The tree · Drive · Happens to the world · Plays out over the whole window
A crew travels beyond the Earth-Moon system and returns to Earth
The transit-in-months milestone with people aboard: the first round trip beyond the Moon's neighbourhood proves that a crew can be carried across interplanetary space and back, which is what working rotations to an outer site require. A crew landing on Mars and coming home is the likeliest way it happens, and the one most programs are aimed at; a crewed trip to a near-Earth asteroid, to one of Mars's moons, or around Mars without landing would count equally. It needs the launch, propellant and life-support steps as much as the drive, and it sits under drive because the transit is the hard part it resolves.
The test: what counts as it having happened
People travel to a point at least five million kilometres from Earth (about thirteen times the Moon's distance, well outside the region where Earth's gravity dominates, so that a trip around the Moon or to a point near the Earth-Moon system does not count) and return alive to Earth, confirmed by the responsible agency or company and independent tracking of the vehicles. A crewed landing on Mars and return meets this by construction.
Settled by: The responsible agency's or company's mission record and independent tracking
The odds, by how long I live
| baselineto 2071 ± 8 | moderateto 2080 | strongto 2095 | radicalto 2136 | openno deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 52% | 66% | 82% | 92% | 94% |
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 2026-09-25.
Why these numbers: Re-estimated 2026-09-25 against the widened criterion, proposed by Claude and accepted by John 2026-10-02. Mars carries most of it, and the Mars-landing numbers (0.45 by 2071) are the floor. A crewed flight around Mars without landing, or to a near-Earth asteroid or Mars's moons, needs no landing or ascent from a planet and is a smaller step, so it adds real chance; but no program is funded for any of them and a crewed asteroid mission was cancelled once already, so they raise the number by several points rather than dominate it.
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 0.6% (+0.1 points). 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 | 0.6% | 1.4% | 4.0% | 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
Nothing new in the window; Artemis II flew around the Moon in April 2026, well short of five million kilometres, and crewed Mars plans remain undated, with uncrewed Starships targeting the November to December 2026 window.
Notes
Added 2026-09-25 as the replacement for D-crew-round-trip-to-mars under candidate 5 of docs/proposal-function-over-route-2026-09-25.md, approved by John 2026-09-25. Step 27, item 76 (2026-09-19) had already said the Mars node stood in for 'a crew has gone beyond the Moon and returned' and would be widened rather than removed if another destination came first; this is that widening. The five-million-kilometre boundary is Claude's: the Moon's orbit alone would not do, because a crewed flight around the far side of the Moon passes slightly beyond the Moon's orbital distance (Apollo 13 reached about 400,000 kilometres from Earth in 1970). The link to orbital refilling is kept; a single-launch crewed asteroid trip might not need it, which the next review can test.
Think this is wrong, missing something it depends on, or badly estimated?
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The record itself is data/D-drive.toml in the public repository.