A Research Proposal for the Longevity Asymmetry Corpus: The Axiom That Never Needed Stating — Central Thesis, Research Question, Method, a Full Map of the Programme's Catalogue, and the Boundary This Programme Does Not Cross

This paper states, for the first time in a single document, what the Longevity Asymmetry Corpus is a research programme about, what question it asks, what it claims, how it claims it, and — the boundary that took roughly two months of accumulating practice to state as precisely as this paper now states it — what it has committed not to claim. The research question is this: what happens to political legitimacy, institutional design, and the psychology of loss once the premise that biological mortality arrives for everyone, at intervals set by biology rather than by purchasing power, stops holding for the first time in recorded history? The central thesis, formalized as the Mortality Symmetry Axiom (MSA) and its collapse under the Biological Zero-Day Mechanism (BZM), is that this premise has been load-bearing — for political philosophy's treatment of equality, for six independent religious and philosophical traditions' accounts of consolation and legitimacy, for the actuarial architecture of the welfare state, for inheritance law, for the design of life tenure — without any of these traditions having had occasion to defend it, because it was never false before. The mechanism connecting this axiom's collapse to political consequence runs through A5, this corpus's term for constitutive attachment formalized from Frankfurt's conditions for love and Hamilton's kinship discount, and through a specific, corpus-wide finding this paper restates as precisely as any single paper in the corpus has: political activation is triggered by the visibility of biological asymmetry, not by its inaccessibility, and it is driven by love rather than by grief, because attachment's protest response precedes rather than follows the loss it anticipates. From this mechanism, a four-stage sequence — Grief, Attribution, Legitimation, Concentration — and a structural governance conflict of interest, in which every plausible governance actor's own constitutive attachments place them on the wrong side of the problem they would administer, follow as corollaries this paper states without re-deriving in full. This paper's second contribution is methodological rather than substantive: a plain statement of the four commitments — falsifiability, empirical anchoring, designed absence, and the zero-precedent humility this corpus's own Zero Precedent names — that distinguish this research programme from an otherwise similar body of speculative political theory, and an explicit statement of the boundary those commitments jointly produce. This corpus does not recommend institutional designs, policy responses, or civilizational survival conditions. It names mechanisms, tests them against documented events, and states what would falsify them. This paper is, in part, a rewrite of an earlier, unpublished draft, When Death Becomes Poverty (May 2026), composed before this corpus's later methodological commitments existed to hold it to a standard. Section IX audits that draft directly, in the same register Zero Precedent applies to this corpus's own Appendix H: several of its central insights survive intact — the visibility threshold, the priority of love over grief, the symmetric wound across the biological divide, the cross-civilizational calibration problem. Its explicit prescriptions — five stated conditions for civilizational survival, falsification conditions read as a normative roadmap — do not, and this paper states precisely why.