Technology is changing at a pace that often exceeds humanity’s ability to understand its consequences. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics and space exploration are advancing simultaneously, promising to reshape how long we live, how we work and even where humanity may one day survive.
Nobody can say with certainty whether this acceleration will prove entirely good or bad. Technology has always carried both possibilities. It can cure disease, reduce suffering and expand human knowledge. It can also deepen inequality, create new risks and place enormous power in the hands of a few institutions or individuals.
The challenge is not to stop progress. It is to guide it responsibly.
Humanity today stands at an unusual point in history. We remain biologically fragile, bound to a single planet and vulnerable to disease, conflict and environmental shocks. Yet we are also developing tools that may extend healthy life, reduce catastrophic risks and eventually allow human communities to live beyond Earth.
This places time on two scales: the lifespan of an individual and the lifespan of civilisation.
The first scale: human life
Life expectancy has increased dramatically over the past two centuries. In many pre-industrial societies, average life expectancy at birth was low largely because infant and child mortality were extremely high. Improvements in sanitation, clean water, nutrition, vaccination, antibiotics and maternal care transformed this picture.
The greatest historical gains in average life expectancy did not come primarily from making very old people live much longer. They came from preventing people, especially children and mothers, from dying young.
Today, many developed countries have life expectancies of 70 to 80 years or more. Yet the next challenge is different. It is not only about preventing early death; it is also about delaying or reducing the diseases that limit healthy life in middle and old age—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, dementia and other chronic conditions.
Artificial intelligence could become a powerful part of this next stage.
AI is already helping researchers understand proteins, identify patterns in scans and improve the speed of medical discovery. AlphaFold, for example, has made major advances in predicting protein structures, a development that can support biological research and drug discovery. Researchers say it has transformed structural biology by producing predictions that, in many cases, approach experimental accuracy.
AI-assisted systems are also being tested and used in areas such as diabetic-retinopathy screening, skin-cancer assessment and radiology. Their greatest near-term contribution may be earlier detection, better risk prediction and more targeted treatment—not instant cures for every disease.
This distinction matters. AI may not make people immortal, and it cannot yet solve the most difficult biological problems of ageing. But it can help doctors recognise disease earlier, help researchers identify promising treatments faster and help health systems direct limited resources more effectively.
There is also serious research into ageing itself. Scientists are studying cellular reprogramming, senolytics, tissue regeneration and drugs that may slow some processes associated with ageing. These fields remain experimental. They should not be confused with proven pathways to radically extended human life.
Still, it would be unwise to dismiss them. Many ideas that sounded impossible a generation ago are now standard medical practice.
The sensible expectation is not that everyone will soon live beyond 150 years. It is that scientific and technological progress may add more healthy years to life by reducing disease, disability and preventable decline.
The second scale: civilisation
The second question is larger: how long can human civilisation endure?
The average human life may be 70, 80 or perhaps 100 years. Civilisation, however, may last for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years—if humanity avoids self-destruction.
This requires a different way of thinking.
A person plans for a career, a family and retirement. A civilisation must plan for pandemics, climate shocks, nuclear conflict, ecological collapse, artificial-intelligence risks, asteroid impacts and technological failures that cannot be repaired quickly.
No one has an exact model for the probability of civilisation-ending events. But uncertainty is not an argument for ignoring risk. It is an argument for building resilience.
A species confined to one planet has a fundamentally different risk profile from one with self-sustaining communities in several locations. The comparison is simple: a company with one server faces different dangers from a company that maintains multiple backups in different data centres.
Earth must remain humanity’s first priority. It is our only home, and it remains vastly more hospitable than the Moon or Mars. No space settlement should become an excuse to neglect poverty, war, environmental destruction or public-health failures on Earth.
But protecting Earth and pursuing long-term space settlement are not opposing goals. They are complementary forms of insurance.
NASA’s Artemis programme is intended to return humans to the Moon and build capabilities for eventual missions to Mars. NASA currently targets a human lunar landing in 2028, while Mars missions remain a longer-term objective. These plans do not mean that humanity is ready to establish a self-sustaining civilisation beyond Earth. We are not.
Living on Mars or the Moon would require reliable food, water, energy, medicine, shelter, manufacturing and communication systems in environments hostile to human life. The technical challenge is immense.
Yet this is precisely why the work should begin gradually and seriously. Four and a half billion years of Earth’s history have produced one species capable of understanding planetary risk and imagining survival beyond its home world. Whether this opportunity remains open indefinitely is unknown.
One instinct, two horizons
Extending an individual life and extending the life of civilisation are expressions of the same instinct: the desire to create more time.
At the personal level, we try to prevent disease, improve health and protect families. At the civilisational level, we must reduce the risks that could remove humanity’s future altogether.
If AI can postpone the date at which a body fails, that does not automatically mean it can postpone the date at which the human species fails. A longer-lived population, confined to a single vulnerable planet, remains one major disaster or human error away from catastrophe.
That is why the same commitment that drives medical research should also drive environmental protection, peacebuilding, pandemic preparedness, nuclear restraint and space exploration.
Civilisational insurance is not an insult to Earth. Taking out insurance does not mean one expects the house to burn down; it means one recognises that a valuable home deserves protection.
The immediate work must remain here: building a more peaceful, sustainable and equitable world. We should make Earth safer, healthier and more liveable for everyone. At the same time, humanity should pursue the long-term goal of becoming multi-planetary—not as an escape from responsibility, but as an additional safeguard against extinction.
Technology gives us unprecedented tools. The question is whether we will use them merely to live longer as individuals, or wisely enough to give civilisation itself a longer future.
