30 The War on Aging before the age of one instead lived to an age typical of those of their cohort who survived infancy – certainly at least 50 years on average. Thus, Pasteur may well have added on the order of a billion person-years to human life. The demographic result is that deaths in infancy are now vastly outnumbered by deaths between ages 50 and 100. But this is not reflected in our priorities, as demonstrated by the resources allocated to medical research and care. Enormous effort is made to maintain the life of sick babies, and nobody disputes the merit of such a policy. Indeed, it seems difficult to imagine any argument against it that does not utterly fly in the face of all that we instinctively know about human morality. In this article I explore an extremely straightforward scenario, whose neglect by others can, I feel, stem only from unjustifiable short-sightedness: that humanity’s progress in reducing death rates at older ages will recapitulate the sequence just outlined for infant mortality. Some time – quite possibly within only a few decades, as I have discussed extensively elsewhere and will therefore only summarize here – we will make breakthroughs in maintaining and restoring the health and vigor of the elderly comparable, in terms of healthy years added to their lives, to what Pasteur and those who implemented his ideas gave to those otherwise destined to die in infancy. Forever thereafter, I suggest, we will strive vigorously to reduce the incidence of involuntary death (at whatever age) yet further. In the sec- tions that follow I sketch some of the major advances that we seem likely to make in this endeavor. The later episodes that I describe may seem uninterestingly distant at first, but such  nonchalance  becomes  questionable  when  one  consid- ers how early in this chain of events those with access to the latest medical care will begin to enjoy a diminishing mortality risk – an increasing remaining life expectancy as time passes. (I like to call this the achievement of ‘life extension escape veloc- ity’.) In a nutshell, I claim it is probable that most of the first