International Space Station too dangerous to stay in orbit, warns Musk
Elon Musk has called for the International Space Station (ISS) to be de-orbited 'within two years' amid concerns about the ageing facility's safety.
The billionaire owner of SpaceX, which sends astronauts and cargo up to the ISS regularly for Nasa, said parts of the station were 'simply getting too old'.
'Even though SpaceX earns billions of dollars from transporting astronauts & cargo to the ISS, I nonetheless would like to go on record recommending that it be de-orbited within two years,' Mr Musk posted on X, his social media platform.
The ISS is not scheduled to be brought back to Earth until 2030.
Mr Musk's comments follow Nasa's decision to postpone a commercial mission to the ISS, which is jointly run by the US, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Union, that was previously scheduled for Friday.
Nasa said it was working with Russian space agency Roscosmos to investigate 'a new pressure signature' in a section of the station, called the Zvezda service module.
'Top safety risk'
Zvezda hosts living quarters, life support systems, key electrical components and flight control and propulsion systems, according to Nasa's website.
Leaks were first detected aboard the ISS in 2019. Nasa has described the leaks, which are caused by microscopic cracks in the station's aluminium-based structure, as a 'top safety risk'.
Over time, the leaks have been growing worse – although experts say they are closer to a slow puncture in a tyre than a blowout.
Nevertheless, it means valuable air is being lost from the station, which is dependent on supply runs from Earth for oxygen, food, water and other essentials.
The cracks in the station, parts of which are now a quarter of a century old, are thought to be the result of general wear and tear to its largely aluminium-based structure.
In orbit, the ISS undergoes a constant cycle of cooling and heating that causes what is known as 'high cyclic fatigue' in its metal components, where tiny cracks can emerge. This is because aluminium becomes harder but more brittle over time as it is flexed.
Casey Handmer, an American physicist who previously worked at Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory, claimed that the problem was potentially far more serious than had been publicly acknowledged and could lead to a failure in orbit that put astronauts at serious risk.
There are seven people currently aboard the ISS.
'We could wake up tomorrow and find, with zero warning, that it has failed catastrophically,' Mr Handmer wrote on X.
'Whether that means a leak slow enough to close some hatches, get the crew out or at least into safer parts of the station, is a roll of the dice.
'It could also depressurise in less than a minute.'
On Thursday, Nasa said Russian cosmonauts had carried out repairs to the Zvezda section. However, the US space agency postponed the Axiom Mission 4 launch, which would have taken an Indian astronaut to the ISS, while investigations are carried out.
'The postponement of Axiom Mission 4 provides additional time for Nasa and Roscosmos to evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary,' Nasa said.
The Axiom Mission 4 launch will be carried out by Mr Musk's SpaceX, using both the company's Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon capsule.
The billionaire threatened to decommission his Dragon capsules as part of a blazing public row with Donald Trump on social media.
However, Mr Musk has since said he regrets some of his comments during the spat and there has been no sign of him following through on the SpaceX threat.
