Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever Paperback – September 27, 2005

This book is extraordinary because Ray Kurzweil is extraordinary. How often can you say that somebody is the real thing, but that's exactly what Kurzweil represents? This man operates on the outer edge of human knowledge. I am reminded years ago of a science fiction writer named Lester Del Rey, a mind so gifted that MIT hooked up a microphone to his neck. Everything he verbalized was recorded because it was felt that he was a hundred years ahead of his time.People like Kurzweil come along only rarely, and when they do, we are the lucky ones who find out about their existence and can learn from them. This is not to say that Kurzweil is right about everything he says, and thinks. He's not John von Newman, the Hungarian mathematician and advisor to the Manhattan Project during World War II. It was said about von Newman that once he thought about something, and gave an opinion there was no need to think about the subject anymore. He was that thorough in his thought processes.Forgive my digression, but it's a story you will tell your friends. While von Newman was lecturing one day on mathematics at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, Einstein asked if he could sit in on the lecture. During the lecture, Einstein looks at von Newman and says in German, "Johnny, slow down, I can't keep up with you." Now there's a brain.What Kurzweil and von Newman have in common is their ability to convey their thinking to the rest of us. Richard Feynmann the physicist was also like this. It is a rare gift among any group of advanced intellectuals when they can take topics, and break them down into language that the layman can deal with. It is a trait that is also vitally necessary if they are to have influence, and in Kurzweil's case, he does have influence.Kurzweil was given the National Medal of Technology, and is a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Being an entrepreneur, he doesn't want for money, those needs were taken care of by the sale of his inventions, ideas, and companies that he started.The premise of this book is that our technology is exploding at such a rate that the authors believe that in the next several decades we will have the knowledge via nanotechnology and others that will allow us to live for hundreds of years. His personal objective is to bridge the gap (his words) in time from now, until this new technology becomes available. Kurzweil wants to live FOREVER, don't we all? What about sex though, will we have sex when we are 200 years old, or will we have to be satisfied reading Plato.When you consider the amount of energy that each of us has that's put into anxiety concerning our future deaths, Kurzweil is really talking about the ultimate revolution, and the freedom from death. It's nice work if you can get it, and certainly will drive classically trained psychoanalysts up a wall, if they have to give up their anxiety in this yet unrealized future.As for me, I love the book for other reasons. This fabulous author is able to condense the contents of hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and who knows how many scientific relationships. He then takes the sum total of this knowledge bank, and distills it down into a highly readable book considering the material, of almost 400 pages.If you want to know about your health, and what you can and should be doing about it, than this is the book for you. Kurzweil goes through the vitamins, and the supplements. He tells you the real deal. In my own world of stock investments, and managing billions of dollars for international entities and families, I get to research and study just about anything I want. Kurzweil has followed a parallel track. Where we cross paths, I can see that he really has mastered a wide assortment of topics.You just aren't going to find this information anywhere else, unless you can make a full-time commitment to do the research yourself, and who can do that. I go to nanotechnology conferences in California, Kurzweil shows up. I go to Futurology conferences in Washington DC, Kurzweil shows up. I attend seminars at the Media Lab at MIT, and sure enough, there's Kurzweil. Does the man sleep; has he already crossed himself with nanotechnology, and the robotics that he swears is coming? All I know is that he's probably living at a rate of three times the rest of us.Let's look at just a few chapters and you will see how important this book is:Chapter 9 on "The Problem with sugar and Insulin" is vital if you want to have an understanding of Diabetes which Kurzweil was diagnosed with at a young age, and now states that he has completely eradicated from his body. Half of the American population is pre-diabetic, and you need to have this information to help yourself, and your loved ones.Chapter 10 is Kurzweil's personal program. His father had a massive heart attack when he was 51, so the author has a direct interest in heart disease. He's had his genes tested, and he goes into remarkable detail as to what exactly he is doing for himself to bridge the distance in time between now, and when these remarkable life-sustaining technologies are going to come into existence. What's beautiful about the book is that you can read it on many levels. You don't have to strive to understand the whole thing. Take what YOU NEED out of this book, and forget the rest. For those that have an interest however, he takes