The tree · Biology · Happens to the world · Could be decided within 5 to 20 years
A major operation under anaesthesia is performed off Earth and the patient survives
A settlement of thousands cannot evacuate every appendix. Nobody has been operated on off Earth; medical care there stops at what a crew member with training can do with a kit, and serious cases come home. The first major operation under general or regional anaesthesia, performed off Earth with the patient surviving, is the point at which people can be sick out there the way people are sick anywhere, which a settlement, the Tier 2 bar, assumes.
The test: what counts as it having happened
A surgical operation that opens a body cavity or otherwise requires general or regional anaesthesia is performed on a person at a site off Earth, and the patient survives to discharge or to return to Earth, confirmed by the operating agency or company or in a peer-reviewed report. Minor procedures under local anaesthetic do not count.
Settled by: The operating agency's or company's record, or the peer-reviewed case report
The odds, by how long I live
| baselineto 2071 ± 8 | moderateto 2080 | strongto 2095 | radicalto 2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 45% | 55% | 70% | 88% | 92% |
Each column is a different guess at how long I live, from current trends (baseline) to open-ended. The number is the chance this happens before that deadline, assuming everything it depends on happens first. As of 2026-09-20.
Why these numbers: Surgery happens when someone needs it and cannot be sent home, which takes a population in the hundreds at sites more than a few days from Earth; that is a Tier 1 world, so under even odds by 2071 and likely once a settlement exists. Proposed by Claude 2026-09-20 with the node's addition, accepted by John.
What this one is worth
If this happened tomorrow and nothing else changed, the chance that I live and work off Earth by 2071 goes from 0.5% to 0.5% (too small to tell apart from chance). If it turned out no, the same number goes to 0.0% (−0.5 points).
| Longevity scenario | baseline2071 ± 8 | moderate2080 | strong2095 | radical2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The headline as it stands | 0.5% | 1.2% | 3.8% | 11% | 15% |
| If this settled yes now | 0.5% | 1.4% | 4.3% | 11% | 15% |
| If this settled no now | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
This is what the site says in advance, before the thing happens. When it does, the
ledger entry that records it quotes this figure beside what actually followed, so a
reader can see whether the prediction held. Worked out at the run
2026-10-11-scan by holding this step at each outcome in turn and
playing the whole tree out again, 20,000 times per
scenario. That is a throw of the dice, so a move smaller than about
0.10 points is inside the noise rather than
a finding.
The last check
Once a week the tree is read against the news, node by node, against the test above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every check ever made on this node is on the Radar page.
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2026-10-04 Nothing new
No operation under anaesthesia has been performed off Earth. Only simulated robotic surgery on the ISS (SpaceMIRA) and parabolic flight anaesthesia studies appeared.
Notes
Added 2026-09-20 under step 27, item 2 (docs/reviews/2026-09-19-rulings.md, ruled 2026-09-19): raised by Gemini as a missing node; a Tier 2 requirement (data/tiers.toml). No hard dependency is drawn: an emergency can force the first operation at an outpost before any other node resolves.
Think this is wrong, missing something it depends on, or badly estimated?
Open an issue about it, or read
how feedback gets folded into the tree.
The record itself is data/B-biology.toml in the public repository.