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The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘People didn't like women in space': how Sally Ride made history and paid the price
A week before Sally – a documentary about the first American woman to fly into space – landed at the Sundance film festival in January, Nasa employees received emails informing them how Donald Trump's diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) rollbacks would take effect. Contracts and offices associated with DEI programs were to be terminated. Staff were given Orwellian instruction to inform the government of any attempt to disguise inclusion efforts in 'coded or imprecise language'. In the weeks to follow, Nasa would take back its promise to send the first woman and person of color to the moon's surface. Meanwhile, employees are reported to be hiding their rainbow flags and any other expressions of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community, allegedly because they were instructed to do so though Nasa denies those claims. 'The pride flag flew in space a couple years ago,' says Cristina Costantini, the director of Sally, on a Zoom call with the Guardian. 'Now all Nasa employees are being asked to take down any representations of pride.' Costantini calls the developments sad, especially because such harmful silencing contributes to the very atmosphere that made her film's subject hide her own queer identity throughout her celebrated career. Sally Ride, who made history when she rode the space shuttle Challenger into the stars on 18 June 1983, was a lesbian. The public, and so many who knew Ride personally, only found out that part of her legacy after she died of cancer in 2012. Ride's obituary identified Tam O'Shaughnessy as her partner of 27 years. O'Shaughnessy is a key voice in Sally, a National Geographic documentary revisiting everything we thought we knew about Ride – from her astronomic accomplishments to the infuriating sexism she confronted at Nasa and in the media, with reporters questioning how she would dress, whether space travel would affect her ovaries and if she would buckle and cry in the face of daunting challenges. But now there's the extra dimension, the part of Ride kept tragically buried because of the institutionalized homophobia we see resurfacing today. 'We made this movie not thinking it was particularly controversial,' says Costantini. 'We had no idea it would be this relevant.' Costantini is speaking from her Los Angeles office in Atwater Village, a photo of a space shuttle and another of Ride on the Challenger mission hovering just behind her. The investigative reporter turned film-maker – who grew up wanting to be a scientist and made her feature debut co-directing the Sundance audience award winner Science Fair – describes Ride as a major influence on her life. She remembers researching the astronaut as a young child on an old Encarta Encyclopedia CD-Rom for a book report. In grade three, Costantini contributed to a class mural where the students in her Milwaukee school painted their heroes on a wall. Ride is drawn standing alongside Brett Favre and Michael Jordan – a small sampling of the heroes that fed childhood aspirations in the mid-90s, says Costantini. With Sally, Costantini is returning to her icon's story with a canvas bigger than either a book report or mural, but an even more challenging story to tell. 'The film is really two stories interwoven,' says Costantini. 'It's the public and the private Sally. The public Sally is so well-documented that it's a problem. We had to bring in 5,000 reels from the Nasa archive and sort through and sound sync all of them. That was a monumental task. 'And then the other task is the private story, maybe the more interesting story, which has no documentation at all. There are only five really good pictures of [Sally and her partner, Tam] together that we had. You can't build a love story out of showing people the same five pictures over and over again. For that we had to kind of invent our own cinematic romantic language.' Costantini's doc pairs narrations from O'Shaughnessy and others who were close to Ride with animation and 16mm visuals. They express the love, the excitement of first relationships, the heavy toll from keeping these feelings secret and the sting when Ride – whose noted emotional reserve is making more and more sense – would behave inexplicably. 'Sally is a very confusing central subject in some ways,' says Costantini, remarking on how Ride didn't always make for a picture-perfect feminist hero, the uneasiness going a long way to make her even more compelling. The director refers to a story recounted by fellow astronaut Kathryn Sullivan. During the race to become the first American woman to go to space, Ride sabotaged a Nasa exercise Sullivan was working on. Talking heads mull whether that was an example of Ride's prankster sense of humour, or a cutthroat competitive nature that flew in the face of female solidarity and sisterhood. 