Edge Esmeralda is a month-long gathering for people building a brighter future, bringing together founders, scientists, technologists, investors, artists, and builders from around the world. This year’s event takes place from May 30 to June 27, 2026.

As part of this partnership, Infinita Premium Node ID members can now receive 20% off Edge Esmeralda tickets. To access your discount code, simply open the Infinita app, navigate to Discover → Partners, and your code will be available there. And use the code at the checkout in Edge’s website.

New to Infinita? The Infinita Node ID is our membership program. Premium members receive access to a growing network of benefits, including discounts at partner events and pop-up cities around the world, special pricing on services and experiences, access to exclusive programs, and other perks across the ecosystem.

Get Your Discount Code

More importantly, we’re excited to see members of both communities connect, collaborate, and build together in real life. Partnerships like this are one of the ways we’re creating more opportunities for builders across the broader Infinita ecosystem. Explore more benefits ↗

In the months since, I have thought a lot about that quote. I’ve seen it reflected in a lot of the discontent with current systems inside and outside the world of network states. People approach it differently - some attempt to provide alternatives that sit outside of mainstream governance on blockchains, others choose to focus on their immediate vicinity, building small scale communities of friends, building new real estate projects focused on walkability and nature.

So what would “better” look like to you if you woke up in a position to materially change things? Would you go into it full swing and attempt to implement systemic change? Or would you go about it incrementally?

This was the question that faced Octavio Sanchez, the chief political architect of Honduras’ controversial ZEDE law – a law that has allowed for the development of Prospera and its layer 2 network state Infinita City, on the island of Roatan, Honduras.

The idea and the idealist

You might recognise this train of thought from “Petri Dishes” , a piece I published a few weeks ago that looked at medieval charter cities and their potential for IRL governance experimentation. Now, I’m going to take you through the real world example of Sanchez and his attempt to implement this theory into practice.

Sanchez was young and idealistic when he came into office. Since his teenage years he had been percolating futuristic policy solutions, going so far as to write a science fiction book at age 16, imagining government bulletins from Honduras in 2050.

His core conviction was that Honduras’ poverty was a problem of institutions. “Many all over the world,” he told NPR in an interview from January 2013, “don’t understand we are poor not because we are dumb; we are poor because of institutional arrangements, not because of lack of capacity to imagine things.”

By 2002, while working under future President Porfirio Lobo Sosa when Lobo led the Honduran Congress, Sanchez had begun advancing the idea alongside American development consultant Mark Klugmann. Together they envisioned a Hong Kong-style zone within Honduras, a place where better rules could prove themselves before spreading outward. The idea simmered for nearly a decade, waiting for the right political moment.

That moment came unexpectedly. A 2009 constitutional crisis, in which the military exiled President Zelaya for attempting to extend his term, reshuffled the political deck entirely.

Lobo Sosa won the election that followed, and Sanchez was sworn in as his Chief of Staff in 2010, finally holding the executive leverage to turn decades of thinking into policy. He and his colleagues were facing the tall task of changing the trajectory of what was then described as a “failed state.”

A modern charter

In 2010, Sanchez and Lobo Sosa along with National Congress President (and future President) Juan Orlando Hernandez sat down in Miami with Paul Romer, a celebrated economist who had championed the idea of bringing back charter cities during a TED talk in 2009.

“The real challenge then, is to try to figure out how we can change rules [...] if we can find ways to give more choices to both, that will give us a set of rules for changing rules that get us out of traps.

If you try to change the rules in the nation, you can’t give some people a chance to hold back, see how things turn out, and let others zoom ahead and try the new rules. But cities give you this opportunity to create new places, with new rules that people can opt in to. And they’re large enough to get all of the benefits that we can have when millions of us work together under good rules.” Romer had said.

Shortly after, the administration presented the idea of Regiones Especiales de Desarrollo (Special Development Regions) or REDs, quickly followed by the introduction of a law in July 2011. REDs signed off significant governance authority in special zones to attract investment and growth, much like other charter cities which came before. They were to be overseen by a Transparency Committee, which Romer announced he would lead.

The dream of the REDs was, however short lived. Following the revelation that an agreement had been signed without the Committee’s knowledge, Romer and four others resigned. While others involved said the Transparency Committee was not yet officially appointed and therefore the move was justified, in October 2012, the Honduran Supreme Court deemed REDs unconstitutional, and they were no more.

As we now know, that was not the end of Honduras’ special economic zone development, nor of Sanchez’s determination. Dismissing the Supreme Court defeat as a matter of internal politics rather than genuine public opposition, he, along with jurists Carlos Pineda and Ebal Diaz pushed for a new constitutional amendment. The ZEDE (Zone for Employment and Economic Development), was adopted the following year along with a new oversight committee called CAMP - Comité para la Adopción de Mejores Prácticas (Committee for the Adoption of Best Practices) of which Carlos Pineda became the secretary. The committee consisted of 21 global members, 4 of which were Honduran.

With renewed fervor, Future President Orlando Hernandez campaigned heavily on the ZEDEs’ benefits and in 2017 Prospera was born.

Despite the authorisation, ZEDEs have been mired by controversy throughout their existence, with Prospera in the middle. Repealing the ZEDE law became a focal point of President Xiomara Castro’s 2021 campaign and during her tenure were subject to a number of votes to repeal.

The 2025 Honduran election became a nail-biting peak, off which the future of ZEDEs and Prospera could topple. Ultimately, Trump-backed Nasry Asfura won the vote, officially embracing the ZEDE model in early 2026 and securing Prospera’s future.

Bringing in charter cities to the present day

Sanchez’s journey with the ZEDE law that would allow the development of charter cities is a useful case study in what it actually takes to implement the structure for cities experimental governance to prove their case. Although founders now say there is much more appetite from global leaders to embark on this process, Honduras’ swings between acceptance and rejection demonstrate the rocky ground they have to navigate.

“Part of what’s unique about the Honduras program is that it wasn’t outsiders. It was their initiative. They created the laws and Octavio was critical in all of that,” says Patri Friedman in a call with me on the way to the airport. Friedman is leading the Liberty Acceleration Summit from 26th-28th March (next week) in collaboration with Infinita City of which Sanchez will be a key speaker. After the summit, he is hosting a “founders retreat” for network state project leaders, a more closed event that founders can apply to join.

“I’m really excited for him to come to an event finally and get some credit,” Friedman continues. He sees the summit as a chance to “celebrate the beneficial elections, celebrate Octavio and bring together Latin American officials,” who are interested in Honduras’ journey with the charter city model and special economic zones.

The summit itself is particularly focused on Latin American development as a whole – “Socialism is receding in Latin America. But will this be another cycle of the same old swings between right and left, or is this the time for real, lasting change? Could Latin America even be leading the world in liberal governance? The ingredients for a New Latin American Liberty are there, and they’re coming together at this summit.” reads the event page.

Talks include discussions on the geopolitical climate in the region and mainly feature leaders from the charter cities and network states movements, although Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto is earmarked for a conversation in the morning of the first day.

Whether Honduras ultimately proves to be a replicable model for governance reform or simply a story of one unusually persistent insider navigating a uniquely chaotic political environment remains an open question. The ZEDE experiment is still young, its long term impact on ordinary Hondurans still unclear.

What Sanchez’s journey does demonstrate is something more modest but arguably more useful, that structural reform of this kind doesn’t move on ideas alone. It moves on relationships, timing and an almost irrational willingness to start over.

The summit next week will frame Honduras’ journey with ZEDEs as the beginning of a Latin American moment. That may be optimistic. But then again, so was a sixteen year old in Honduras writing policy bulletins from the future.

This week’s newsletter was sponsored by Infinita City.

Food for thought

• If you’re free next week and fancy a trip down to Roatan, theres still a few spots left to attend the Liberty Acceleration Summit. Patri’s founders retreat which takes place after is also open to application – I’ve met some of the people going and it sounds like it’s going to be great. If you (like I) are not able to attend, Infinita City will be posting recordings of the talks from the summit shortly after.

• If you’re not aware of Paul Romer’s approach to charter cities, take a few minutes to listen to his TED talk from 2009, it explains the theoretical basis behind many of the network state approaches that are being taken today. If you have time to go into 2009 governance ideas a little more, Paul Collier’s TED talk on post-conflict recovery within nations goes even deeper.

FAQ Section

Q: What is Honduras’ ZEDE law and how did it come about?

A: The ZEDE (Zone for Employment and Economic Development) law is a Honduran constitutional amendment that allows designated zones to operate under distinct governance structures, with the aim of attracting investment and testing alternative institutional arrangements. It was developed by Octavio Sanchez, who served as Chief of Staff under President Porfirio Lobo Sosa from 2010, after an earlier version — the Special Development Regions (REDs) law — was struck down by the Honduran Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 2012. Sanchez had been developing the underlying concept since the early 2000s alongside American development consultant Mark Klugmann, drawing on economist Paul Romer’s charter city framework. The ZEDE amendment was adopted in 2013 with a new oversight body called CAMP, consisting of 21 global members.

