Power has a wrinkle problem.
Look at the numbers laid out in the viral post circulating right now: Vladimir Putin at 73, Donald Trump at 79, Benjamin Netanyahu at 76, Narendra Modi at 75, Xi Jinping at 72, and Ali Khamenei at 86. Do the average. You land at roughly 76.8 years old — men who were born before television was common in most homes, before the internet was a dream, before climate change was a dinner-table word. These are the six people whose fingers rest on the world's most consequential buttons.
I'm Gerd. I was born in 1986 in Albania, moved to Italy at five for medical treatment, and have spent my adult life in a wheelchair studying the physics of the universe. I founded FreeAstroScience to make science accessible, honest, and human. And when I see that image — those six names and six ages — I don't feel outrage. I feel a strange, almost cosmic sadness, the kind you feel when you realise the clock is ticking and nobody in the room can hear it.
The Universe Doesn't Negotiate With Age
Here's something I learned studying stellar evolution at the University of Bologna: stars don't stay the same. A star in its final phase burns differently — brighter in some cases, but also more erratic, more prone to explosive releases of energy. We call that phase a red giant. (I'll let you decide whether the metaphor writes itself.)
The Pew Research Center found that the median age of national leaders worldwide sits at 62, meaning our six protagonists are roughly 15 years older than even the already-greying average. In most countries, the leader is significantly older than the median member of the population. In America, the median citizen is 38 years old. The person making decisions about their healthcare, their climate, their wars — is more than twice that age.
That's not wisdom. That's an astronomical distance.
A Word Nobody Wants to Say: Gerontocracy
The word comes from the Greek geron, meaning old man. Gerontocracy is formally defined as a system in which an entity is ruled by leaders who are substantially older than most of the adult population. It sounds dry, academic. But it is the most accurate description of the geopolitical moment we're living in.
The London Political Summit's 2026 analysis put it starkly: "The modern world is young but its leaders are not." Gen Z now forms a decisive demographic force globally, yet political power stays overwhelmingly locked in the hands of men in their late 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s. This isn't just symbolic. It raises real questions about whose future these people are actually building.
China and Russia are the clearest examples of what researchers call centralised leadership longevity — systems where generational turnover is deliberately subordinated to regime stability. [web:8] Xi and Putin aren't old because their countries ran out of young talent. They're old because the system is designed to keep them there.
What Experience Buys (and What It Can't)
I want to be fair. I don't believe age automatically disqualifies anyone from leadership. I've met eighty-year-olds sharper than most thirty-year-olds I know, and I say that as someone who still remembers the sharp sting of a professor telling me my research was "too ambitious" — I was 24 and in a wheelchair and I'd just come out of brain surgery. Age and wisdom are not the same thing.
But there's a specific problem with governing through lived experience alone when the problems are genuinely new.
When Putin was born, the atmosphere's CO₂ concentration was around 310 parts per million. Today it's above 420. [This is established atmospheric science, simplified here for clarity.] The planet these men were shaped by no longer exists. Their instincts, their frameworks, their sense of what "normal" looks like — it all formed in a world that is gone. They are, in a very literal sense, steering by an outdated map.
Trump's political resurgence illustrates something important: age is not a barrier where charisma, media dominance, and polarisation prevail, and democratic systems sometimes recycle ageing elites during periods of uncertainty rather than cultivate new leadership. Fear makes people reach for the familiar. That's human. But it's also dangerous.
The Numbers Behind the Silence
Here's a detail that never makes it into the viral posts: the youngest sitting world leader as of late 2025 is Kristrún Frostadóttir, Prime Minister of Iceland. [web:16] She's in her late thirties. Iceland has a population of roughly 370,000 people. The contrast doesn't need underlining.
The average dictator today is 64 years old — 12 years older than the average dictator in 1975. [web:11] Autocratic regimes actively preserve ageing leadership through constitutional manipulation, election rigging, and the systematic weakening of institutional checks. The world isn't just getting older at the top by accident. For some systems, it's a feature.
And yet — and this is where it gets genuinely interesting — even competitive democracies are falling into the same trap. [web:8] The United States has produced its oldest president in modern history twice in a row. Something structural is at play, not just individual ambition.
From a Wheelchair, The View Is Different
I'm going to get personal here, because that's the only honest way to talk about this.
I had a Deep Brain Stimulation implant put in at 25 and removed seven years later. I spent years learning what it felt like to have decisions about my body, my treatment, my future made by people who — however competent and well-meaning — were not living inside my skin. The distance between the decision-maker and the person affected by the decision is never neutral. It has weight. It has a temperature.
That's what I think about when I look at those six names and those six ages. A 22-year-old in Kyiv. A 19-year-old in Gaza. A 17-year-old in Tehran. A 16-year-old in Mumbai whose lungs breathe the same air that policy shapes. None of them were consulted. None of them are in the room.
The world "needs young leaders now" — isn't a slogan. It's a survival instinct dressed up as a tweet.
Science Doesn't Do Nostalgia
One of the things I love most about physics is that it has no interest in what things used to be. The second law of thermodynamics doesn't care that entropy used to be lower. The universe moves forward whether we want it to or not.
Intergenerational equity — giving the next generation real power over their own future — is not soft idealism. Researchers studying global governance have identified concrete structural reforms that make a difference: enforced term limits, youth inclusion mechanisms, leadership succession planning, and intergenerational governance models. [web:8] These aren't radical. They're engineering solutions to a governance design flaw.
Most constitutions impose no upper age limit on leadership. [web:8] They set minimums — you must be at least 35, at least 40 — but not maximums. We build expiry dates into food, into medicine, into the components of spacecraft. We haven't yet figured out how to build them into power.
The Next Generation Is Already Here
I think about Volodymyr Zelensky — 46 years old, younger than all six of the men in that image by decades. Whatever you think of his politics or his decisions, he represents something real: a leader who grew up with the internet, who understands what it means to be filmed on a smartphone, who communicates in the digital language his people actually speak.
The youngest leaders in the world right now — Ibrahim Traoré in Burkina Faso at 36, Gabriel Boric in Chile, Ecuador's Daniel Noboa — are imperfect, complex, sometimes troubling figures. Youth is not a virtue by itself. But it is a starting condition for relevance.
The question worth sitting with — the one that keeps me up past midnight here in Emilia-Romagna, watching satellite feeds of Aurora Australis from my laptop — is this: what kind of world do we want to be governed by people who have to live in it for the next fifty years?
Never Give Up on the Future
I built FreeAstroScience from a hospital bed, from rehabilitation rooms, from years of surgeries and setbacks that would have been entirely reasonable excuses to stop. The one philosophy that kept the whole thing from collapsing inward was simple and almost embarrassingly direct: never give up.
That applies here. The gerontocracy we're watching is not inevitable. It's a design. Designs can be changed. Young people — not just in politics but in science, in art, in community organising, in the quiet daily act of caring about something beyond themselves — are already doing the work of building a different architecture of power.
The universe, remember, does not stay the same. Red giants eventually collapse into something new. What comes next — a white dwarf, a neutron star, in extraordinary cases a black hole — depends entirely on what was built during the main sequence.
We are still in ours. The question is whether we use it.
Gerd Dani is the founder and president of FreeAstroScience — Science and Cultural Group.
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