The oldest surviving story in human civilization is about a man trying to live forever. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written down roughly four thousand years ago on clay tablets in Mesopotamia, follows a king who is two-thirds divine and one-third mortal. His mother is the goddess Ninsun, and his father was mortal. He occupies the cruelest possible position: he can see immortality, it runs in his family, and he has been told he cannot have it. The gods get to live forever, but he does not.
When his closest companion Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh is shattered. Not by the abstract concept of mortality, but by the specific injustice of a cosmos where some beings get permanence and others do not, and the line between them feels arbitrary. He travels across the world, passes through the waters of death, finds Utnapishtim—the only mortal granted eternal life after the great flood—and learns where he can find a plant that restores youth. Then he loses it to a serpent while he bathes in a pool and goes home empty-handed. The story resolves not with another quest, but with Gilgamesh looking at the great walls of Uruk, the city he built, and finding that what he created while alive was enough.
Humanity's earliest-known written story holds a mirror to the situation we are walking into. Except this time, Gilgamesh might actually get the plant.
A growing number of researchers now believe that we are approaching what they call longevity escape velocity—the point at which science extends your remaining life expectancy by more than one year for every year that passes. Ray Kurzweil predicts we will cross this threshold between 2029 and 2035. George Church, the Harvard geneticist, has said he believes those in reasonably good health will have access to it by the end of 2030. Aubrey de Grey, the biogerontologist who coined the term, puts it at a 50 percent chance by the mid-2030s and adds that the cost to the end user will eventually be zero, because aging is so expensive that it would be economically suicidal for any country not to make these therapies available.
These are not fringe voices, and the reason their timelines have compressed so dramatically in the past few years is artificial intelligence. AI is reshaping every stage of longevity research. It is identifying drug targets that human researchers miss, simulating molecular interactions that would take years to test in a wet lab, and designing novel compounds from scratch. In 2025, Retro Biosciences—backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—announced that AI models had made epigenetic reprogramming fifty times more efficient. Insilico Medicine's AI-driven pipeline produced a novel drug target, designed a small molecule to inhibit it, and pushed it through a successful Phase 2a clinical trial in an age-related disease, all at a pace that would have been unthinkable five years ago. Scripps Research used AI to identify anti-aging drugs that target multiple biological pathways simultaneously; more than 70 percent of the compounds it flagged significantly extended lifespan in laboratory organisms. Brian Kennedy, one of the world's leading aging researchers, says that five years ago he would not have predicted that half his lab would be working on AI, but that is now the reality.
The implication is staggering: if you can stay alive and reasonably healthy for another ten years or so, you may never need to die of old age. For those who are not confident they will make it to that threshold, there is a backup plan. In early 2026, a team of researchers demonstrated perfect ultrastructural preservation of a rabbit brain using vitrification without aldehyde fixation—the first convincing proof that a mammalian brain can be frozen and structurally maintained at the cellular level. The science of preservation is advancing rapidly, but preservation is only half the problem: nobody has demonstrated revival. Whether the path forward involves thawing a biological brain, scanning it into a digital substrate, or something no one has yet imagined, the question of how you get from a vitrified organ back to a living person remains entirely open.
Here is what makes this moment extraordinary and, for anyone paying attention, disorienting. The same artificial intelligence that is compressing longevity timelines is simultaneously dismantling the structures of meaning and identity that made finite life feel purposeful in the current capitalist economy. AI is not just accelerating drug discovery, it is automating the cognitive economy—the professional expertise, the creative output, the analytical work that gave a large portion of humanity its sense of purpose and self-worth. In February 2026, Spotify's co-CEO revealed that the company's most experienced developers have not written a single line of code since December. Instead, they supervise AI that generates it for them. This is not a thought experiment. It is happening now to the same educated, driven, technically literate population most likely to access longevity therapies.
So the gift arrives with a paradox. AI may hand us indefinite life at precisely the moment it strips away the work, the expertise, and the professional identity that structured the lives we were already living. More time, and potentially unlimited time, in a world where the cognitive contributions that defined you are no longer needed. The purposelessness may not shrink with more time but instead expand to fill the container. While humans will no doubt recalibrate in time to find fresh meaning in a world where their identity is not coupled to their economic work, the story goes beyond the individual to the fabric of humanity itself.
All the major wisdom traditions humans have developed are built on the assumption that life is finite. Not as a regrettable footnote, but as the organizing constraint around which everything else takes shape. The urgency to love, to create something that outlasts you, to find purpose in limited time, to wrestle with the question of what a good life looks like when your days are numbered. All of it draws its force from the fact that the clock is ticking. Mortality is not the obstacle to meaning, but rather has functioned in many ways as the engine of meaning.
Buddhism is built on impermanence. Christianity orients around death and what follows it. Islam structures daily life around submission to a will larger than the individual, a practice that assumes the individual's time is borrowed. Judaism's emphasis on memory, on carrying the stories of the dead forward, on the obligation to the generations that follow, all of it presupposes that each generation passes. The Hindu cycle of samsara treats death not as an ending but as a transition within a larger arc of becoming, and liberation is understood as freedom from the cycle itself. Indigenous traditions across the planet embed death in the rhythm of the natural world, teaching that giving way is how the living system renews itself.
Jung built his entire framework of individuation on the mortal arc. The midlife crisis, the encounter with the shadow, the descent into the unconscious and the slow integration of what you find there—all of it assumes a life that has a first half and a second half, and the turn between them is driven by the dawning awareness that time is not infinite. Remove that awareness and you may well remove the pressure that drives individuation itself.
Each of these traditions developed under conditions where mortality was non-negotiable. Gilgamesh lost the plant that Utnapishtim had given to him. The mortality constraint was always there, and the traditions made the deepest possible sense of a situation that couldn't be changed. We have never actually had to answer the question of what meaning looks like without that constraint. If death becomes optional, we are not just extending life, but we are stepping outside the boundary condition that nearly every religion, philosophy, and psychology was designed to operate within. This is both exciting and terrifying.
And we need to acknowledge that it may not be universal, at least not in the beginning. The early adopters will be those with access and resources while everyone else keeps dying on the old schedule. We may not be living in a world where mortality has been solved, but one in which mortality has become a class boundary. The gods get Olympus, and you get Uruk. De Grey argues that the economics will eventually force universal access, because the cost of treating age-related disease dwarfs the cost of preventing it. He may be right, but "eventually" can be a long time when you are on the wrong side of the line.
I am genuinely excited about what is coming and would welcome a healthy, productive life well past what biology currently allows; I personally don't know anyone who would have the opposing view. The science is extraordinary, and the people pursuing it are working on one of the most ambitious problems one can imagine. What excites me equally is the companion question: what interior work would make those extra decades or centuries not just longer, but genuinely richer?
If we are being given the extraordinary gift of more time, that gift asks something of us. It asks us to do the interior work that matches duration with depth. To face the shadow, to explore the unconscious, to build the interior architecture that transforms mere persistence into a life worth extending. The engineering conversation focuses on consciousness as a substrate problem—the brain as hardware, identity as pattern. That framing has produced remarkable results, but what it invites us to consider next is depth.
Gilgamesh went looking for the plant of immortality and came home empty-handed. But what he found when he returned—the walls of Uruk, the city he had built, the evidence of a life fully lived—turned out to be enough. We may succeed where Gilgamesh could not, and that would be a triumph. The invitation is to build an inner infrastructure worth coming home to; the kind that makes an infinite life as meaningful as a finite one.