\u2014told multiple outlets that he believed humanity<\/a> would achieve longevity escape velocity by 2029.<\/p>\n \u201cPast 2029, you\u2019ll get back more than a year. Go backwards in time,\u201d Kurzweil said in an interview with the venture capital and private equity firm Bessemer Venture Partners<\/a>. \u201cOnce you can get back at least a year, you\u2019ve reached longevity escape velocity.\u201d<\/p>\n That may seem like a remarkably near future, but Kurzweil seems convinced, largely because medical advancement seems to be speeding up.<\/p>\n \u201cWe got the COVID vaccine out in ten months,\u201d he said in the interview. \u201cIt took two days to create it. Because we sequenced through several billion different mRNA<\/a> sequences in two days. There\u2019s many other advances happening. We\u2019re starting to see simulated biology being used and that\u2019s one of the reasons that we\u2019re going to make so much progress in the next five years.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s no denying that medical advancement has saved countless lives and demonstrably lengthened life expectancies, especially in the most developed parts of the world. But critically, \u2018life expectancy<\/a>\u2019 is not \u2018length of life,\u2019 and the concept of longevity escape velocity is focused on the former. Achieving this concept is not the same as achieving immortality.<\/p>\n \u201c[Achieving longevity escape velocity] doesn\u2019t guarantee you living forever<\/a>,\u201d Kurzweil said. \u201cYou could have a 10 year old and you could compute that he’s got many, many decades of longevity, but he could die tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n A major reason for that is the unpredictability of life. Unfortunately, we\u2019re probably not, say, curing all cancers in the next three years, and cancer<\/a> is a disease defined by the randomness of the mutations that cause it. Accidents are also a fact of life, though Kurzweil claims that through technological advances like self-driving cars, the odds of a deadly accident occurring will also go down rapidly in the near future.<\/p>\n Kurzweil is well known in the tech world for his impressive track record of accurately predicting timelines for technological advances. He successfully predicted the proliferation of portable computers (i.e. cell phones<\/a> and laptops) and WiFi, the existence of cloud computing, and that a computer would beat a chess champion at the game by 1998 (which happened in 1997), among many others.<\/p>\n That said, he\u2019s also been wrong many times over. No one can predict the future, even with all the data in the world at their fingertips.<\/p>\n On top of that, it\u2019s important to remember that, at its core, the achievement of longevity escape velocity is based on the statistical calculations of average life expectancies. If it\u2019s even possible to achieve, it would not mean that everyone around the world would suddenly experience dramatically extended lives.<\/p>\n That would require everyone to have access to the very height of cutting-edge medical technology and infrastructure<\/a>, which is highly unlikely to happen in the span of three years.<\/p>\n As an example of that unlikelihood, tuberculosis\u2014a disease we have known how to treat and prevent for decades\u2014kills more people per year worldwide than any other infectious disease<\/a> (with the exception of a three-year period in which it was surpassed by COVID-19). The existence of medical treatments and advances is not synonymous with their widespread implementation.<\/p>\n