How to live forever: every way people are trying in 2026, and what the evidence says

Immortality: living forever. Biological immortality means not aging, so that the risk of dying does not rise with age, even though accidents and disease can still kill.

Lifespan: how long a person lives. Maximum lifespan is the longest any member of a species has lived.

Healthspan: the years of life spent in good health.

Life expectancy: the average number of years a newborn can expect to live, given current death rates.

Senescence: the gradual decline of cells and the body with age. Senescent cells stop dividing and release harmful signals.

Epigenetic reprogramming: resetting the chemical marks on DNA that change with age, so that old cells behave more like young ones.

Senolytic: a drug designed to clear senescent cells.

Longevity escape velocity: the point at which medicine adds more than a year of remaining life expectancy for every year that passes.

Cryonics: preserving a legally dead person at very low temperature in the hope that future medicine can revive them.

Mind uploading: copying the structure and activity of a brain in enough detail to run a working version of that mind on a computer.

Digital immortality: the idea that a person can continue in digital form after their body dies.

Not today, and not with any technology that exists yet. Every human body ages: cells accumulate damage, tissues lose the ability to repair themselves, and the risk of dying roughly doubles every eight years or so in adulthood. Medicine has done an extraordinary job of stopping people from dying young, which is why average life expectancy has risen so much over the last century. It has done much less to change how long the oldest people live.

The longest verified human life belongs to Jeanne Calment, who was born in Arles, France, on February 21, 1875, and died there on August 4, 1997, at the age of 122 years and 164 days (Guinness World Records). The oldest living person in October 2026 is Ethel Caterham of the United Kingdom, who turned 117 on August 21, 2026 (Good Morning America). Calment's record has stood for nearly three decades.

Across the whole world, the World Health Organization estimates that life expectancy at birth was 73.3 years in 2023, and healthy life expectancy, the years lived in good health, was 62.8 years (WHO). The gap between those two numbers, about a decade spent in poorer health, is exactly what much of the longevity industry is trying to close.

A few animals come close to escaping aging, and they are a big part of why scientists think aging can be changed. The best known is Turritopsis dohrnii, the so-called immortal jellyfish, which can turn itself back from an adult into an immature polyp, the earliest stage of its life, and start again (Wikipedia: Turritopsis dohrnii). Hydra, tiny freshwater animals related to jellyfish, constantly renew their tissues and show almost no signs of aging.

Among animals with backbones, the record belongs to the Greenland shark. Scientists using radiocarbon dating of the lenses in their eyes estimated in 2016 that the species lives at least 272 years, with the oldest shark they studied estimated at 392 years, give or take 120, and that the sharks do not reach maturity until about 150 years of age (Wikipedia: Greenland shark). Lobsters do not appear to weaken or lose fertility with age, though they still die.

None of these animals is truly immortal: they can all be killed by predators, disease or accidents. But they prove that aging is not a law of physics. It is a biological process, and biological processes can, in principle, be changed.

The approaches fall into four groups: keeping the body healthy for longer, slowing or reversing aging with medicine, preserving the body after death, and continuing in digital form. They differ enormously in how much evidence stands behind them.

The least glamorous approach is also the only one with strong evidence in people. Not smoking, staying physically active, eating well, sleeping enough, keeping a healthy weight and staying connected to other people all lower the risk of the diseases that kill most people, and doctors have recommended them for decades. They will not let anyone live forever. But they are the main reason some people stay healthy into their 90s while others do not.

The most famous modern example of taking this approach to the extreme is Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur who spends about $2 million a year on a regime of diet, exercise, sleep, supplements and medical tests he calls Blueprint, and who was the subject of the 2025 Netflix documentary Don't Die (Wikipedia: Bryan Johnson). Whether such an extreme regime adds much beyond the basics is not yet known.

The best evidence for a drug that slows aging comes from rapamycin, a drug used to prevent organ transplant rejection. In a 2009 study published in Nature, rapamycin given to genetically diverse mice starting at about 600 days old, the equivalent of about 60 in human years, extended their lifespan by 14% in females and 9% in males (Nature (PubMed)). It was one of the first demonstrations that a drug could extend the lives of mammals even when started late in life.

