One lifetime isn't enough: what I want to see on curiosity about the future and how much time it takes to be there for it

Arithmetic that doesn't add up

Let me start with a simple calculation. It's 2026, and people are still fighting wars and dividing up resources. If I honestly estimate how long it will take for peace and freedom to settle across the whole planet, I get at least several decades. Maybe several centuries.

An ordinary life lasts eighty years, a hundred at most. About twenty of them go into growing up and learning, and another part goes to old age, when there's little strength left. The arithmetic doesn't add up: seeing a society where everyone has enough and no one forces anyone is almost impossible within that span. Let alone helping to build it.

For a long time I lived inside this yardstick without noticing it. Eighty to a hundred years seemed a given, like the weather. The yardstick pressed on me constantly: I have to make it in time, I have to get something done, old age is coming. There was no concrete plan, only the pressure.

Everything changed at the turn of 2024 and 2025. I learned that ways to extend life were already being researched seriously, and that artificial intelligence was speeding that research up. It was as if a door had opened. I could stop tying myself to an eighty-year span and let myself think further ahead: two hundred years, a thousand.

Why not "the next generation"

People often answer this kind of reasoning: if you don't make it, your children and grandchildren will. Raise people who will carry on.

I don't dispute the value of raising children. But as a way of getting closer to the goal, this path seems slow to me. Every new generation needs years of education and growth to reach the point where the people already thinking in this direction are standing. Then those people grow old, and it all starts over. It's like a construction site where the whole crew is replaced every twenty years and the newcomers have to have the blueprints explained from scratch.

It seems more effective to me to preserve the lives and clear minds of those who are already moving in this direction. The longer they work together, the more they get done and the closer they come to what they're working toward. Young people don't disappear in this picture: they simply join a circle where experience isn't reset to zero.

What I want to see

I haven't tried to arrive at an exact number. But if I list the things my lifetime currently isn't long enough for, it becomes clear we're not talking about decades.

1. 1

   Orbital stations inhabited not by a crew of a few people but by whole settlements.

2. 2

   The Sun's energy truly harvested by people: for example, with a Dyson sphere around it.

3. 3

   Computing centers near the Sun with enough energy for enormous computations.

4. 4

   Consciousness on new substrates: everyone chooses their own environment but stays connected to the outside world.

5. 5

   Ships to deep space, and meeting other forms of life, if they exist.

This is a vision, not a forecast. I would like to see each of these things with my own eyes. The first already partly exists.

People have lived continuously on the International Space Station since November 2000 Source 1. For a quarter of a century someone has always been in orbit: eating, sleeping, working, looking down at the Earth. It used to be science fiction; now it's background news. I want to see the next step, when there are many stations and thousands of people live on them.

The Earth receives about 174,000 terawatts from the Sun. One terawatt is roughly a thousand large power plants. All of humanity uses about 18: that's every power plant, engine and boiler in the world combined Source 2. So almost ten thousand times more energy falls on the planet than we use. And that is less than a billionth of what the Sun radiates in every direction. The rest of the light simply flies off into the void.

If such structures ever appear around the Sun, there will be enough energy for things that are hard to imagine today. For example, computing centers inhabited not by programs but by minds. Electronic neurons instead of biological ones, and on them millions or billions of minds.

I would like to see a world where everyone chooses their own environment: what it's like, how to move through it, what to feel. And the connection to outer reality doesn't disappear. Through their interfaces people send ships into deep space, to other stars and galaxies, and receive news from them.

And perhaps somewhere out there are other forms of life. I would like to get to know them and find a way to cooperate, so that together we can keep exploring the Universe.

Scales that don't yet fit in our heads

When I write "thousands of years" or "hundreds of light years", I know how it sounds. The words are there, but the feeling isn't. Let me try to give it something to hold on to.

A light year is the distance light travels in a year. Light is the fastest thing in the Universe: it gets from the Sun to the Earth in about eight minutes. The Voyager 1 probe was launched in 1977 and is still flying away from the Sun. In November 2026, after almost half a century of travel, it will for the first time be one light-day from Earth, about 26 billion kilometers Source 4. That's farther than anything made by people has ever gone. Half a century of flight equals one day of light.

The star nearest to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 light years away. At Voyager's speed, the journey there would take more than 73,000 years Source 5.

For a brain used to measuring life in decades, numbers like these are empty sounds. I don't think it's that these distances are unreachable in principle. It's that our present brain doesn't know how to think about them. It's used to problems a day's walk away and on the horizon of a single lifetime.

If the substrate of consciousness becomes more powerful, new abilities will appear. And with them, new ideas and inventions that will make today's impossible merely difficult, and then ordinary. I don't know exactly how it will happen. But I really want to be around when it does, and to feel for myself the horizon widening.

What is already changing

I no longer think of my life as a limited term. I assume I may live a very long time, and my attention is on how to do that. The pressure of "I have to make it in time" is gone. In its place is curiosity: what comes next, and how to live to see it with a clear mind.

I understand that sooner or later I will die. By death I mean not only the body stopping but self-awareness ending: the sense that "I am". I don't promise myself it won't happen. I intend to push that moment as far away as I can.

It has already changed something in my plans, too. When the horizon is eighty years, everything is measured by what you can get done before old age. When the horizon is open, you can take on tasks worth spending a century on.

"I've had my life"

I hear this phrase from older people. I treat it with care: behind it there is often fatigue, illness, loss. I don't want to argue with that.

But I do want to point out that behind the phrase stands the same eighty-year yardstick. It was accepted so long ago that it seems like a law of nature.

What comes after is a separate conversation. Some believe in God, some in rebirth, some in heaven and hell. These are questions each person answers for themselves, and I don't presume to judge anyone's faith. I'm personally drawn to what can be tested. And no one knows for sure what happens after death.

So for myself I make a simple bet: to extend what I know for certain. This life, this consciousness, this sense that "I am". And I'll be glad if someone reading this wants the same.

Together, longer and further

It seems to me that the wish to live long grows not out of fear of death but out of interest. If you're curious what will happen in two hundred years, you want to be there for it yourself rather than read someone else's account.

I'm interested in people who feel the same way. Who look at the future with curiosity rather than anxiety, and want to extend their lives and clarity of mind in order to see and do more. Together, problems like these get solved faster than alone.

If you're one of them, let's stay in touch. I'll be writing about how to extend life and what I want to see in the future.