'She didn't leave tell all diaries or an audio journal of how she was feeling in every single moment. So we're left to interpret later on what her choices were, and why she did what she did.' Costantini also points to Ride's five-year marriage to fellow astronaut Steve Hawley. The union in retrospect can be seen as a betrayal of who she was, and the LGTBQ+ movement that she never publicly aligned with. But it was also a necessary and sacrificial career move to make her dream possible, deflecting any suspicions about sexual orientation while making Ride a more ideal candidate to make history and inspire young women. 'People didn't like women in space,' says Costantini. 'And they especially didn't like single women in space. Some of the male astronauts were, like: 'Well, it was a good look for her not to be single and in space.'' When Ride does climb above the atmosphere on her historic mission, there's a cathartic moment where the tense conflicts within her – or put upon her – are either resolved or abandoned, if only temporarily. 'I loved being weightless,' says Ride, while in space, her recorded words packing new mean considering all the burdens we now understand. 'It's a feeling of freedom.' 'She escaped Earth's orbit – Earth's gravity – metaphorically too,' says Costantini, on that pivotal moment in American history and Ride's personal life. 'Looking at the Earth from space, she started to, for the first time, really think about the imaginary lines that we have. She was struck by the fact that all these countries have known borders around them. These are human constructions. As Tam says in the film, the lines between genders, the lines between race, the lines between countries, who we're allowed to love, those are meaningless constructs. 'Space was transformative for her. When she came back to Earth, she finally allowed herself to be who she really is, and love who she really loved.' Sally premieres on National Geographic on 16 June and is available on Hulu and Disney+ on 17 June
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
The 32-year-old nuclear scientist busting the ‘Net Zero myth'
The splitting of the atom was supposed to bring about a new age of abundance. In the world of tomorrow, model families would live beside giant cooling towers in homes running on electricity 'too cheap to meter'. They would get around in cars powered by miniature nuclear reactors, not needing to stop and refuel for thousands of miles. Even the tedium of golf could be alleviated, somewhat, by balls implanted with radioactive material to make them easy to find with a Geiger counter when lost in the rough. Needless to say, this vision of the future never materialised. While progress was being made, a pair of disasters – Three Mile Island in the West and Chernobyl in the East – dealt a blow to nuclear's reputation as a safe source of power from which it has yet to fully recover. Humankind now finds itself struggling to end its dependence on fossil fuels. Governments are spending colossal sums to swap coal, oil and gas for wind and solar so they can achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, and progress has been slow. A renewed push for nuclear may be beginning, but many wonder whether net zero can be reached at all. It was this question that got the scientist and author Dr Tim Gregory thinking and which inspired his new book, Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World. Gregory's argument is simple: what we need is a total rethink of the path to net zero. We should embrace nuclear power and turn decarbonisation into the Apollo programme of the 21st century. 'Certainly, for the foreseeable future, nuclear power represents our best shot of sensibly achieving net zero and producing all of the electricity that we're going to need by 2050 when we're all in electric cars and using heat pumps,' he says from the driver's seat of his car as we float through the vales and hills of the Lake District towards Sellafield, where Gregory works as a chemist. His book is ordered with the care and precision you would expect from someone whose bread and butter are atoms and subatomic particles. Nuclear power's potential to change the world is enlivened by data and forward-looking policy ideas. Counter-arguments are pulled apart with rigour. But what comes through most strongly is Gregory's enthusiasm. The 32-year-old emits optimism like an exotic isotope emits gamma rays. 'That's one of my favourite things about being a scientist. It's a genuine, incredible source of optimism,' he says over a pea fritter and chips (Gregory is a vegetarian) in Seascale, a village just down the coast from Sellafield that became known as 'the brainiest town in Britain' when the scientists and engineers arrived to build Britain's first nuclear facilities. The tide is turning There are already signs the tide may be turning in favour of nuclear energy. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, announced earlier this week that Britain would spend £14.2 billion on a new nuclear power station at Sizewell C, and Donald Trump, the US president, last month issued a flurry of executive orders aiming to quadruple nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Until recently, though, Gregory wasn't sure if net zero was possible. 