Testing it in people is harder, because human lives are long and aging is not an approved target for drugs. The Dog Aging Project's TRIAD trial is testing rapamycin in 580 pet dogs aged seven and older, given once a week for a year and then followed for two more, with survival as the main outcome (GeroScience (PMC)). Dogs share our homes and many of our diseases, so a positive result would be a big step. In people, the proposed TAME trial of the diabetes drug metformin, designed for 3,000 people aged 65 to 79 over six years, has for years struggled to raise the tens of millions of dollars it needs (Fight Aging!).

As we age, some cells stop dividing but refuse to die. These senescent cells release signals that cause inflammation and damage nearby tissue, and clearing them out has improved health in old mice. That idea attracted major investment, including from Jeff Bezos, into Unity Biotechnology. But Unity's lead drug failed to beat a placebo in a trial for knee arthritis in 2020, and in September 2025 its stockholders voted to liquidate the company (Investing.com). The idea is not dead, and Altos Labs bought a senolytics company in 2025, but it has not yet worked in people.

This is the approach that has excited scientists and billionaires most. In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka and Kazutoshi Takahashi showed that switching on four genes could turn an adult cell back into a young stem cell, a discovery that won Yamanaka a share of the 2012 Nobel Prize (Wikipedia: Induced pluripotent stem cell). Later work showed that switching those genes on briefly, rather than all the way, can make old cells behave younger without losing what they are. That is partial reprogramming, and in animals it has restored vision in damaged eyes and improved other signs of aging.

In January 2026, the US Food and Drug Administration cleared Life Biosciences to start a trial of ER-100, which uses three of Yamanaka's four genes, in people with glaucoma and another disease that damages the optic nerve. The company described it as the first epigenetic reprogramming therapy cleared for testing in people, and the first participant was dosed on June 9, 2026 (Life Biosciences). Well-funded companies are following: NewLimit, co-founded by Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, raised $435 million in June 2026 and plans to test in people in 2027, and Altos Labs launched in 2022 with $3 billion. Our guide to the billionaires trying to live forever covers who is funding what.

Some people have not waited for clinical trials. A company called Minicircle has offered an experimental gene therapy meant to boost a protein called follistatin, in Próspera, a special economic zone in Honduras, without published human data, and experts have been skeptical (MIT Technology Review). Liz Parrish, the head of BioViva, gave herself an experimental gene therapy in Colombia after the FDA declined, and her claims about its effects have been criticized as within the margin of measurement error (Wikipedia: BioViva). Treatments like these are unproven and may be unsafe.

One of the boldest ideas in the field is longevity escape velocity, a term popularized by the biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey. The idea is that we do not need a cure for aging all at once. If medicine can add more than one year of remaining life expectancy for every year that passes, people alive at that point could, in principle, keep staying ahead of aging indefinitely (Wikipedia: Longevity escape velocity).

De Grey's LEV Foundation is testing whether combining treatments can push lifespan further than any one treatment alone. Its first Robust Mouse Rejuvenation study gave 1,000 middle-aged mice combinations of four treatments: rapamycin, a senolytic drug, a telomerase gene therapy and stem cell transplants. The last mouse died in February 2025, and the foundation described the result as a qualified win: average lifespan rose significantly, but there was no radical extension of maximum lifespan (LEV Foundation). A second study with 2,000 mice and eight treatments is planned.

Cryonics takes a different approach entirely. Instead of preventing death, it aims to pause what happens after it. After a person is declared legally dead, their body or brain is cooled, filled with a solution that stops ice from forming, and stored at about minus 196 degrees Celsius, in the hope that future medicine can repair and revive them. In 2026 it costs from $28,000 at the Cryonics Institute to $220,000 for a whole body at Alcor, usually paid for with life insurance, and several hundred people are in storage. Nobody has ever been revived. Our guide to cryonics in 2026 covers the prices, the process and the science.

The most radical approach does not try to save the body at all. Mind uploading would copy the structure and activity of a brain in enough detail to run that mind on a computer. It sounds like science fiction, but the first steps have been taken. In 2024, scientists published a complete wiring map of an adult fruit fly brain, nearly 140,000 neurons, and a computer model built from it predicted how the real fly tastes and feeds (Nature). In March 2026, a startup reported connecting that model to a simulated body (The Decoder).

A human brain has about 86 billion neurons, so the gap is still huge. But the tools are improving fast, and it is this route that Larry Page's reported plan depends on: according to Suleyman, Page expects to be exploring the galaxies at the head of a self-copying spacecraft by the end of the century, which no human body could survive. In our view, copying a human mind is a matter of when, not if. Our guides to mind uploading, the connectome and the von Neumann probe explain how it would work.