Q: What is Prospera and where is it located?

A: Prospera is a ZEDE located on the island of Roatan, Honduras. It launched in 2017 following the passage of the ZEDE constitutional amendment and operates with significant autonomy from standard Honduran law, including its own regulatory and legal frameworks. Infinita City is described as a “layer 2 network state” built within Prospera’s structure. Prospera has been consistently controversial: repealing the ZEDE law was a central plank of President Xiomara Castro’s 2021 campaign, and the zone’s legal future remained uncertain until the 2025 Honduran election, when Trump-backed Nasry Asfura won and officially embraced the ZEDE model in early 2026.

Q: Who is Octavio Sanchez and what role did he play in Honduras’ charter city experiment?

A: Octavio Sanchez is a Honduran politician and policy architect who served as Chief of Staff to President Porfirio Lobo Sosa and is credited as the primary driver of Honduras’ special economic zone legislation. His interest in institutional reform began in his teenage years — he wrote a political science fiction book at 16 imagining government bulletins from Honduras in 2050. His core argument, articulated in a 2013 NPR interview, was that “we are poor not because we are dumb; we are poor because of institutional arrangements.” He navigated two rounds of legislation, a Supreme Court defeat, multiple repeal attempts, and more than two decades of political turbulence to bring the ZEDE framework into existence.

Q: How do charter cities relate to the network state movement?

A: Charter cities and network states share a foundational premise that governance can and should be tested in bounded, opt-in environments before being adopted more broadly. Economist Paul Romer, whose 2009 TED talk influenced Honduras’ RED legislation, argued that cities allow new rules to be trialled without forcing an entire nation to adopt them simultaneously. Network states extend this logic into digital and community-first contexts, sometimes anchored on blockchains, sometimes in physical communities. Prospera’s relationship with Infinita City, described as a layer 2 network state built within the ZEDE, represents one attempt to layer these models. Patri Friedman, who is leading the Liberty Acceleration Summit in late March 2026 in collaboration with Infinita City, sees Honduras as evidence that governance experimentation can originate from within a country’s own political figures rather than being imposed externally.

Listen on YouTube

More about Tomas Pueyo’s work:

• 20 Ideas to Grow New Communities

• Tomas Pueyo’s X

  ---

More about Trey Goff’s work:

• Trey Goff’s X

On March 28, 2026, twelve startups presented at the BioHub Demo Day. In this article, we’re highlighting seven of them.

The Demo Day was part of the Liberty & Acceleration Summit and served as one of the wrap-up moments of Infinite Games 2026, our series of events and programs that took place earlier this year across Próspera and Infinita.

The event also gave founders direct exposure to investors and guests from Infinita’s broader ecosystem, including firms such as Pronomos Capital. Octavio Sánchez, the mastermind behind Honduras’ special economic zone framework and Próspera’s legal foundation, attended the Demo Day alongside the famous blogger Tim Urban.

Over the years, we have brought renowned global leaders including Balaji Srinivasan, Naval Ravikant, Patri Friedman, Tim Draper, Aubrey de Grey, and Bryan Johnson.

Let’s take a look at some of the startups that pitched in our last Demo Day!

Unlimited Bio: Advanced rejuvenation gene therapies

Unlimited Bio is developing combination gene therapies targeting aging-related conditions, with a focus on accelerating therapeutic development pathways connected to aging and healthspan decline.

🔗 Learn More ↗

Ora Biomedical: Longevity and resilience research

Ora Biomedical is advancing research around radiation resistance and cellular damage. The company is initially approaching the market through cosmetic applications while building research with broader implications for aging and resilience science.

🔗 Learn More ↗

AccessBio: Biotech venture creation platform

AccessBio is building a cross-border biotech venture creation platform designed to help advanced therapies move from research into scalable companies and clinical deployment.

🔗 Learn More ↗

EpiBone: Regenerative bone engineering

EpiBone is engineering living bone and cartilage using adult stem cells to help treat skeletal defects and degeneration through regenerative medicine approaches.

🔗 Learn More ↗

Public Good Pharma: Affordable medicine development

Public Good Pharma is building a healthcare cost-containment platform that helps fund the development of affordable medicines and lower-cost treatment pathways.

🔗 Learn More ↗

Reality Network: Decentralized cloud infrastructure

Reality Network is working on decentralized cloud infrastructure powered by everyday devices instead of centralized server systems.

🔗 Learn More ↗

Andén: Digital economic zone infrastructure

Andén is building compliance infrastructure that transforms legacy free trade zones in Latin America into operational digital economic zones using existing legal frameworks.

🔗 Learn More ↗

We’ll continue sharing more about the founders and startups building in and around Infinita through our Instagram, X, and upcoming Substack features, including deeper startup spotlights, founder interviews, and ecosystem updates.

Stay on the lookout for future Demo Days and startup acceleration programs coming soon!

We also have a new community call coming up - A virtual hangout to hear what’s happening on the ground at Infinita and what’s coming next, and how you can get involved from now, even if you’re not onsite in Roatán.

Join our Community Call
🗓 June 3, 2026
⏰ 11AM EST / 9AM Roatán

RSVP: Join Our Community Call

Whether remotely or eventually onsite in Roatán, we’re excited to continue growing this ecosystem alongside founders, researchers, investors, creators, and builders from around the world.

More startup programs, Demo Days, partnerships, and ecosystem updates are already in the works.

🤝 If you have any questions, want an introduction to one of the startups, or are interested in joining future accelerator programs or Demo Days, reach out to us at startups@infinita.city

Stay tuned!

Coming in with a new edition. Nice to meet you, I’m Nelsi! :)

From now on I’ll be sharing what’s going on here on the ground, month by month, and (hopefully) convincing some of you to come see it for yourselves.

In May’s edition, we’ll cover:

• How Sid Sijbrandij cured his own cancer.

• Updates on Node ID benefits

• Peek into our killer-Instagram

So grab a cup of coffee, or a glass of something stronger, and let’s get into it 😁

🎧 From the Podcast: "I'd rather die of a potential cure than from cancer."

That’s how Sid Sijbrandij put it when he sat down with us in the CiVL podcast studio here in Próspera. Honestly, one of the most powerful conversations we’ve recorded.

Sid is the co-founder of GitLab, one of the largest open-source software companies in the world. After being diagnosed with an aggressive bone cancer, doctors told him the standard treatment path was limited. He didn’t accept that as the only option. He built his own system.

He ran whole genome sequencing, single-cell analysis, and over 10 experimental treatments in parallel, combinations with no clinical trial behind them, reasoned through first principles and AI.

Because of that, he’s still here.

Listen Here

💊 Why You Can’t Use Your “Right to Try”

In theory, patients with serious or terminal illnesses can access experimental treatments still in clinical trials.

In practice, access is extremely limited. Our own Steve Martin breaks down how the issue isn’t only FDA approval, it’s biotech participation. From their perspective the risk/reward is broken: participating means potentially existential regulatory risk - and for what? They can only charge at cost.

One patient with glioblastoma got halfway through a trial and was seeing real results, until the trial stopped. He spent $10,000 trying to use Expanded Access and was denied.

Montana’s SB 535 is now his last hope.

Read The Full Article

🪪 Node ID is Getting More Valuable

We’re excited to share that Node ID, your Infinita membership, just got an update. We’re always working on ways to make it better for you.

If you’ve been around, you know about our $LIVES token. It’s Infinita’s community token for payments within the ecosystem. It’s pegged 1:1 to the dollar, and it saves you money.

Here’s what’s new:

Basic Node ID (Free) You get it automatically when you create your account at infinita.city/wallet.

• 5% off every time you buy $LIVES (so effectively, 5% off every purchase)

• 2.5% back in HIVE points (1 HIVE = 1 LIVES)

• Access to Missions, complete challenges, earn rewards

Premium Node ID ($1,000/year) Everything in Basic, doubled.

• 10% off

• 5% cashback

• 2x Mission rewards

• Plus, included access to Infinita-organized events

• Access to exclusive partners perks and discounts (more on this coming soon!)

If you’ve been waiting to upgrade, this is a good moment.

🖥️ Join Our Virtual Hang Out

Missing Roatán? Join our Community Call 🗓 Jun 3, 2026 · 11AM EST / 9AM Roatán

Todd White, Managing Director of The Thalion Initiative, will share an update on Thalion’s work on the biology of aging.

After his talk, we’ll break into small groups of 3–4 to talk, connect, and share what we’re building, and swap ideas.

Join the Call

📱 Our Instagram Community is Killing It!

Our Infinita ambassadors have been busy - check out @infinita.city on Instagram.

We’ve been having a lot of fun with our community and ambassadors living here on the beautiful island of Roatán; people inside the ecosystem, on the ground, going about their day.

That’s it for May, thanks for reading! 🌸 And if any of this sparked something, the best next step is just to come see it for yourself.

The next chances to visit are:

• Noma Family (Jul 5 - Aug 2, 2026) 🔗Link
  ($300 off if you’re a Premium Node ID member)
  

• Free Cities Conference (Sep 3 - 6, 2026) 🔗Link
  (Benefits details coming soon)
  

• Prospera Chess Cup (Jun 26 - 28) 🔗Link
  (Following the great legacy from BTC Chess at Infinite Games!)

