Live long enough to be happier

Author: Ray Kurzweil, Terry Grossman
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-12-01
Features: In the peak of the Cold War in 1966, Isaac Asimov's science fiction thriller Fantastic Voyage shifted public attention from space travel to a more extraordinary journey—the inside of the human body. "Our" scientists compete with anonymous scientists from "the other side" to develop microtechnology, and whoever perfects it first will have the advantage. However, this microtechnology has a fatal flaw: it wears out extremely quickly. Professor Benes develops a way to overcome this flaw, but before he can present his ideas, he suffers a stroke and a blood clot forms in his brain. In the struggle against international conspirators, "our" people send a five-member team into Professor Benes's body using a microsubmarine equipped with time-limited microtechnology to remove the blood clot. The team includes Captain Owens, who commands the "Poseidon" submarine (the size of a blood cell), an excellent neurosurgeon named Duvall responsible for medical matters, the beautiful surgical assistant Peterson (played by Raquel Welch in the very successful), the human circulation expert Michaels, and the Central Intelligence Agency's operations commander Grant. In the thrilling mission, both readers of the novel and audiences of the film experience the extraordinary journey of the five-member team inside the human body: their heroic battle against white blood cells, evil antibodies, annoying platelets, and other threats before the time limit of the microtechnology arrives. The metaphor of the novel Fantastic Voyage fits the description of this book on several levels. First, we hope readers of this book can also experience the extraordinary journey inside the human body. Since 1966, humanity has made tremendous progress in understanding the complex processes of life, disease, and aging. We now have unprecedented abilities to understand biology at the level of the structure of tiny molecules. We also have the opportunity to significantly extend life, improve well-being, and expand our perception of the surrounding world. Asimov's magical description of microtechnology was prophetic. We are now at the beginning of a profound transformation era, where technology is being condensed to the molecular level. In reality, we are developing submarines the size of blood cells, called nanorobots (these robots are characterized by their dimensions in nanometers or millimeters, equal to one billionth of a meter), which enter the human body to perform important tasks. Although we cannot shrink ourselves to the size of these nanorobots to ride them, as Asimov's novel depicts (at least not in the coming decades), we can place ourselves in a virtual reality environment and observe the world through the eyes of these nanorobots. We can control the actions of these nanorobots as if we were inside the human body, just as soldiers today operate remote weapons systems. Longevity is in our hands. Today, do we have the knowledge and means to achieve longevity? If all scientific and technological progress suddenly stopped, the answer would be no. We already have far more means than most people realize to significantly slow down the processes of disease and aging, but we still lack all the technology needed to infinitely extend human lifespan. But scientific and technological progress has not stopped, and