you to depths that you can't imagine going to in any other way.Chapter 12 on "Inflammation - The Latest Smoking Gun" is once again a gem of a chapter. Half the people who get heart attacks in this country are walking around with normal Cholesterol levels and normal LDL (bad) Cholesterol levels as well. If Cholesterol is so bad, how can this be? Kurzweil takes you through the latest research on Inflammation, where much of the answer may reside. This is complex stuff the man is tackling, and he makes it a JOY TO READ.Chapter 15 on the "Real Cause of Heart Disease and How to Prevent It" is worth its weight in gold. He tells you in detail exactly where cutting edge medical technology is today and I know from my own work that maybe 2% of the doctors out there are practicing what Kurzweil already knows to be true.He covers cancer, the power of your brain, hormones and aging. His chapter on exercise is a grand slam homerun. Perhaps only 1% of the books and literature out there ever talks about what evolutionary biology has to teach us about our bodies. Kurzweil covers the topic better than anyone, and it's worth talking about here.Our ancestors take us back maybe 5 million years. Human beings broke off from other chains several times during that period. Everything we are however has been shaped over that very long biological period of time through random mutations. Now think about it, for five million years, we have basically been hunter-gatherers, necessitating severe body movement. We probably walked, ran 10 miles a day, maybe more. We are in trouble now because our heritage is 10 miles a day of movement, and we are currently fighting each other to get to a parking space closest to the store we want to go to at the mall. This is a SURE-FIRE RECIPE for the breakdown of our bodies. Kurzweil is right; we need to GET MOVING AGAIN.Read the book; learn from a true genius what you could be doing, what you should be doing to maximize this beautiful gift that nature gave us, our bodies and our minds. Don't hesitate, click the box to order this book, and get excited in anticipation of taking yourself on a journey that may lead to immortality. If it doesn't, at the very least, you will begin to take control of your body. You will be in the driver's seat. You will take back control of your world from a culture that has led us to obesity, and Diabetes. You NEED to read this book.Richard Stoyeck

I am reading Ray's Singularity book, where he makes a convincing case that tech is moving forward so incredibly fast that there's a good chance that if you can only make it to 2020 still alive & functioning, you might live a much longer life than we do now, and in a much better state of health.I know Ray eats lots of health pills and stuff, and wanted to get his recommendations for what exactly to do to actually live to 2020 (when I will be 80). The book does a good job of methodically working through all aspects of a healthy life, from exercise and stress to diet, with a heavy emphasis on diet. It is certainly "actionable" since he tells you what you need to do.Problem is, what you need to do is give up anything you've ever liked to eat in your life, and spend the rest of your life (or until 2020) eating stuff that has no flavor, no taste, no fun, no jazz. Give up sweets, simple starches like potatoes, macaroni, spaghetti, bread other than whole-wheat with pebbles in it, ice cream and milk and all other dairy products, and every form of meat except salmon -- not even tuna and swordfish because they have high mercury levels. No gravies or sauces, no mayo, only olive oil--and only certain specific expensive olive oils, too.Instead you are to revert to your hunter-gatherer ancestral dietary load of raw everything, fatless everything, little meat, little sweet, little tasty -- if it's tasteless, dry, chewy, and flavorless, then good. If you find yourself smiling after you take a bite--then spit it out, it's killing you!Kiss off mealtime and snacktime as joyful enterprises in your life. Eating is something you will from now on do for fuel only, not for pleasure.To be fair, Ray and his partner make two points: First, if you really do try to reduce yourself to this level of eating, after a while you will get somewhat used to it -- it's supposedly true that, for example, if you eat a lot of sweets you become addicted to sweet tastes, whereas if you forgo sweets, after a while your sweet tooth diminishes. So it's not torture forever--just for the months (or years?) it will take your body and your taste buds to adjust. I suppose that might have some truth to it. God knows if I have chocolate milk for breakfast (so shoot me!), my sweet tooth for the rest of that day becomes more like a sweet fang.Second, he says that by the time we reach 2020, medical technology breakthroughs will make it likely that we'll be able to go back to abusing our digestive tracts somewhat, since medicine will be able to offset or compensate for our poor choices and we'll have sin without guilt once again. Ah, Eden!But for now, I just get depressed every time I look in the fridge, or walk the aisles of the grocery store, knowing that every single thing that catches my eye will kill me outright, or at least before I reach 2020. It will be really, really annoying if I am the last man to die from 20th century body malfunctions! But if I had that much discipline and self control, I'd be a much better person than I have ever been. And how likely is that?