Say you’re coming from Infinita to enjoy a special benefit, reward, or perk to each of these events!

Talk soon,

Nelsi 🌊

The Availability Problem:

Imagine you have cancer, or chronic pain, or a progressive degenerative disease of some sort. You have exhausted the traditional treatment options available to you, and none of them have worked. However, there are treatments that are still undergoing clinical trials which might help you. They are not fully approved yet, but your situation is dire and you don’t have time to wait another 10 years for the trials to finish. Can you access those treatments?

In theory yes, you can access unapproved treatments through federal laws like the 2018 Right to Try bill, or through FDA pathways like “Expanded Access”. However these laws don’t mandate that the company making the drug gives it to you. And what you will find when you try to use your Right to Try, or Expanded Access, is that there are almost no treatments available for use.

That’s why despite there being somewhere in the neighborhood of 13,000,000 Americans with terminal or serious illness, the FDA only grants about 2,000 Expanded Access requests per year, even though they approve 99% of all requests, typically within 24 hours. There just aren’t enough companies even bothering to apply.

No one really knows for sure how many patients have been treated under Federal Right to Try laws. What we do know is how many companies with drugs going through the clinical pipeline have used data from treating patients with RTT, when submitting data for their treatments to the FDA. Even if we assume the usage numbers are 2-3X higher, they are still pretty abyssmal.

Risk and Reward:

But what is it about these pathways that makes companies avoid them like the plague? The answer is three words: Terrible Risk/Reward.

See, the companies who own the rights to the treatment you want to access are called “Biotechs”. Now Biotechs are not like the big pharma companies you think of, they don’t make billions of dollars. In fact, they usually don’t make any money at all. They’re the small companies that do the research to get the drug approved. This approval process costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-2 billion dollars, and takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years.

Biotechs can’t sell their drug pre-approval, so the only way they can fund this process is by raising money. But they don’t get this money all at once. It’s given to them one chunk at a time, as investors say “Okay do this first round of trials, if it goes well we might fund the next one”. This means that just to stay alive as a company and keep the treatment moving through the process, Biotechs must be able to raise money.

And competition is fierce, there’s a lot of Biotechs competing over a small pool of capital. So to raise successfully, you need to be absolutely flawless. As a result of this the executives who run Biotechs are extremely risk averse. They will inherently stay away from anything that has even a slight chance of jeopardizing their clinical trial.

So what does this have to do with Right to Try? Well, treating you under Right to Try is a risk. If something goes wrong, there’s the risk of a lawsuit, there’s the risk of other investors whose capital is needed to keep the company alive finding out about the bad outcome, which leads to the biotech not being able to raise the next round which it needs to survive. There’s also some risk the FDA will come down on you, though they really only do this in extreme circumstances.

So for a Biotech, treating patients before their drug is approved is enormously high risk. That said, these are humans at the end of the day and typically run by founders that went into medical sciences because they are motivated to save lives. If they can justify the risk to their board, many of them would take it? So what’s the reward for participating in Right to Try?

Nothing. There is no reward. Actually, the Biotech will probably lose money treating you.

Federal Right to Try and Expanded Access both only allow the Biotech to charge “at cost”, basically meaning they can recoup the cost of the drug. There’s a ton of other costs that they will probably not be able to get reimbursed for. The lawyer who had to be hired to check that the company could do this, the hours that the Board spent drawing up plans and debating whether or not to do it, the time someone needed to take to engage the FDA and answer your doctor’s questions, and more. All of that is probably money lost.

So the pathways you want to use only work if there is a company willing to basically risk their reputation, and even their company’s survival, just for the chance to lose money treating you. And that’s why no one uses them.

State Laws Are Addressing The R/R Problem:

In 2025 Montana passed an expanded Right to Try bill, SB 535. This bill was specifically crafted to fix the risk/reward problem from earlier. Among other things, SB535 allows for Biotechs to make a profit for treating you instead of taking a guaranteed loss. The idea behind this was that by fixing the Risk/Reward, Montana could attract companies that wouldn’t otherwise make their treatment available.

And it has worked.

I (the guy writing this article) work sourcing treatments for use under SB535. I am paid to talk to Biotechs whose treatment is not available, and convince them to come to Montana. Patients should start receiving treatment some time in June or July, we may very well have more treatment options available in Montana within the first year than have been used under Federal Right to Try in the last 8 years combined.

Here are two charts showing what will be available through just us in Montana basically as soon as the program launches:

And Montana is not alone in this. New Hampshire has HB701, a similar law but terminal illness only.

However, once again, there is a risk of these laws only working “on paper”.

Somehow it’s the FDA, Again:

Remember those biotechs I mentioned? Well, whether or not some state law says they can come treat patients, the FDA still has the ultimate say. The FDA could shut down a biotech’s clinical trial for coming to Montana, or New Hampshire. This is a power they reserve unto themselves.

As a result, all of the treatments I just mentioned and many more, will only condition their participation in state programs like Montana and New Hampshire’s on receiving Safe Harbor. Basically this is where the FDA exercises something called “Enforcement Discretion”, and in doing so promises the biotechs that they won’t get in trouble for coming to treat patients under state law.

Without this, as nice as these state laws are, only the most risk tolerant providers around will participate. This means there will be some treatments available, but only something like 10% of what the numbers could be, and it means patients will continue to suffer and die from lack of access.

Convincing people in the House and Senate to back up efforts to get the FDA to promise enforcement discretion is what I’ve spent the last 6 or so months working on.

This actually matters a lot for states other than Montana and New Hampshire.

In Utah, there is a stem cell access bill. There is also a great company called Discgenics making stem cell based therapies which are in late stage clinical trials based in Salt Lake City. You cannot access Discgenics treatment under Utah state law. That’s pretty ridiculous! Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Wyoming, North Carolina, and Tennessee, have similar laws. So you can get off label stem cells, but nothing with actual clinical trials backing them.

In 17 states (AR, AZ, CO, GA, IA, IN, KS, LA, MD, MS, NC, NH, NV, SD, TN, TX, and WV) there are Right to Try 2.0 laws, also known as Right to Personalized/Individualized treatment laws. These are laws which allow for you to access treatments based on your personal genetic code, a class of treatments which is widely believed to be the silver bullet for many rare diseases and cancers. Like the other laws I have mentioned, any company that participates in one of these does so at their own risk.

How You Can Help:

Call your representative, especially if you live in one of the states with these laws, and double especially if you live in Texas.

Tell them something like, “Our state passed a law to enable patients to access cutting edge treatments, but I just found out the FDA reserves the right to punish companies who actually provide treatments under that state law. Now there’s patients going without treatment because companies can’t come here. Please reach out to @righttotryguy on X, he is coming to Washington D.C. on the 19th and 20th and wants to meet with Senators and House Reps to discuss.”

This is a long overdue update from Infinita!

If you’re not on the ground, this is your way to stay in the loop with what’s been happening and what’s coming next.

This edition covers: Infinite Games, the lib/acc Summit and Octavio Sánchez’s recognition, the new Dome setup, and two ways to plug into Próspera through e-residency and a tax residency program.

Here’s the update 👇

Infinite Games wrapped 🔥

Infinite Games ran through February and March, bringing 300+ people into a constant flow of tournaments, meetups, and side events.

A quick snapshot:

• 10+ main tournaments including Longevity Biomarkers, BTC Chess 960 (2 BTC prize pool), Poker ($30k+), Electric-Knife Fighting, and a Jiu-Jitsu seminar with world champion Roberto Cyborg!

• 40+ community-led activities

• 2 major conferences: Longevity Biomarkers Summit + Liberty Acceleration Summit

• Dialog Trek and Principled Business Summit plugged in

• Keynotes from Yaron Brook, Cremieux, Sid Sijbrandij, Tim Urban, and more!

🎧 Listen to the conversations: infinitacitytimes.com/podcast
📍 See it on the ground on Instagram: @infinita.city

∞

Liberty Acceleration Award to a founding architect 🏆

At the lib/acc Summit, we awarded Octavio Sánchez with the first Liberty Acceleration Award.

Octavio was a key architect behind Honduras’s ZEDE framework, the legal foundation that made Próspera possible. After an early version of the legislation was struck down, he rebuilt it and pushed it through again. That second version is what exists today.

This was also his first time visiting Próspera in person.

Recognizing him in that moment, with a room full of people building on top of that system, felt right.

∞

Infinita Dome has a new location, and you can rent it out 🎥

It’s not a standard venue. The space sits somewhere between cyberpunk and formal, with flexible seating, dynamic lighting, and a layout that adapts to talks, workshops, dinners, or recordings.

It’s fully equipped with a 2x3m LED screen, AC, snack bar + fridge, seating for 90+ people, and a high-quality AV setup for live events, streaming, or production.

As Sid Sijbrandij put it:

👉 Contact us at: dome@infinita.city to get a quote!

