In this excerpt from “We Are As Gods: A Survival God for the Age of Abundance,” authors Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler explore what it means to be human in a world where technology has granted us seemingly limitless power. If it sometimes seems like humans can play at being God, the real question is how to do it wisely. 

The next frontier is longevity — the attempt to rewrite the rules of life and death.

At the center of these efforts is a general consensus: Biology is a code that gets buggy over time. This bugginess is what we call aging. But like all codes, biology can be debugged.

Few have pushed this idea further than Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, who argues that aging isn’t a loss of function but a loss of information — making it a problem of software, not hardware. Information recovery tools are piling up: CRISPR lets us edit the genome; Yamanaka factors, a set of four transcription genes, roll back the biological age of cells; cellular reprogramming, epigenetic editing, mitochondrial enhancement. Each of these technologies adds more possibility, and all of them are being accelerated by AI.

“What we do now [using AI] in a month would’ve taken thousands of years,” Sinclair explained on Peter’s Moonshots podcast. AI lets Sinclair simulate trillions of molecules, screening for the rare combinations that reverse aging at the epigenetic level. His team has identified four key enzyme pathways. If you inhibit three and activate one, you can reset a cell’s biological clock. It’s called epigenetic reprogramming, a technique that suggests we can reverse aging altogether.

Just five years ago, age reversal was a crazy idea. “In 2017, it was just a theory,” Sinclair notes. By 2020, he proved it worked in the lab. Now, AI is accelerating the transition into human trials.

By 2026 or so, these compounds could do everything from smooth wrinkled skin to revitalize decrepit organs in as little as four weeks. And that four-week supply? According to Sinclair, it should cost a few hundred dollars.

Another breakthrough targets senescent cells, which are dysfunctional cells that have stopped dividing but refuse to die. Researchers call them zombie cells. They clog tissues, secrete inflammatory chemicals, and accelerate aging. Normally, our immune systems—especially the natural killer (NK) cells that are frontline defenders against cancer and viral infections—clear them out. But as we age, in a process known as immuno-exhaustion, our supply of NK cells diminishes, leaving us more vulnerable to disease.

Enter senolytics, a new class of drugs that clears zombie cells from our system. In mice, they’ve already extended healthspan and lifespan. Human trials are underway.

Meanwhile, companies like Celularity are working on immune reinforcement. Founded by stem cells pioneer Robert Hariri, Celularity harvests NK cells from healthy placentas and transfers them into aging bodies, where they bolster immune function. They’re also developing T cell and stem cell supplements to reboot the body’s natural repair systems. Together, these advances shift the paradigm from treating age-related disease to preventing decline before it starts.

When will we see actual treatments? Consider the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan, which is maybe the most ambitious XPRIZE yet. To win, you need a therapeutic treatment that reverses the ravages of aging in muscle, immune, and cognitive function by a minimum of ten years, and with a real goal of twenty. In other words, give humanity back two healthy decades, win a hundred and one million dollars.

Did this lofty goal hamper competition? The opposite. It spurred it on. As of late 2025, over seven hundred teams from more than fifty nations entered. A winner is expected by 2030.

The Healthspan XPRIZE is yet another example of the money flowing into longevity. Many of the world’s tech-forward billionaires are funding start-ups in the area. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is backing Joe Betts-Lacroix in an epigenetic reprogramming company called Retro Biosciences; while Brian Armstrong, cofounder and CEO of Coinbase, has teamed with investor Blake Byers to build another reprogramming company called New Limit.

And like Sinclair’s lab, these other efforts are also benefiting from the compounding impact of artificial intelligence. Drug discovery once took decades and cost billions. Today, AI designs new molecules in hours, and for the cost of electricity. Google DeepMind, Alphabet’s premier research division, is the creator of AlphaFold, which cracked the protein-folding problem and gave us the recipe for—no this is not a typo—two hundred million proteins. This single AI advancement accelerated the pace of longevity therapeutics by decades.

AI-driven diagnostics is also moving at lightning speeds. It takes only four hours for Fountain Life, Peter’s longevity diagnostics and therapeutics company—co-founded with Tony Robbins, Bill Kapp, and Bob Hariri—to gather two hundred gigabytes of data about your body (MRI, CT, and DEXA scans; your full genome; microbiome; 140-plus biomarkers; and more). This information is fed into Fountain’s diagnostic AI to answer two questions. First, is anything going on inside your body that you need to know about? Second, disease-wise, what’s likely to happen to you in the future, and what can you do to prevent it? “It’s about not dying from something stupid,” as Peter likes to say.

So where does this lead? Consider two AI-longevity comments from early 2025. First, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told attendees at Davos: “If you think about what we might expect humans to accomplish in an area like biology in one hundred years, I think a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy. And then if AI is able to accelerate that [timeline], we may be able to get that in five to ten years.” Then, DeepMind CEO and Nobel laureate Sir Demis Hassabis went further: “I think someday we can cure all disease with the help of AI. I think that’s within reach within the next decade.”