There is one way of living on that does not depend on any breakthrough, and it is available now. A digital legacy preserves what makes you recognizably you to the people who know you: your stories, your opinions, your advice, your sense of humor and your voice. It does not preserve consciousness, and we would never pretend it does. But it is the part of a person that the people who love them miss most, and the part that every other approach to living on would also need.

That is what a Persona is: an AI likeness of you built from your own memories and your own cloned voice, which your family can talk to and hear after you die. You build your Persona by talking, answering questions and telling stories, by voice or by typing, and your Persona learns from every conversation. Building is free: you get 25 memories with no card and no time limit, and your free build never expires. Paid plans start at US$14.99 a month.

The question that matters most with any digital version of a person is who controls it. Executor Lock™, our patent-pending technology, passes control of your Persona to the executor you name after you die, and no third party can ever edit, retrain or impersonate your Persona. Idy® has 78 patents pending, with international protection sought under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, covering consent, verified death, the handover to a named executor, the permanent memory snapshot behind Executor Lock™, and keeping a Persona the same person when AI models change.

Not officially. No regulator in the United States, Europe or Canada classifies aging as a disease, which means no drug can be approved simply for treating it, and companies have to test their treatments against specific diseases instead (DistilINFO). That is one reason the field moves slowly: Life Biosciences is testing ER-100 in eye disease, not in aging itself.

That may be starting to change. At a major aging research conference in October 2026, FDA officials said that aging and longevity would be a topic in the agency's next list of regulatory science priorities, though none promised a path to approving drugs for aging (Lifespan.io). Prize money is flowing in too: the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan named 20 finalist teams in August 2026, with a grand prize to be awarded in 2030 for therapies that restore function in older people (XPRIZE).

Nobody can honestly promise a way. The most realistic hope for people alive today is a longer healthy life, from healthy habits now and, possibly, from drugs and therapies that are only beginning to be tested in people. Treatments that reset the age of cells are the most exciting development in decades, but they are years from being proven safe and effective, let alone available.

The more radical routes, cryonics and mind uploading, are bets on the future. Cryonics depends on future medicine being able to repair and revive preserved tissue. Mind uploading depends on mapping and running a human brain, which we believe will happen, but not on a timetable anyone can promise. What both of them would need, if they ever work, is to know who a person really was: how they spoke, what they remembered, what they cared about.

That is why we think the most practical step toward living on is also the simplest: make a record of who you are, in your own words and your own voice, while you can. It will not make you immortal. But it means your family can still talk to you and hear you after you die, and it means that whatever the future holds, the most important information about you will exist.

This page is part of our series on the people and the science behind the race to outlive the body.

• Digital Immortality: Larry Page and the Race to Upload Minds: the story that started it, and how close we are to copying a mind.

• What Is a Von Neumann Probe? Larry Page's Galaxy Plan: the self-copying spacecraft at the center of Page's plan.

• Why Larry Page Called Elon Musk a Speciesist: the argument Musk says led to OpenAI.

• What Larry Page Believes About AI and Living Forever: his record, in his own words and in other people's accounts.

• Mind Uploading in 2026: How Close Are We?: how close science is to copying a human brain.

• What Is a Connectome? Every Brain Mapped So Far: the brain's wiring diagram, and every brain mapped so far.

• The Billionaires Trying to Live Forever: who is spending what on longevity and digital immortality.

• Cryonics in 2026: Cost, How It Works, Who Signed Up: what it costs, how it works and who has signed up.

Records and life expectancy come from Guinness World Records, Good Morning America and the WHO. The science of aging comes from Nature (PubMed), GeroScience (PMC), Fight Aging!, the LEV Foundation, Life Biosciences, MIT Technology Review, Investing.com and Wikipedia on induced pluripotent stem cells, longevity escape velocity, BioViva, Bryan Johnson, Turritopsis dohrnii and the Greenland shark.

Regulation comes from Lifespan.io, DistilINFO and XPRIZE, and mind uploading from Nature and The Decoder. We checked every source on October 30, 2026. This page is general information, not medical advice.

None of the people, companies or organizations named on this page has any connection to Afterlife.ai™, and nothing on this page suggests that any of them uses or endorses our service.