∞

Próspera e-residency: try building inside the system 🧩

If you’ve been around Infinita and want to go one level deeper, Próspera e-residency is the best entry point.

It gives you a digital identity to set up a business, operate inside a low-tax framework, and experiment with the ecosystem without relocating full-time.

The key thing here is optionality. You can test things. Incorporate. Try operating inside Próspera’s system without overcommitting.

You can get it here: prospera.co/r/infinita

If you use our link, you’ll also get $30 back in HIVE points inside the Infinita Wallet.

∞

Nomad Layer: a clearer tax base for global workers 🌍

For people working remotely across countries, one question keeps coming up: where do you actually pay taxes?

A lot of people either keep paying high taxes back home, ignore the problem entirely, or go through complex setups elsewhere.

Nomad Layer offers a more straightforward path: a $5,000 lump sum tax for a simpler, more stable tax base in Próspera.

It’s mainly designed for non-US citizens living a global, mobile lifestyle.

If this is relevant to you, apply here: nomadlayer.com/?r=infinita

∞

A lot moved in a short time - And we have more to come!

We wrapped a full season of activity, hosted a summit, recognized someone who helped make this ecosystem possible, upgraded key infrastructure, and kept opening new ways for people to plug in.

If you’ve been following from a distance, at some point you should just come down and see it yourself 🌴☺️

– Tails from the Infinita Team

Instead of relying solely on the medical system, Sid took a different approach. He ran every diagnostic imaginable, developed experimental treatments, combined therapies, and ultimately built his own path to survival — even when doctors ran out of options.

In this episode, we explore how Sid applied first-principles thinking to medicine, why healthcare systems are fundamentally misaligned with patient incentives, and what the future of personalized treatments could look like.

This is the second time in Próspera’s history that all venues have been fully booked out, even including the additional capacity with the hostel and Duna Tower.

The lib/acc Summit (March 25–28, 2026) came exactly at the right time. And its influence will continue and grow.

The future is bright.

A System That Was Supposed To Fail, But Didn’t

In April 2022, Reason Magazine ran the headline: “Honduras Ends Its Charter City Experiment.”

Four years later, the government that ran on shutting down ZEDEs has been voted out decisively. Meanwhile, Próspera, Ciudad Morazán, and Orchidea are still here (Ciudad Morazán and Orchidea are the two other special economic zones in Honduras).

Not only that, they’ve continued growing. Próspera now has 500+ businesses incorporated. Morazán has 300+ physical residents. The framework withstood a hostile administration that tried to undo it.

This was intentional. The Honduran “framers” knew a government like this would come at some point, and they built the legal structure accordingly with strong legal protections. What we’re seeing now is that design being tested, and holding.

The key visionary behind this framework attended the summit, visiting Próspera for the first time ever. He keeps a low profile and prefers not to be named. It was an emotional moment for me, to see him joyous at the success of Próspera, and especially at the BioHub Startups Demo Day, was genuinely meaningful.

Honduras Is Quietly Becoming Something Much Bigger

Honduras holds a very particular position in the liberty movement in Latin America. It’s still undernoticed, but if you zoom out a few decades, it may end up being one of the most important developments.

Currently, most of the attention is going to figures like Javier Milei in Argentina or Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Those are important and significant shifts, but they are operating at what you could call the “Layer-0” level, political change that enables new directions.

What’s happening in Honduras goes one layer deeper.

The core idea is enabling “Layer-1” change: governance decentralization through special jurisdictions with legal autonomy. This is what makes charter cities possible, and what creates the base layer for what many refer to as network societies.

The “layer” framing comes from an analogy with crypto infrastructure, where different layers build on top of each other to enable more specific use cases.

Layer-1 is the city itself, a physical jurisdiction with its own legal and operational structure.

Layer-2 builds on top of that. These are districts, communities, and ecosystems focused on specific domains, whether that’s biotech, Bitcoin, nomads, or wellness.

And the actual endpoint of all of this is the application layer, the businesses.

These are companies that take advantage of the governance environment created by Layer-1. This can be biotech companies, financial services, or even traditional businesses operating with lower friction, better rule of law, and faster execution.

The People In The Room Reflected The Full Stack Of Layers

The summit was structured around this idea, and the speakers reflected it across all layers.

Layer-0: Political And Ideological Foundations

At the Layer-0 level, voices shaping political and ideological direction: Agustin Antonetti (a major Argentinian influencer close to the Milei government), Philipp Thompson (who has worked with Peruvian president Hernando de Soto, author of “The Mystery of Capital”), Patri Friedman (focused on governance experimentation and new jurisdiction models), Mark Frazier (on partnership models between governments and new systems), and Tomas Pueyo (with a talk on geopolitical shifts driven by technology).

There was also a broader alliance of similar efforts globally at the Layer-0 level. Projects from Brazil (FloripaDEZ, represented by Paloma Lecheta), Tanzania/Zanzibar (OurWorld, Florian Fournier), Indian Nations in the US (Joseph McKinney), Tipolis (Alex Voss), Liberland (Petr Krovina), Sealand (James & Liam Bates), and Hugo Mathewcowitsch (Tools for the Commons, supporting multiple Layer-1 systems).

Layer-1: Jurisdictions And Governance Infrastructure

At Layer-1, the people building and operating jurisdictions: Próspera, represented by Erick A. Brimen, Gabriel Delgado, Trey Goff, Lonis Hamaili, and Christian Betancourt, alongside Ciudad Morazán represented by Joyce Brand (author of “Morazan Rising”).

Layer-2: Ecosystems Built On Top

At Layer-2, operators building real ecosystems on top of these jurisdictions: Infinita (Niklas Anzinger, biotech), Bitcoin District (Tomek Kolodziejczuk), Noma Collective (Daniel Thompson), Roatan Tourism Bureau (Goncalo Hall), Nomad Nation (Zach Milburn), Nomad Layer (Joey Langenbrunner), and Darien Village (Ivan Syrtsov).

We anchored the Layer-1 / Layer-2 analogy in Próspera, and this is where the origin of this concept comes from, but it is already spreading to other jurisdictions. We also welcomed speakers such as Yesh Baskaran (ZuGrama, India), Payam Safa (LightDAO), Vance (My Latin Life), and Patrick Hiebert (Veritas Villages, Panama) as part of this broader expansion.

Where It Becomes Real: From Systems To Outcomes

If governance is a product, it behaves more like backend infrastructure. It matters, but it’s not what people directly interact with.

What matters is whether businesses succeed.

These are some of the real businesses already growing and operating as clear examples of what becomes possible within these systems: Niko Klein (Network Bank), Anna Vakrusheva (Unlimited Bio), Soham Sankaran (PopVax), Jonathan Anomaly (Herasight), and Brian O’Beirne (RealityNet).

That’s why the application layer is ultimately the most important part of the conversation. It’s where innovation actually happens, and where these systems prove whether they work or not.

We also had a full set of keynote speakers, including Sid Sijbrandij (founder of GitLab), Tim Urban (Wait But Why), and Cremieux (known for his work analyzing and writing on biotech, policy, and systems-level incentives).

For many, the highlight talk of the conference was Sid Sijbrandij’s “Going Founder Mode on Cancer,” where he shared his journey from diagnosis, to exhausting traditional options, to taking matters into his own hands and navigating accelerated access pathways to find treatments that were not yet commercially available.

It was a concrete example of what these systems can enable when they work. Not theory, but real-world outcomes.

The summit closed with a panel featuring Cremieux and Tim Urban on legal changes for biotech acceleration in the US, tying the broader narrative back to practical implications.

The Conversations That Don’t Happen On Stage: The Founders Retreat

Alongside the main summit, the Founders Retreat brought together a smaller group of people actively building new jurisdictions, governance infrastructure, or on top of those new layers. The group included Pronomos Capital and Seasteading, with Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman), alongside a group of aligned VCs & private investors and other practitioners. The goal was simple: share what’s actually working, what isn’t, and what to do next; packed with candid conversations about regulation, financing, and execution.

No pitches or posturing, this is where you’ll hear the real war stories and practical help on what to do next, all off the record.

So, What’s Next?

This week gave a clear read on where things actually stand.

The ZEDE framework was tested under real political pressure and held. Builders are showing up. Companies are being formed. And the people in the room were not just talking about ideas, they are actively building within these systems.

That’s what matters.

At Infinita, we’re continuing to open this up to more people. If you’re curious, come see it for yourself, spend time on the ground, talk to the people building here, and experience how this actually works in practice.

And who knows, maybe the next successful business incorporated in a frontier jurisdiction is yours!

Until we announce the next big thing Infinita will host, here are two great chances to come visit and experience it yourself:

• Free Cities Conference (September 2026) → freecitiesconference.com

• Noma Collective (July 2026) → noma-collective.com/location/Noma-Family-Jul-05-2026

If you want to be part of what’s happening, join the Infinita community and stay in the loop for what’s coming next!

✧ This was part of Infinite Games 2026, a series of tournaments and events that took place in the Próspera jurisdiction (Roatán, Honduras) during Feb-Mar, 2026.