Genetic engineering, epigenetic reprogramming, longevity pharmacology, bioinformatics, AI everything—and again, the same question: Where does it lead?

We’re nearing what Ray Kurzweil called longevity escape velocity, which is the moment when medical progress outpaces biological decay, extending our healthy lifespan faster than time erodes it. Once theoretical, longevity escape velocity is now measurable. With AI accelerating every aspect of longevity research, the slope of that curve is bending upward. If Sinclair’s work, the XPRIZE Healthspan competition, and investments by the tech giants and world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs continue to debug, defrag, and defang aging, then we’re talking about living a whole lot longer a whole lot sooner—and maybe this decade.

It’s an abundance of life to go with our life of abundance, and it raises a final concern: meaning. If death is less of a deadline, we face a different problem: not how to stay alive but how to stay human.

Even if we extend life by decades, or double it as some predict, we’ve only managed to upgrade our biology. Our psychology remains an issue. More time is not always a treasure. Without purpose, it can be a random drift. Without play, a prison of the same old, same old.

Without flow, an empty surplus devoid of growth or meaning. The question of radical longevity is no longer how we defeat death. It’s how to remain vibrant and alive on the inside. As Woody Allen reminds us: “Eternity is an awful long time, especially toward the end.”

For most of human history, we didn’t have to manufacture meaning. It emerged from the hard work of trying not to die before dinner. But the more we decouple life from survival, the more we have to invent reasons to get up in the morning. 

Without curiosity, creativity, play, purpose, flow, and meaning, our brains atrophy and our minds rot. And in our extended future, we will have to live with that rot for a mighty long time. Despite the menu at the Cheesecake Factory, humanity does not always flourish in abundance. That’s one of the main lessons of this chapter. Comfort is an enemy. We need challenge. Friction hones intelligence. Goals drive us forward. As coach Dan Sullivan likes to say: “It’s critical that our future be bigger than our past.”

In a long-lived, post-scarcity world, the absence of external struggle means we need to generate drive from within. Humans have five major intrinsic motivators—curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery—ancient tools now turned essential. Together with play and flow, they’re the design principles for a life worth extending.

The bottleneck to longevity may no longer be biological. Increasingly, it’s mental, emotional, maybe even spiritual. The tools that lengthen life are here. The tools that make life worth living? To thrive in the age of abundance, we need another set of guidelines. Less a manifesto. More a direction of travel. Six tools based on the principles described throughout this book that are designed to help us flourish in an extended future.

Embrace Challenge as a Virtue: Boldly go. Challenge is core to a meaningful life. One of the oldest rules in physiology, the Yerkes–Dodson law, shows that optimal performance requires moderate stress. Flow reinforces the idea, as the state only emerges when challenge exceeds skill. Stagnation is a greater risk than starvation in a post-scarcity world. To thrive, we need to train ourselves to stretch ourselves, over and over again.

Cultivate Curiosity Over Comfort: Curiosity is rocket fuel. It fires up the brain’s reward circuitry, amplifying excitement, learning, memory, and flow. And our prediction engine brain updates its mental models through error and surprise. Curiosity drives these updates. Without it, our predictions falter. So feed curiosity on a regular basis. Ask great questions. Ask them often. This is one of the advantages of large language models. We all get to be young again, asking, “Why? Why? Why?” to our hearts’ content.

Redefine Work as Creation: For a very long time, we worked to survive. In a post-scarcity world, the new work is creation, growth, self-expression, meaning-making. These skills define the future of work, when the goal is no longer to earn a living but to earn a life.

Strengthen Social Bonds: Long lives require strong communities. In the Harvard Study of Adult Development—the longest-running study on human flourishing—close relationships were the best predictor of health and happiness. And if large-scale cooperation is required to face down existential risk, connection is infrastructure.

Live with Purpose: The longer we live, the more dangerous mental drift becomes. Purpose is an anchor, linked to better outcomes in everything from career satisfaction to long-term health. With radical longevity, time becomes abundant. To use it wisely, intentionality is our discipline. It cuts through distraction and marshals attention, shaping life to mean more tomorrow than it does today.

Preserve Awe: Awe is an endangered species in a world of everything, everywhere, all the time. Yet it resets the brain, expanding perception, quieting ego, and strengthening connection. In nature, music, poetry, or psychedelics, awe is a sacred technology for recalibrating our mindswhen progress outruns perspective.

Keep Failure in the Loop: Failure is the precondition for success. Errors light up the brain and trigger learning. In a future where AI minimizes error, we risk losing the conditions that make growth possible. To flourish in an age of certainty, we need uncertainty. Without failure, there’s no surprise. Without surprise, we stop becoming and start stalling. In an exponential world, stalling is another word for drowning.

From “WE ARE AS GODS: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance” by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. Copyright © 2026 by PHD Ventures, Inc. and Steven Kotler. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC.