The influence of vitalist movements on actual technological and biomedical progress has been extremely small. There is little evidence that this is likely to change in the next few decades.

CRISPR, CAR-T, xenotransplantation, AlphaFold, the AI revolution, and even the doubling of NIH funding between 1998 and 2003 all happened almost entirely without any meaningful influence from vitalists. The great engines of progress did not come from the immortality movement. They came from mainstream science, biotech, medicine, and now AI.

It is 2026, and Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and other top billionaires and multimillionaires openly say that one of their goals is to defeat all disease. They are raising and deploying billions of dollars toward that ambition.

It is also 2026, and the most famous immortality-adjacent figures are Bryan Johnson, David Sinclair, and Peter Diamandis. Meanwhile, AI visionaries are rapidly catching up. One could call some of these people vitalists, but they did not come out of vitalist movements. They are not products of those communities. They do not have deep causal links to them.

For decades, vitalist movements have discussed how they would scale: how they would persuade thousands of activists, produce hundreds of techno-multimillionaires, recruit top scientists, influence top politicians, and eventually become a major historical force. It did not happen. In 2026, we are not significantly closer to that goal than we were in 2000, even though the plans and internal discussions never stopped.

There are notable exceptions, especially in cryonics, and perhaps cases such as Jean Hébert. But they are rare, and often remain somewhat separate.

For decades, vitalists hoped for a scientific breakthrough that would transform the aging paradigm. It has not yet occurred — because of insufficient funding, regulatory barriers, scientific difficulty, institutional conservatism, or some mixture of all of these. Whatever the explanation, the result is the same: it did not happen.

For decades, vitalist leaders tried to convince vitalists that collective strategies work, and that the central task was to gather a critical mass of committed vitalists. Once that mass existed, the argument went, at least some strategies would finally start working. But that critical mass never arrived.

Moreover, many people who made real contributions to the vitalist cause may have substantially reduced their own chances of living to see the victory they hoped for. They spent time, money, career capital, health, and emotional energy on advocacy, organising, writing, conferences, and underfunded institutions — often by sacrificing their health and wealth. Some of that sacrifice was admirable. But it may still have lowered their own survival odds.

Perhaps the bitter lesson of vitalist movements is that they are doomed to have no influence, while the necessary progress is accelerated by outsiders: AI labs, biotech companies, mainstream philanthropists, elite scientists, and founders who never passed through vitalist institutions at all.

It now seems increasingly clear that unless vitalist movements begin doing something genuinely great, bold, and operationally serious, they will not make a significant contribution to the victory over disease, aging, and death. They may cheer for it. They may comment on it. They may have predicted parts of it. But they will not be among the forces that actually caused it.

We need to identify the movement's Great Big Project: the one bold, serious, concrete thing we could plausibly do this year with the forces we already have. Not another long-term fantasy about the future arrival of thousands of passionate vitalists. Perhaps they can be recruited; perhaps they will come. But they will not gather around emptiness. They need a banner, a project, a visible act of seriousness — not the promise that if enough people join, we will someday work out what the movement is for.