The summit was organized by Infinita City, Próspera, and Pronomos Capital, with the support of Petar Cekaravac.

They explore Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, the ethical case for individual freedom, and why capitalism is often misunderstood in modern political discourse. The conversation also touches on libertarian governance, free private cities, and what a truly free society could look like in practice.

A deep dive into capitalism, philosophy, and the future of human freedom.

Tim Urban has spent the last decade building a massive following at Wait But Why, the most popular long-form blog on the internet.

He is best known for his work on productivity, life and career advise such as the most-watched TED Talk in history “Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator”.

Recently, Tim has focused on technology and its impact on society. He is now diving even deeper into life extension - possibly as a consequence of his work on time?

That and other questions we’ll ask him during a fireside chat on March 27th at the summit.

In the meantime, here is a primer on the writings of one of the most influential minds of our time:

On Technology and Society

The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence Think you understand how fast things are moving? You don’t. This post explains why we’re currently standing on a vertical line of progress that’s about to shoot off the charts.

The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction The high-stakes follow-up. Tim frames AI as a “Biological Boss” that could either solve death forever or turn us all into paperclips.

Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future An 80-page odyssey into why we need to merge with AI to survive. If you want to understand the “Human 2.0” hardware, start here.

What’s Our Problem? (A Self-Help Book for Societies) His latest massive work. A “new language” for understanding why society is so broken and how we can use “High-Rung” thinking to fix the institutions that hold back progress.

On Life, Time and Mortality

Putting Time in Perspective A visual ego-check. It maps out all of human history to show that we are basically still in the “Intro” credits of the human story.

Your Life in Weeks The post that turned human life into a grid of boxes. It’s the visual representation of why every single week we spend building the future matters.

The Tail End Warning: This will make you cry. It visualizes exactly how much time you have left with the people you love. It’s the ultimate “why” behind the urgency of the life extension mission.

Why Cryonics Makes Sense Tim’s “gateway drug” to life extension. He argues that dying today is just a medical emergency in a world where the hospital of the future is just a few hundred years away.

Towards Longevity Maximalism?

While Tim has been relatively quiet about the specifics, he’s dropped several hints that his next project is a deep dive into the “Biological Deadline.” Tim has publicly described his massive research folder on “Society” as having a core branch dedicated to the idea that aging is a technical failure of homeostasis - a set of biological glitches that we are finally developing the “wrenches” to fix. Sounds familiar?

It is exciting to see one of the most influential minds of our generation to gravitate towards what we’ve been working on: radical life extension!

If you’re working on ways to solve aging, apply for the BioHub Demo Day and program - maybe you’ll earn an entry in Tim’s book! If you want to see Tim’s upcoming talk, sign up to the Liberty Acceleration Summit 2026.

They discuss N-of-1 personalized therapies, biosecurity in an age of cheap DNA synthesis, and why open science could accelerate biotech innovation. The conversation also touches on cloning, embryo editing, and the long-term future of human enhancement.

Topics include:

· DNA as digital code
· Genome writing and synthetic cells
· CRISPR and programmable biology
· Personalized genetic medicine
· Biosecurity and engineered viruses
· Open biotech vs. proprietary models
· Cloning and human genome design

A conversation for builders, founders, and technologists thinking about biology as the next software layer.

They unpack how incentives distort which diseases get treated, why surrogate endpoints matter, and how off-label use, real-world data, and even “bro science” reveal gaps in the current system.

They also cover:

• Clinical evolution and iterative human testing
• Regulatory opacity and open-sourcing FDA filings
• Australia’s faster Phase 1 model
• Human challenge trials and medical freedom
• Surrogate endpoints and distorted incentives
• Real-world data and off-label discovery
• Biotech innovation shifting to China
• How better trials unlock biomedical abundance

A conversation for anyone interested in biotech, policy, and the future of drug development.

Now 16 markets are live on the Infinita Wallet App, thanks to our partner Futuur.

To participate:

1. Just sign-in to your wallet app, you’ll see right away.

2. Select the first market you want to bet on, it will take you to Futuur. You need to register on Futuur as well (sorry, this was a development trade-off we made).

3. When you’re on Futuur, you can place your bets (updated in the wallet).

Here is a little video here how this looks:

Admittedly this is a bit of a “crypto experience” with 2 sign-ins and different currencies (you can’t use $LIVES in Futuur yet, you need to deposit stablecoins there), but it’s a start - let’s have some fun! What matters is the markets.

The Live Markets

We choose markets that are relevant for the Infinita & Prospera communities - in some of those you may need a bit of “insider knowledge” or you can even effectuate the outcome (e.g. how many clinical trials we’ll do? Bring someone! How to get the insider knowledge? Go to Infinita events, pay attention, ask questions!).

We think these are actually the right incentives to set 🙂

Examples:

• Does Prospera get a favorable settlement by April 5, 2026?

• How many registered businesses will Prospera have by April 5, 2026?

• How many clinical trials will have started in Prospera by Dec 31, 2026?

• How many patients will be treated under right-to-try in Montana within 2026?

• How many fish will be killed during the Lionfish hunt?

• Will the champion of the Electric-Knife win all matches undefeated?

Please report problems, feedback or question requests to lives@infinita.city.

Mar 26-27, 2026: Signup Here

+ Private Founders Retreat @ lib/acc 2026, Mar 26-28: Signup Here

Confirmed Speakers to Date (more to be added)

Who This Is For?

• Policymakers and policy influencers, aligned with liberal governance

• Operators and founders of charter cities or SEZs, technology-driven communities or accelerators and frontier technologists like biotech, crypto, AI or hardtech

• Investors interested in “sovereignty technology” as an emerging asset class

What is It About?

The summit has a specific thesis of change: governments (layer-0) need enabling legislation for limited institutional change, allowing special economic zone or other forms of localized governance autonomy (layer-1). These local governance providers then need to attract and develop industry clusters (layer-2) that can lead to the formation of more than standard manufacturing industrial parks, but leapfrog to the “app layer” frontiers of technology (e.g. biomedical, finance, hardtech) and form residential communities, incl. experimentation in self-governance.

The summit will feature speakers from each of these verticals, for practical lessons learned, implementation, fundraising, networking and achieving scale.

The New Wave of Governance Innovation

For a long time it seemed the “end of history” is liberal democracy, and the work left to do is converting the rest of the world. However, the model has shown cracks. State overreach and authoritarian populism are the results. Latin America has largely not been able to implement the right policies to reach higher development levels.

What is missing?

True governance innovation, inspired by the best practices of history, like rights-based governance, common law or due process rules. Innovation starts with identifying problems, and applying local solutions in the real world, test and experiment until something works that can scale. This “startup approach” was how SEZs led to tremendous economic success in China (starting with Shenzhen), Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore - and is now continued in innovative ways in Latin America, in various “Zona Francas” but especially in Honduras. This and a few other trends are coming together under the “New Wave” of Governance Innovation:

• Honduras’ SEZs like Prospera, Ciudad Morazan and Orchidea survived a socialist government trying to shut them down for 4 years, now coming out stronger.

• Javier Milei in Argentina proved the results of a deep pro-liberty program for the benefit of people: lower poverty, lower inflation, lower unemployment.

• Nayib Bukele in El Salvador turned one of the most dangerous countries in the world into one of the safest, and catapulted it to the Bitcoin frontier

Many Latam governments have positive experience with SEZs and are open to do more. Many liberty-aligned groups are in power and hungry for change.

What can you expect?

This is where policy meets technology. You’ll hear about the most frontier ideas in the world: polycentric law, regulation-by-insurance, 3D property rights, blockchain-based governance and incentive mechanisms, futarchy-based governance.

Technology builders and operators enabled by this legal innovation are side-by-side with policymakers. You’ll hear about: biotech, crypto, AI, hardtech & more.

Where will you be?

Roatan in Honduras is a tropical paradise island (FAQs here), abundantly safe, good infrastructure, Caribbean amenities, gorgeous natural beauty.

You’ll stay in places like the Las Verandas high-end resort, or the burgeoning technology hub emanating from the jungle, out of a 14-story tower called Duna.

Founders Retreat

The Founders Retreat is an approval-only track for people actually building new jurisdictions, governance infrastructure, or on top of those new layers. The group will be joined by Pronomos Capital GP and Seasteading legend Patri Friedman, and a group of aligned VCs & private investors and other practitioners for orientation sessions, small-group problem-solving, and candid conversations about regulation, financing, and execution. No pitches or posturing, this is where you’ll hear the real war stories and practical help on what to do next, all off the record.

»»» Apply Here for the Founders Retreat «««

​✧ This is part of Infinite Games 2026. Infinite Games is a series of tournaments taking place in the Prospera jurisdiction (Roatan, Honduras) from Feb 1 - Mar 31, 2026 (full info) .

Your Organizers

The summit is organized by Infinita, Prospera and Pronomos Capital, with the help of Petar Cekaravac (Telegram | Email). Reach out to Petar for inquiries. You can also join the Infinita Builders Hub Telegram group here to find who else is coming.

The opening event drew a crowd of 85 people, with 30+ more coming for the longevity biomarker conference and principled business summit this weekend.

This is a special year - the the first time in 4 years, we don’t feel under an existential threat anymore. Prospera grew 80% year-on-year despite a government trying to shut it down, imagine what is possible without it now!

We invite you to join us in building the most important change of the century - a new wave of governance innovation, from Honduras to the World.

»»» Infinite Games 2026 - Signup

If you’re building in biotech, AI, or frontier tech, this is your launchpad to connect with global investors, test your ideas in the world’s most advanced regulatory zone, and go to market fast.

👉 Register Now

Last Year: The Drapers $1M Investment Competition at Infinita

You might’ve seen the headlines, last year we made history by hosting the “Meet the Drapers” Show and $1 Million Investment Competition right here in Próspera, Roatán.

Top investors flew in, startups pitched directly to Tim & Adam Draper, and Próspera proved itself as a serious playground for serious founders.

Startup Success Case: Unlimited Bio

Unlimited Bio was incubated at Infinita.

They leverage gene therapies with an existing safety track record. In Próspera, they repurpose them for longevity indications and gather data for further scaling into larger markets.

In Próspera, they went to market in under a year, at a fraction of a cost. And now they’ve already got celebrity customers.

That’s what we mean by speed.

Why Próspera?

Próspera is not just a jurisdiction. It’s a startup zone designed from scratch to let innovation move 10x faster and cheaper.

• Open a global entity online in under 24 hours

• Choose the legal framework that suits your needs

• Lock in today’s rules, taxes and all, for life

• Pay just 1% effective income tax

It’s like launching in a startup version of Singapore, built into the Honduran Caribbean.

How to Join

1. Apply here: luma.com/BioHub2026

2. Book your housing: [explore options] we’ve secured discounted options for our members

3. Coordinate arrival with our team so we can onboard you smoothly

What You Get

• Weekly mentorship from real founders and VCs

• Regulatory sandbox to test your ideas

• Pitch at the Investor Demo Day

• A chance to launch or grow your startup, right here on the Próspera Zone

👉 Apply Now

Come to live and work alongside a high-density of longevity and desci pioneers. While we scope our permanent wet-lab facilities, we offer immediate access to clinical partners for trials where you can deploy and test without limitations.

“God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity.”
-Book of Wisdom 2:23

In 313 AD, the Roman general Constantine conquered his rivals in a civil war, culminating in a famous victory at the Milvian Bridge. Before the battle, Constantine experienced a vision instructing him to paint the Christian symbol “chi rho”— ☧—on his men’s shields. His Edict of Milan ended official persecution, legalized Christian worship, and allowed the Christian church to own property, unleashing Christianity’s messianic energies from Anatolia to Britain.

While Constantine’s reforms made Christianity the dominant religious, cultural, and economic institution in the West, the emperor rejected forceful conversions. In a follow-up edict, he clarified that Christians must “voluntarily… undertake the conflict for immortality.” In his book Defending Constantine, Christian scholar Peter Leithart translates Constantine’s statement as “The battle for deathlessness requires willing recruits.”

Christianity’s New Conception of Death

The Emperor’s turn of phrase was significant. Christianity was suffusing the classical world with a fundamentally new conception of mortality as an aberration, a trespasser in creation, and a kind of illness afflicting the cosmos. The Western mind had come to see sickness, decay, and death itself as enemies to be fought, conquered, and destroyed.

Pre-Christian antiquity saw death as a value-neutral reality ordered by the fates. In the Iliad, Hera mocked Zeus for thinking he could save a man from his fated doom; mortality was a boundary even the gods were foolish to resist. Cicero affirmed that “if the soul did perish, there would be, even then, no evil in death.” Marcus Aurelius exhorted us to “[wait] for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded… For [death] is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature.”

Contrast these sanguine ancients with the messianic monotheism radiating from Judea. Anyone who searches for “death” in the Bible will find himself hard-pressed to find one charitable word about mortality. From start to finish, the Bible is fanatically consistent in its view of death as an unalloyed evil, foreign to our created nature, and the great enemy of humanity and God.

Editor’s note: The following is a very comprehensive exegesis for readers interested in deep analysis of the Bible. If that’s not you, feel free to skim a bit down to “Death Gives Life Meaning” and the Pro-Aging Trance.

You can open the Psalms and pick any reference, at random, to “death” or “Sheol [the grave]” and you will find the Psalmist praying for salvation from death—not reconciliation to his own dissolution. Psalm 118, a cornerstone of all Christian liturgy, prefigures the resurrection: “I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.”

The Psalms of David, in particular, display this theme. Psalm 16 says: “You will not abandon my soul to Sheol [the grave] / or let your holy one see corruption. You make known to me the path of life / in your presence there is fullness of joy.”

Death is evil because the grave represents disintegration and oblivion. “What profit is there in my death?... Will the dust praise you?” David asks God. As surely as death is evil, longevity is good. “He asked life of you; you gave it to him / length of days forever and ever,” says Psalm 21.

The Book of Genesis explains the introduction of death into the world through the story of Eden and the Fall of Man. Only one tree in the Garden of Eden, the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” was forbidden to man. Yet the fruit of a different tree, “the tree of life,” was expressly given to Adam and Eve to eat. The fruit of this tree of life could sustain human life indefinitely, enabling us to “live forever.”

Tempted by Satan, human beings rebelled against God by eating from the “tree of knowledge of good and evil.” By rejecting the order of Eden, humans lost access to the tree of life. Sickness, deformity, and decay—all things that were not part of God’s design—entered into the world. Humanity was consigned to deteriorate back into the dust from which it was originally created.

The first-century BC Book of Wisdom, while regarded as apocryphal by Protestants, accurately summarizes the Bible’s overall view of death as an intruder that does not belong in creation: “God created man for incorruption and made him in the image of his own eternity, but through an adversary’s envy death entered the world.”

Taking up these themes, the biblical prophets prophesied the defeat of death, to be replaced with “everlasting life” for those whose names are written in God’s book of life. The prophets describe a physical, bodily resurrection of the dead from the dust: “You shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves.”

Throughout the Old Testament, death is consistently held up for scorn as the evil that God hates most. The word “death” is used as a stand-in for all the evil in the world. Wisdom, personified as a woman in the Book of Proverbs, says “all who hate me love death.” God pleads in vain with his people, Israel, to turn from their self-destruction and avoid death. “I desire not the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way, and live… why will you die, O house of Israel?”

The first Christians believed that Christ came into the world so that death might be defeated. Christ is called the “New Adam,” for “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” The apostles celebrated the coming, corporeal conquest of death, the “Last Enemy to be Destroyed.” Paul taunted death: “Death is swallowed up in victory. ‘O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’”

Finally, Revelation foretells that death will be chucked into the apocalyptic “lake of fire” with the devil—that death itself will die. In a restored and glorified material universe, “death shall be no more.” The “water of life” will then be given freely, and the “tree of life” from Eden will be restored.

Human beings, far from being passive observers, will actively co-participate with God in working towards this future. “The one who conquers will have this heritage [the water of life and immortality],” God announces in Revelation 21, “and I will be his God and he will be my son.” Revelation 2 clarifies that this “one who conquers” is not Christ, but the human reader of the book—who Christ is inviting to wield power “as I myself have received authority from my Father.”

The Bible contained the foundations of Constantine’s “battle for deathlessness.” Christianity rejects any attempt to cast death as a neutral fact of life or a positive good. It also stands in opposition to the modern idea that “death gives life meaning,” for the Bible is clear that death has no redeeming features and can never be a positive good to conserve. Instead, the Christian revelation reconceptualizes death as purely evil—the ultimate evil, in fact—and an unacceptable defect in the world. God, with the co-participation of his people, will destroy it entirely.

The apostles, and centuries of Christians thereafter, stood ready to face death for Christ. Yet Christian martyrdom can only be understood in the light of the promised bodily resurrection and new creation.

The Apostle Paul was as cold and sober as Bertrand Russell in recognizing that death, if it has the last word, entails nihilism. Without the resurrection of the dead, Paul says, “your faith is in vain.” The Christian martyrs did not die to welcome Marcus Aurelius’ cheerful dissolution, but to rise from their graves and live again. The Catholic thinker G.K. Chesterton aptly contrasted the martyr and the suicide by saying that the martyr dies for the sake of life, while the suicide dies for the sake of death.

“Death Gives Life Meaning” and the “Pro-Aging Trance”

Today, it’s common to hear people claim that death adds value to our lives. While Elon Musk argues that death is necessary to create ideological turnover, the usual argument is that looming decay and oblivion gives our lives their urgency, focus, and fullness. For example, philosopher Simon Critchley, citing Cicero, criticizes longevity research by saying that “The one thing that gives life meaning is the certainty of death.”

Modern novelists have been especially attracted to the idea that that life’s meaning comes from its being ephemeral and short. J.R.R. Tolkien, drawing from Wagner’s operas rather than the Bible, made death the “Gift of Ilúvatar,” the remote Prime Mover of a Neoplatonist cosmogony—a blessing which makes mankind special and offers us an escape from the material world. While the biblical Satan introduced death through the Fall of Man, Tolkien’s devil figure, Morgoth, tempts men with the prospect of release from death.

To give a more recent literary example, popular novelist Matt Haig imagines an immortal alien who is envious of human romantic love, which he says can “only be possible in someone who was going to die at some point in the future.”

Despite Christianity’s deep-seated hostility to death, non-Christian scientists and thinkers like Aubrey de Grey and Nick Bostrom are today’s leading critics of this view.

De Grey, a biogerontologist who pioneered the modern, engineering-based approach to aging as the progressive accumulation of specific categories of damage, has long described the notion that dying of aging “gives life meaning” as a “pro-aging trance.” De Grey posits that, if aging seems beyond the reach of medicine, “it makes good psychological sense to find some way to convince oneself that aging is all for the best.” As an example of this phenomenon, de Grey once cited the 2003 US President’s Council on Bioethics, which suggested that “our dedication to our activities [and] our engagement with life’s callings” depends on our looming mortality.

In his short story The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, philosopher Nick Bostrom satirizes these pro-death cliches by describing a world in which 10,000 people per day are fed to a giant dragon. Bostrom imagines pompous ethicists using identical arguments to defend the dragon sacrifices, even warning that a “preoccupation with killing the dragon” will distract us from the full enjoyment of our lives.

The notion that “death gives life meaning” can be answered by reflecting on common human experience. In law school, my textbook on wills, trusts, and estates began by observing that most people die intestate, or without a will. Why is this?

One answer is found in Leo Tolstoy’s short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy imagines a character, Pyotr, attending the funeral of his friend, Ilyich. Tolstoy writes that Pyotr views the funeral “as if death was an occurrence proper only to Ivan Ilyich, but not at all to him.”

Most readers find that Tolstoy’s story illuminates a shared human experience of death—even when it confronts us at a funeral—as a remote abstraction. While Pyotr does not think “I will live forever,” this does not mean he genuinely has the belief that “I will die.”

The truth is that most human beings, including most intellectuals, lack the belief that they will have an individual, first-person experience of dying. While they appreciate that life is abstractly finite in duration, they have never beheld what Tolstoy called the ultimate truth: “day and night going round and bringing me to death.” As the author William Saroyan put it, “everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.”

Do the countless people who die intestate today, or who empathize with Pyotr in Ivan Ilyich, live lives without true love or meaning? Teenagers, as most of us recognize in retrospect, find their own deaths more or less unthinkable. Are teenagers’ lives devoid of purpose—or of love?

“Death Gives Life Meaning” is a Secular Argument

The cliché that “death gives life meaning” seems to be no more than one or two centuries old. It originated, as far as I can tell, in the same place that Tolkien likely found it: in German romantic pessimism. Having read thinkers from every era of Christian and Western history, I have never found anything quite like it before Schopenhauer and after Constantine.

Some atheist futurists, recognizing the absurdity of the “pro-aging trance,” assume that the trance originated from Christianity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of the 30,000 verses in the Bible, not one of them says anything approaching “death gives life meaning.” The prophets certainly never called death—as Tolkien suggests it was—“the Gift of the Lord,” nor waxed fondly about dissolution and oblivion like the Epicureans and Stoics. On the contrary, it was the Christian worldview that introduced the wholly opposite conception of death into the world.

An unsympathetic Christian reader, seeking to salvage a pro-death perspective, might claim that, although the biblical authors never said anything like “death gives life meaning,” they would have agreed with the sentiment if they lived today. A pro-death Christian might urge that the biblical authors could not foresee modern biotechnology and therefore were not motivated to warn us that longevity is bad.

But the state of science in antiquity tells us nothing about Christianity’s view of death. Homer, Cicero, and Aurelius could no more foresee cellular biology than the Psalmist could. Yet the Psalmist, not these Western classical authors, offered a strikingly unblinking, sober recognition of death as an absolute evil.

Nor did any significant Christian thinker in antiquity, the Middle Ages, or modernity—until about the past century—criticize any medical advancement on the grounds that it reduced sickness and suffering or forestalled death. When, for example, microbiologist and outspoken Christian Louis Pasteur successfully developed a vaccination for rabies in 1885, no theologian denounced Pasteur on the grounds that his vaccine would prolong millions of lives. On the contrary, Christian theologians from Gregory of Nyssa to Pope Pius XII have heralded technology and medicine as means of extending mankind’s dominion over the material universe.

The historical significance of Christianity’s theological innovation is underrated and difficult to overstate. Long before biotechnology, or even Baconian science, human beings grappled with the obvious tragedy of death. Humans clearly did not need science to engage in philosophical copium and tell themselves that death is, after all, not so bad. From East to West, this is largely what humanity’s poets and sages did.

Christianity alone introduced a singularly hostile view of death as an unacceptable flaw in reality, not an essential part of who we are, and foretold its conquest and obliteration in the Lake of Fire. This victory against death will be won, not in Elysium or the Platonic Realm of the Forms, but in the material universe: in our very bones, our flesh, and in the fabric of the cosmos.

Christianity’s Embrace of the Material Body

A second core innovation of Christianity is its embrace of the human body and the material world. The Christian afterlife is fundamentally immanent and embodied. Christians will not merely go to an abstract “heaven”: instead, all dead Christians will be physically resurrected in glorified bodies—cured of all deformity, sickness, and decay—at the Last Judgment.

In 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul explains that, while we long to be set free from the decay of our bodies, it is “not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.” To be “further clothed” is to receive one’s material “resurrection body.”

Importantly, many people will receive their resurrection bodies without ever having died. Even if no Christians receive their resurrection bodies before the Last Judgment, after all, many Christians will be alive when the Last Judgment occurs. God does not need to kill these living people in order to give them their resurrection bodies. Paul famously observes this in 1 Corinthians 15:51, saying: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” This means that any Christian who wants to argue that death has some positive value cannot even claim that death is a necessary gateway to our resurrection bodies.

The cosmos will itself also undergo a kind of resurrection into a majestic, but still material, form, free of death and entropy. While pre-Christian Judea had a robust doctrine of the Fall of Man, Christians introduced the further idea that the very fabric of the universe had itself been corrupted by the Fall and was decaying. In Romans 8:21, Paul stated that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption [or “decay”] and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

Christianity’s twin claims that our reality had come into being at a finite point in the past and was now “decaying” both contradicted the consensus of Aristotelian physics—that the cosmos is past-eternal, unchanging, and does not decay. In this way, the Christian revelation correctly anticipated something like the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Heat Death. At the same time, the Bible raised the prospect that creation’s decay could be resolved in the future. Decay does not point to an escape from the cosmos, but to its liberation and transformation: to the creation of “A New Heaven and a New Earth.”

Revelation 21 introduces a vivid cosmography of the future with a divine promise: “Behold, I am making all things new.” It then describes the “New Jerusalem”: a strange, cubical, crystalline structure, comparable in size to the moon, hovering in the heavens. This mysterious imagery has led critical scholar Bart Ehrman to describe Revelation as a form of “science fiction.” The overarching message, however, is clear: God’s new creation will not be an immaterial spiritual world, but a renewed version of this universe analogous to our own resurrected bodies.

In the early centuries of the church, Christianity clarified its view of matter and the body in response to the attacks of the Gnostics: a splinter group who, working to accommodate Christianity to Platonist philosophy, cast matter as evil and denied the bodily resurrection. Irenaeus of Lyon, a second-century bishop thought to be a spiritual grandson of the disciple John, responded to the Gnostics with his work Adversus Haereses—a virtual treatise on the triumph of bodily glory, health, and longevity over aging and death. Irenaeus is today regarded by all Christian denominations as one of the most important fathers of the early church.

In Haereses, Irenaeus worked to systematically refute Gnostic arguments that it was impossible for a biological body to be immortal. According to Irenaeus, Christians must affirm bodily immortality—not an afterlife as a mere immaterial soul—because Jesus Christ has given both “His soul for our souls, and His flesh for our flesh.”

Irenaeus also thinks the Bible teaches that our biological bodies can be sustained indefinitely. He cites stories in the Pentateuch of patriarchs living “beyond seven hundred, eight hundred, and nine hundred years of age.” Regardless, he reasons that “if the flesh were not in a position to be saved, the Word of God [Christ] would in no wise have become flesh.” Irenaeus then concludes explicitly that, by the time of the New Heaven and the New Earth, “man has been renewed, and flourishes in an incorruptible state, so as to preclude the possibility of becoming old.”

No ancient Western system besides Christianity ever suggested that human beings might one day cease to grow old—nor even contemplated human biological immortality as desirable.

In the classical world’s folk mythology, the dead might hope to reside in Elysium or the Isles of the Blessed: an ethereal plane of ease and gentle breezes where the dead strum indolently on harps. In Epicurean philosophy, of course, death represented disintegration and annihilation. Death was, in any case, embraced by classical thinkers precisely as a reprieve from the physical world.

