Be privileged.

Be lucky. Be rich. Be powerful. Be good-looking. Be intelligent, smart and wise, but more importantly educated– suggested fields of undergraduate study are biology, anthropology and politics. Contrary to popular suggestions, I do not advise you to drop out. Network. Be charismatic. Meet people. Know people. Remember names. Make contacts. Act. Do favours. Be or become powerful. Have parents who can help you with all of these things, who are lucky, rich, smart and powerful themselves. Be successful, by every definition of “successful”. You don’t need to be self-made. You can climb there over the stabbed backs of others, it doesn’t matter. Just be made.

Almost all of this is dumb luck. You can read as many Successmanship books as you want and work every extra hour of every day you’re given, and still not get any of the things listed in the above paragraph. Billions of people other than you already do. It’s much easier to just be born on the top rung.

Be driven, in a way which is beyond the drive of every other human. This isn’t about waiting around until somehow, for some reason, someone else destroys the Earth. This is about you travelling from where you are right now to a point in time when you have brought about the Earth’s destruction. You want continuity of purpose between these two events. You want to set events in motion and then live to see their conclusion. The second part is because you need to be sure.

So you must need to destroy the Earth. Make that need into the foundation of everything you do, from getting up on any given morning to quitting for any given night. You will need to sustain this drive for a greater period of time than anybody has ever sustained anything. You need to be superhuman, not to say psychotic. You’re embarking upon a journey into deep psychological time, across time scales against which the human psyche can certainly have no protective evolutionary adaptations. It is very probable that you will cease to be sane or even recognisably mentally human by the end of this process.

This, by the way, is not a deal-breaker. Remaining human is not part of the mission statement. As long as there is some kind of continuity of you from here to there, it doesn’t matter how many loop-the-loops that continuous thread of you-ness makes. It’s still you. Every particle of your body changes every seven years, what does it matter if every particle of your psyche does the same?

The first thing you actually need to do, once iron-willed and hyper-rich, is to dramatically increase your lifespan. Well, let’s just call it “become immortal”.

Modern biology is an amazingly young science and has come an extraordinary distance in a small amount of time. Immortality in some form or another is fairly likely to be invented some time before the end of the current iteration of intelligent humans, but

• that’s not a guarantee
• it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen in your lifetime, and
• it doesn’t mean that you, personally, will have access to it.

So you need to make sure of these things.

You don’t have to be the person who makes the crucial discoveries. In fact, it seems unlikely that any single person or even laboratory will be able to take credit for the collection of breakthrough procedures which eventually add up to eternal youth. But you need to be as close to the discovery as possible, to maximise the chance that you are among those who benefit from it. The effective way to do this is to fund the science. Be a smart investor. You studied biology; this should help you understand the basic principles of the scientific field, as well as the grotesque structure of biological science as a real practice in the real world. This in turn will mean you can know your way around a laboratory, know how to recognise a good scientist and promising research, and know the difference between a good investment and a bad one.

Immortality takes a variety of different forms, but in practical terms none of them amount to invincibility. No procedure which halts or reverses the process of ageing can protect you from, say, polio, or a truck. Most people manage to live their entire lives without experiencing either of these things, but that is because their lives are short. Your life is now unbounded in length and as time goes to infinity, incredibly rare events occur infinitely many times, sometimes twice in one day.

There are, however, other things which can protect you from polio and trucks, such as vaccination and vigilance. Now you that are immortal, you need to radically modify your lifestyle for extreme caution. Watch everything you eat, distrust everybody you meet. Fly everywhere, avoid motor vehicles at all costs. If you must travel, travel in motorcades; better, become reclusive and arrange to never need to leave your home at all. Be cautious around bacteria, bone-in meat, hard surfaces, swimming pools, open fires. Do you see what the President of the United States is surrounded with, every day of his life? That’s a good start. But he only needs to survive to the end of office. You need to survive for millions of years.

Yes, that’s right. Millions. Probably tens of. We’re talking about destroying the whole planet Earth. We’re talking about pursuing a chain of events, of continuous and focused