'I was thinking fossil fuels are so deeply embedded in everything we do in society – they just produce too much energy and they're too convenient, they're too easy – that we're going to extract every last drop of oil, every pocket of gas, and every gram of coal, and burn it.' But researching his book turned a hunch into a conviction that nuclear power is the best option for reaching net zero. So what does he think needs to happen? More nuclear reactors must be built, of course. In Britain, just 10 nuclear reactors like the Olkiluoto-3 reactor recently inaugurated in Finland would eliminate fossil fuels from the grid. The whole of Europe, he states, would need only 170 similarly sized reactors to achieve the same result; the rest of the world, 1,500. An even grander scheme imagines a global fleet of thousands of reactors which together, Gregory calculates, could meet the world's energy demands for a thousand years. If that seems like a lot, it's because it is. 'That's the scale of the net zero challenge,' he writes. But we have, to an extent, done this before. Take France – after the oil crisis of the 1970s, the country resolved to go nuclear to protect itself from future shocks. Under the slogan, 'In France, we don't have oil, but we have ideas,' 56 reactors were built which, at their peak, supplied 70 per cent of its energy. 'They almost decarbonised their entire grid by accident before anyone cared about climate change,' says Gregory, holding up a chip for emphasis. 'There's a real lesson in that. It's actually possible. The science and technology is there already. We just need to get our act together and deploy it. We're already at about 30 per cent renewables in a lot of countries. What about 30 per cent renewables, 70 per cent nuclear? Then you've done it, and you can all talk about something else and just crack on.' Gregory was thrilled by Mr Miliband's Sizewell C announcement, which the Energy Secretary described as a new 'golden age' for the British nuclear industry. 'I'm delighted. It's not every day a new 3.2 gigawatt nuclear reactor is announced.' Yet Britain intends for nuclear power to contribute just a quarter of its electricity production by 2050. Gregory is not a betting man but, if he were, his money would be on France to be the first country to achieve net zero. Reassuring the general public Before we can begin building Gregory's fleet of reactors, some hurdles have to be cleared, not least the widespread safety concerns around nuclear power. A short walk from where we are sitting, nuclear waste from Sellafield is periodically discharged into the Irish Sea. You'd think it would be enough to deter even the hardiest wild swimmer, but Gregory is unfazed. 'They pipe radioactive waste offshore just over there,' he says, squinting up the beach towards the nuclear site. 'It's absolutely fine. I go swimming in there all the time in summer.' Sometimes pods of dolphins visit – and he hasn't seen any with three eyes. A chunk of Gregory's book is devoted to countering 'radiophobia' – the undue fear of radiation that has been stoked by nuclear weapons testing, disasters and popular culture. There was a forensic examination of the impact of the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred when a reactor exploded during a safety test. Gregory estimates that the true death toll – even including cancers caused by radiation exposure – 'likely falls in the region of a few hundred'. The Fukushima disaster, he notes, has only been linked to a single death, and at Three Mile Island, the worst nuclear accident in American history, 'nobody died, nobody was exposed to anything above background radiation in the surrounding population'. Yet the combined effect of these incidents on our appetite for nuclear power has been extreme. 'We built more nuclear reactors in Europe in the five years leading up to Chernobyl than we have since.' In the lab, Gregory handles minute samples of some of the most radioactive isotopes on the planet. He and his colleagues wear sensors that measure the doses they are absorbing. Gregory, a 'spreadsheet geek', keeps a running tally but says the amount he absorbs each year is negligible – about the same as you would get from a two-week holiday in Cornwall, where high levels of radon gas in the rocks mean annual radiation exposure is more than three times the UK average. He doesn't want to downplay the threat to health ionising radiation can pose, but his work affords him a different perspective. 'The people who work with radiation every day are the people who are least afraid of it,' he says. 'We're all living in radiation anyway, all the time. There's no escaping it.' We pause to acknowledge the glare of the sun. Gregory believes we have no need to worry about nuclear power. But one concern he does not address in the book is the fear that nuclear power plants could become targets for terrorists or a hostile state – as we have seen in Ukraine, where Russia has held the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant hostage. His hypothetical nuclear world is persuasive but exists in controlled, laboratory conditions. 'Everything comes with a risk,' he says. 'The trick is to balance that risk with maximum trade-off, and I would also argue that with more energy, the world would become more peaceful.' Air pollution – a problem that could be mitigated significantly by an expansion of nuclear power – kills more people every hour than have ever died in nuclear accidents, he notes. 