This contrast points to an irony in contemporary atheistic futurism. Today, some techno-accelerationists say that the West has been held back by Christianity’s focus on an otherworldly “heaven” rather than this universe—and that the West must therefore return to pagan morality to get things done. Yet it was only the God of Jacob who gave humanity the messianic vision of a “New Heaven and a New Earth.” Pagans, not Christians, had a pie-in-the-sky Elysium: the Christian God said “I will make all things new.”

The Christian Dominion Mandate and Techno-Optimism

Christianity’s third innovation is its active eschatology, emphasizing human agency in the ultimate conquest of sickness, suffering, and evil. While ancient pagan thinkers speculated about the final fate of the world, they tended to think that large, impersonal laws would determine the universe’s future.

To Christians, however, the coming destruction of death—and the inauguration of the New Heaven and the New Earth—would involve human co-participation with God’s will. In other words, early Christianity prefigured later futurist ideas that intelligence, rather than blind forces, would determine the fate of the universe.

Passages like Psalm 8 articulate a foundational principle of Christian eschatology: mankind’s dominion mandate. The God who has made all of creation, including the stars, has given man dominion over all of creation. “What is man that you are mindful of him?... You have given him dominion over the works of your hands.”

In two of the most iconic parables in the Gospels, the Mustard Seed and the Leaven, Christ prophesies that God’s Kingdom on Earth will grow, fill, and reshape the world. Christians have always understood this Kingdom to be the church, which Paul called the Body of Christ.

Christ’s parables are also allusions to Daniel’s apocalyptic vision in Daniel 2, itself describing God’s people co-participating in the advent of God’s dominion on Earth. This theme eventually reaches its climax in Christ’s speech to John in Revelation, in which “the one who conquers” is invited to share in the water of life and immortality.

In the fourth and fifth books of Adversus Haereses, Irenaeus elaborated on mankind’s dominion mandate and the Christian doctrine of theosis, or divinization: becoming like God. Gnostics argued that the Creator of this material universe must be an evil entity because the world is full of sickness and suffering. In response, Irenaeus argued that Gnostics are only seeing the beginning of the story. By creating humanity, God has germinated the future divinization of this world. Human beings should not “cast blame upon Him, because we have not been made gods from the beginning, but at first merely men, then at length gods.”

Irenaeus is clear that this process of theosis will involve our actively participating with God in conquering the Fall and its effects. Our conquest of decay will itself draw us closer to God, for “the beholding of God is productive of immortality, but immortality renders one near unto God.” Although he could not have anticipated modern biotechnology, Irenaeus plainly has a general notion that we will subdue and utilize the matter of the world as part of our “ripening for immortality.”

The late ancient church father Gregory of Nyssa elaborated on the same essential idea, explaining that God made mankind physically weaker than other animals in order to give us, paradoxically, “a means for our obtaining dominion.”

To make up for our natural deficiencies, Gregory says that humans have been inspired to invent agriculture, domesticate animals, and to develop metallurgy. Our deficiencies have made our own dominion necessary. God permits us to suffer from these deficiencies, not so that we might piously make peace with them, but to refine us, to drive us to transcend them, and to draw us upwards towards Himself.

In John 9, Jesus was asked why a certain man had been born blind from birth. “Who sinned, this man or his parents?,” Jesus’ disciples ask. Jesus does not say—as a modern pietist might—that God wishes the blind man to learn inner peace through suffering. Instead, he responds that the man was born blind so that “the works of God might be displayed in him.” Jesus then heals the man’s blindness by anointing his eyes. “We must work the works of him who sent me,” he tells his disciples.

In other words, blindness—as Irenaeus and Gregory suggested—only exists as a limitation to be overcome. Jesus’ teaching, as well as the example of his healing ministry, inspired Christians to invent the first hospitals and drive the advancement of medicine and the sciences throughout history.

Modern Christian apologists often argue that Christianity, with its faith in a universe of fixed and elegant laws, laid the intellectual foundations that made science possible. Yet Christians did not drive the progress of science simply because their descriptive metaphysics allowed it: they were also driven to discover, innovate, and build because they were ablaze with a holy imperative to take dominion over the universe and subordinate it towards the flourishing of mankind. This was palpably true of, for example, Hildegard von Bingen, Roger Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Pasteur.

How Christianity Created Tech Futurism

What is now sometimes called “futurism”—an active, technological, and optimistic vision of humanity’s role in the universe—was first espoused by Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Today, some staunchly atheistic futurists attempt to omit Christian thinkers from the lineage of futurism. These futurists prefer to trace their ideas to a 1929 book by the Marxist futurist JD Bernal or, before him, to a 1924 essay by JBS Haldane. Yet the Eastern Orthodox theologian Nikolai Fyodorov explicitly advocated both space colonization and regenerative biotechnology from 1864 until his death in 1903.

Fyodorov is a theologian of monumental but understated influence. Known as “Moskovskii Sokrat,” he attracted a circle of influential disciples in Moscow, including Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and taught that God was calling upon humanity to extend itself throughout the universe, command matter, conquer all bodily decay, and regulate the forces of the cosmos. Tsiolkovsky would one day be known as the father of rocketry.

The Catholic priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin expressed similar ideas in his seminal work Writings in a Time of War, written while serving as a wartime stretcher-bearer from 1916 to 1919. The book contains the greatest essay of Teilhard’s career, Cosmic Life, in which Teilhard proposes that we may “envisage a new era in which suffering is effectively alleviated, well-being is assured, and—who knows?—our organs are perhaps rejuvenated.” Teilhard warns that “It is dangerous to challenge science and set a limit to its victories, for the hidden energies it summons from the depths are unfathomable.”

Teilhard has been positively quoted by multiple popes, including Paul VI and Benedict XVI, and was once described by Pope John Paul II as “a man seized by Christ in the depths of his being.” His ideas were also endorsed by Pope Pius XII in a magnificent 1939 speech entitled “Man Ascends to God by Climbing the Ladder of the Universe,” expressing many of the concepts discussed in this essay.

Secular futurist philosopher Eric Steinhart notes that even secular futurists “work within the conceptual architecture of Teilhard’s [futurism] without being aware of its [Christian] origins.” It is not a coincidence that futurism was first espoused by Christians rather than Marxists, Buddhists, or any other group. Both materially and spiritually, messianic monotheism and the Christian resurrection planted, at the axis of the ancient world, the germ of a war against death.

What Does This Mean For Us Today?

Constantine’s war is being fought now. Today, Christians are undernoticed among the innovators, builders, and leaders who are fighting to combat suffering and promote human flourishing through ethical biotechnology. For example, Christians are playing a leading role in the legal and policy battle to unleash regenerative biotechnology in the United States.

As of this writing, three states in the United States have innovative legal regimes allowing patients to effectively access experimental biotechnology parallel to the normal Food and Drug Administration pathway: Montana, New Hampshire, and Florida. In both New Hampshire and Florida, the push to pass the law was led primarily by conservative Christians, with secular organizations and businesses playing a supporting role.

The modern regulatory state has created major obstacles to technological progress. The examples of New Hampshire and Florida show that Christians can use our energy and organizational skills to dismantle these obstacles. By doing so, Christians are combatting evil, worshipping God, and carrying out our dominion mandate.

In New Hampshire, where my own work is focused, Christians hope to set an example that can resonate throughout the country. Our new law is just the beginning. New Hampshire’s proximity to Boston’s biotech hub, together with our unique political culture, put our state in a prime position to become a leading center of experimental biotechnology. By leveraging these advantages, we can unleash a flourishing industry in the state and help to combat the evils of sickness and decay in New England and across the country.

I began my legislative testimony in favor of New Hampshire’s law by discussing Jesus’ healing ministry and his call for us to imitate his example. In the light of Christ’s life, no knowledgeable legislator—Christian or secular—can be surprised that a Christian would support biotechnological progress.

Faithful Christians must continue to heed the call of Christian theology to advance science and technology—both by removing obstacles to their advancement and by taking leading roles in these fields. Non-Christians who work in technology and science should also reconsider Christianity’s role in promoting the sciences and the role that Christians can play today in unleashing them. Constantine’s “battle for deathlessness” continues.

Contact me if you are a Christian church leader or advocate who wants to discuss how the church can promote ethical pro-biotech legal reforms—or a biotechnologist who wants to discuss the role of Christianity in advancing human flourishing. You should also contact me if you’re a leader in science and technology interested in making use of New Hampshire’s enabling environment for regenerative medicine and biotechnology.

“It was necessary that man should in the first instance be created; and having been created, should receive growth; and having received growth, should be strengthened; and having been strengthened, should abound; and having abounded, should recover [from the disease of sin]; and having recovered, should be glorified; and being glorified, should see his Lord. For God is He who is yet to be seen, and the beholding of God is productive of immortality, but immortality renders one near unto God… We cast blame upon Him, because we have not been made gods from the beginning, but at first merely men, then at length gods.”

— Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, IV.38

Ian Huyett is a litigator and lobbyist who writes on law and technology. Follow him on X @IanHuyett.