In Search of Super Longevity and the Meaning of Life

Humanity's Real Destiny and Transhumanism

Super longevity is not the same as immortality. Sometimes one has to sacrifice super longevity in order to achieve immortality.

First Director-General of UNESCO Julian Huxley wrote in 1957, “I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.”

What is humanity’s real destiny? And why do we want to ask such a question in the first place?

Discovering the Meaning and Purpose of Life

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living (? δ? ?νεξ?ταστο? β?ο? ο? βιωτ?? ?νθρ?π?).” He was sentenced to death in Athens where a jury of 500 men found him guilty of “corrupting the youth” by a margin of 280 to 220.

Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras told Leon, Prince of Phlius that “some are influenced by the love of wealth while others are blindly led on by the mad fever for power and domination, but the finest type of man gives himself up to discovering the meaning and purpose of life itself.”

Albert Einstein in Search of a Unified Field Theory

Albert Einstein’s life had a profound meaning as his theory of relativity revolutionized physics, astronomy, and our understanding of the universe. Nonetheless, he spent an additional 20 years searching for a unified field theory but failed to find it.

When he gave up on his scientific research, he also gave up on living. At the age of 76, he suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm and was taken to the Princeton University Medical Center. He refused surgery that could have saved his life.

In spite of his death, Einstein lives on forever in the hearts and minds of all human generations. In other words, Albert Einstein achieved immortality, just like Socrates did. Life with a purpose leads to immortality.

Can Google Solve Death?

In 2015, Google’s life science subsidiary Verily had a staff philosopher among its 350 scientists. Its CEO Andy Conrad explained, “We have to understand the ‘why’ of what people do. A philosopher might be as important as a chemist.”

“A philosopher might be as important as a chemist.” - Google’s Verily CEO Andy Conrad

The words “medication” and “meditation” are different by only one letter (“c” versus “t”). We need to know not only the underlying causes of diseases but also why some patients respond better to certain treatments. We do not want to miss the forest for the trees.

“Can Google Solve Death?” graced the cover of the TIME Magazine on September 30, 2013. The magazine cover reads “The search giant is launching a venture to extend the human life span. That would be crazy—if it weren’t Google.”

Google made its first foray into healthcare with Google Health between 2008 and 2011 to collect volunteered information about personal health conditions, medications, allergies, and lab results. In September 2013, Google unveiled Calico to tackle human aging and associated diseases. Google Life Sciences, formerly a division of Google X, was renamed to Verily in December 2015.

Since the development of contact lens for diabetics to monitor glucose in tears, Verily has been researching cardiovascular disease, cancer, and mental health, just to name a few. The idea is to combine medicine, engineering, and data science in an effort to capture the early signs of a disease and to stop it in its tracks.

Google cofounder Larry Page has good reason for his deep interest in health sciences. In May 2013, Page announced on his Google+ profile that a 1999 cold left him with paralysis of the left vocal cord, and another cold in the previous summer paralyzed the right cord. Business Insider reported that Page has Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease in which the thyroid gland is attacked by a variety of cell and antibody-mediated immune processes.

“Are people really focused on the right things?” - Google's cofounder Larry Page

Undaunted, Page decided to go for the moonshot. “Are people really focused on the right things?” asked Google’s cofounder Larry Page. “One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.”

U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row

The bad news is that life expectancy in the United States dropped in 2015 for first time in 22 years for the entire population of male and female across all ethnicities. In 2016 U.S. life expectancy declined for the second year in a row for the male population. The 10 leading causes of death are heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease, and suicide.

The Transhumanism Handbook (2019) - #1 New Release in Preventive Medicine

To reverse the downhill trends, transhumanism advocates extensive research and significant funding to cure all physical diseases and mental illnesses, increase life expectancy, and improve the quality of life for all human beings.

“ Immortality or life extension is more than just living forever. It’s also how we live forever. What is our mindset? What is our humanity with each other? Our enemy is not one another. Our enemy is sickness, aging and death.” - Jim Strole (People Unlimited and The Coalition for Radical Life Extension)

Available from Amazon.com, Springer Science+Business Media, and Barnes & Noble.

All proceeds (minus the publisher's share) are donated to charities to support education, research, and scholarships.