'The sight of those Chernobyl liquidators in their respirators and their lead aprons is so much more harrowing than a slightly smoggy city, but actually air pollution is not just a little bit worse, it's orders of magnitude worse.' Concerns around the storage of nuclear waste are similarly misplaced, he says. Long-lived waste that takes hundreds of thousands of years to lose its radioactive potency could be used as fuel for breeder reactors, which actually generate more fissile material than they consume. Building a network of these would leave us mainly with waste that needs to be stored for much shorter periods – think hundreds of years. Much of what we think of as waste is actually extremely useful, finding its way into cutting-edge medical treatments like targeted alpha therapy, which uses a short-lived isotope of lead to destroy cancer cells without harming healthy tissue. Britain, he is keen to point out, holds the world's largest civil stockpile of plutonium. One hundred and forty one tonnes of the stuff lies in a secure facility somewhere in Sellafield. If recycled, it could power the two new reactors at Hinkley Point C well into the 22nd century. But in January the government decided it would dispose of the stockpile by burying it deep underground. Learning from Germany's mistakes And what of global uranium supplies? By going nuclear, are we not simply swapping fossil fuel for a geological alternative? A calculation, which Gregory describes self-effacingly as having been done on the back of an envelope, suggests known reserves of uranium, thorium and recyclable fuel could provide power for 900 years. The 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium dissolved in the world's oceans would do for the next quarter of a million. 'It's a resource like any other – if you can't grow it, you have to dig for it,' he says. 'But there's plenty there to tide us over until we get fusion working. And it's actually quite geographically distributed around the world – it's not like any one country or small group of countries has a monopoly on it, like with oil.' But what of the cost? Germany's Energiewende – its transition away from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewables, which began at the turn of the millennium but accelerated after Fukushima – provides the perfect counterpoint. Nuclear, argues Gregory, provides much better value for money than any of its rivals. For the €500 billion Germany spent on its 'failed energy transformation', Gregory writes, it could have had 40 reactors like the one built in Finland. 'With that much electricity, plus the nuclear it switched off since 2000, Germany could have entirely decarbonised its electricity supply, eliminated the need for unreliable wind turbines and solar panels, electrified all 49 million of its cars, and still have spare electricity to generate 1.7 million tonnes of green hydrogen every year.' With large-scale infrastructure projects, Gregory concedes that there is a problem. 'We do seem to have a chronic inability to build large pieces of infrastructure,' he laments. 'It's not just the UK, it's the West in general, and it affects everything from high-speed rail networks to new hospitals to new housing estates, even potholes. There are lots of them around here, as you can imagine, with all the rain that we get.' Again though, we have done this before. Calder Hall, the world's first full-scale nuclear power station, opened in what is now Sellafield in 1956. Queen Elizabeth II threw the switch to connect it to the grid. 'We used to be world leaders at building nuclear power stations' We're back in the car and Sellafield is spreading out in the valley before us. A sign warning against the flying of drones flashes by as we come to a halt on a road named after John Dalton, the Cumbrian-born scientist who popularised the idea that the world was made from atoms. (The ancient Greeks got close but it was a 'lucky guess', says Gregory.) 'In the UK, we used to be world leaders at building nuclear power stations, not just quickly but en masse. The median build time in Europe back in the 1970s and 1980s was about six years, which is about what it is today in China and South Korea,' he says, pointing to the stacks where British scientists took the first steps into the Atomic Age. 'There is a doom and gloom in society, and people are demoralised,' says Gregory. 'I don't want to diminish the very real problems that a lot of people face and the big challenges that the UK faces and the world faces, but we are actually capable of doing some really cool stuff when we put our minds to it.' That's where his Apollo programme analogy comes in. 'A massive, concerted effort on the nuclear power front would solve a lot of our problems. And it's totally achievable.' When he's not in the lab, Gregory is often out promoting nuclear power's green credentials, bringing him into contact with environmentalist groups who are at best ambivalent towards it. Many, like Greenpeace, have their roots in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and are implacably opposed to it, seeing it as linked with atomic weapons, though as Gregory says, 'you can have one without the other'. He recalled a recent encounter with an eco activist. 'I've read a lot of Greenpeace literature, a lot of Friends of the Earth literature – I haven't just put myself into an echo chamber. But I came away from the conversation with this guy really disappointed by how weak the arguments were. They're either based on things that aren't true, or gut feelings, and energy policy is not something that should be dictated by gut feeling.' Despite this, Gregory has a surprising amount in common with the naysayers of nuclear power. Raised in Dewsbury by a single mother, he was 'grabbed' by a passion for science at a young age. Bird-watching books, mushroom-spotting guides and encyclopaedias, provided by his mother, fuelled a love of the natural world. 'I've always had a rock collection and a fossil collection. I had a miniature museum in my bedroom and posters of geological timelines and all the rest of it,' he says. 'I used to get the mickey taken out of me at school for loving science and that kind of thing – I used to get called Nasa boy.' Today, he loves nothing more than walking in the fells that surround his home. 'There's a certain awe you get from being out in the mountains,' he admits. While some find it tough to adapt to the relative isolation of this corner of west Cumbria, Gregory revels in the fact that he is 100 miles from the nearest Pret. He met his wife Amy in a laboratory at Sellafield, and the pair married in a pub having bonded over a shared love of ale. Beer-making, he says, 'is the best kind of chemistry, after all'. He rejects the popular view that achieving carbon neutrality means sacrificing quality of life. For example, 'I hate paper straws. They're an example of bad technology. They make me really resentful, actually,' he says. Really good green technology, he says, should instead be about replacing something with an alternative that is not only more environmentally friendly, but is actually better – like the LED light bulb. 'That's exactly the kind of technology that we should be implementing more of. It's better than what it replaces in its function, and it's cheaper and it's better for the environment. It's perfect. Who can argue with that?' He is similarly irked by 'greenwashing' and uses a brief section of Going Nuclear to interrogate Greta Thunberg's fabled transatlantic yacht voyage to the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019. While she may not have racked up any air miles getting there, the same cannot be said for a crew of five who had to fly to New York to retrieve the vessel and sail it back to Sweden. 'Of all the things in my book that might get me cancelled, the opening to that chapter might be one,' Gregory says. Ultimately though, he feels he is mostly on the same page as the environmentalists, and indeed sees himself as one, of a sort. 'The aims of the environmental movement are really good, and I think most people would agree with them. We all want a cleaner world that's more sustainable – exactly the kind of view that we're enjoying now,' he says, pointing out Blencathra as it looms up out of the landscape. 'I really do think the penny is dropping that renewables on their own are just not going to do it, but with nuclear, it's like both sides of the debate win – everybody gets what they want.' So what does Gregory's vision of the future look like? Regrettably, the nuclear-powered car doesn't come into it, though he expects every town and city will have one or more of the emerging breed of small modular reactors providing their power, alongside solar panels and wind turbines. In fact, the nuclear city of the future may not be unfamiliar to us today. 'It doesn't have to be fundamentally different, that's the point. Nuclear power is already Europe's biggest source of emissions-free energy by quite a long way, and that's really surprising, and the fact that it's surprising is really telling, because nobody notices.' The Energy Coast, as this part of west Cumbria is known, provides a glimpse of such a future. Locals are big supporters of the nuclear industry and Gregory reckons they would be thrilled if a new reactor opened and Sellafield began producing power again. The same cannot be said, however, of a planned solar farm down the road. 'Everybody's kicking off about it. Nuclear is the thing around here – people are really proud of it.' Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World, by Tim Gregory, is published on 12 June (Bodley Head, £25)
Daily Mail
8 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Futurist who predicted the iPhone reveals date humans will cheat death
A leading futurist who accurately predicted the rise of the iPhone has now set the date for humanity's most phenomenal breakthrough yet, the ability to cheat death. Ray Kurzweil, a former Google engineering director, has long been known for his bold predictions about the future of technology and humanity. His forecasts often focus on the convergence of biotech, AI, and nanotechnology to radically extend human capabilities. Now, Kurzweil claims humanity is just four years away from its most transformative leap yet, achieving 'longevity escape velocity' by 2029. While some experts remain skeptical, Kurzweil's influence in Silicon Valley ensures his predictions continue to shape the broader conversation around life extension and the future of human health. Longevity escape velocity (LEV) is a hypothetical scenario where the rate of medical advancement outpaces the aging process, leading to an ever-increasing life expectancy. Kurzweil believes that threshold is within reach because of recent exponential growth in the fields of line gene editing, mRNA vaccines, drug discovery led by artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology. He pointed to the development of COVID-19 vaccines as proof of humanity's rapid progress. 'We got the COVID vaccine out in 10 months,' he said in an interview with Bessemer Venture Partners. 'It took two days to create it. Because we sequenced through several billion different sequences in two days,' Kurzweil added. The controversial idea has long stirred debate in tech and scientific circles, with many gerontologists and longevity experts warning that the science is not yet close to achieving such a feat. In recent study, researchers noted that while some treatments have extended lifespan in animals, translating those results to humans remains a major challenge. Others, like Charles Brenner, a biochemist at City of Hope National Medical Center known as a 'longevity skeptic,' have cautioned against the hype surrounding claims of defeating aging and life-extension theories. We can't stop aging, he told the crowd. We can not use longevity genes to stay young because getting older is a fundamental property of life. But Kurzweil insists the world is on the verge of achieving it, pointing to exponential advances in AI, nanotechnology, and regenerative medicine as indicators that 'longevity escape velocity' could be reached within the decade. The concept hinges on cutting edge medicine becoming universally accessible, something many experts warn is far from guaranteed. While it does not promise immortality, it does suggest that death from old age could be delayed indefinitely, as technology advances over time. 'There's many other advances happening,' Kurzweil said. 'We're starting to see simulated biology being used and that's one of the reasons that we're going to make so much progress in the next five years.' Kurzweil has built a career on predicting the future, with many of his past forecasts coming true during the exact year he stated it would happen. He correctly foresaw the rise of portable computing in the 1990s, predicted the internet boom in the mid-1990s, and a computer would defeat a chess grandmaster by 1997. A milestone reached when IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov that year. Still, critics argue that forecasting a future without death, is far more complex than spotting tech trends. Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel Prize winning biologist, explained in his book ' ' that aging happens because of many connected biological factors, not just one cause. This makes it a very complex problem. Unlike technology, which usually improves in clear and predictable steps, the process of aging is much harder to understand and predict. Even if longevity escape velocity is technically possible by 2029, experts warn that widespread access could be limited by socioeconomic and ethical challenges. The technology needed to extend life in this way, such as genetic reprogramming, precision medicine, or nanobots, is expensive and still largely experimental. Medical advancements have significantly improved life expectancies, but achieving longevity escape velocity is not the same as achieving immortality. Kurzweil acknowledged that broad adoption is a massive hurdle. 'This doesn't mean you're going to live forever. A 10-year-old might have decades of potential, but they could still die tomorrow,' he said. There are limits. Randomness still plays a role. Cancer, for example, isn't a single disease but hundreds of mutations with no universal cure. While self-driving cars may reduce accidents, they won't eliminate them. Equally concerning is the disparity in global health care. Diseases like tuberculosis, which has a known cure, still kill more than a million people annually because treatments are unevenly distributed. The last few years have seen major breakthroughs in life-extension science. mRNA technology is now being adapted for cancer vaccines. CRISPR gene editing is being used in clinical trials to treat hereditary blindness and sickle cell disease. Meanwhile, researchers are growing entire organs in labs and experimenting with reversing aging in mice using cellular reprogramming techniques. AI is also accelerating biology. DeepMind's AlphaFold project solved one of biology's biggest puzzles, predicting how proteins fold in a feat that could revolutionize drug discovery. These advances are what Kurzweil cites as evidence that the human clock may soon start ticking backwards. Still, the idea of LEV captures something deeper, a human desire to defy mortality, to stay a step ahead of the inevitable. Kurzweil is not promising a magic pill or overnight change. He is predicting a tipping point in the near future, when medical progress starts to outpace aging in small, accumulating ways. If his timeline holds true, the early 2030s could mark the beginning of a very different relationship with aging, one in which dying of old age is no longer an assumed endpoint.
