Faaame, Im gonna live forever. (Photo by Justin Sullivan\/Getty Images) <\/p>\n
Forget fighting off the Grim Reaper with devout attendance at the local New York Sports Club and endless self-quantifying. Thats not moonshotty enough for Larry Page. Luckily, hes got the resources of an enormous American corporation at his disposal, which is how Calico, Googles new anti-aging initiative, came about. <\/p>\n
This isnt like living through the prologue of a singularitariannovel, nope, not at all. <\/p>\n
Timescored the exclusive, along with an interview with the spotlight-shy Mr. Page. The company will focus on health and aging in particular and be run independently by Apple chairman and former Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson. Given the turn medicine is taking toward information science, itd be a fair bet this will involve crunching numbers in search of the best strategies for life extension. <\/p>\n
Ideally, if you have more people and more resources, you can do more things, get more things solved. Weve kind of always had that philosophy, Mr. Page explainedthe initiative. And by things solved, it sure sounds like he means death overthrown, or at least held off a lot longer. (And remember, Google also employsnoted death-doubter Ray Kurzweil, and bothSergey Brin and Mr. Levinson are personally involved inthe Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, another scheme to encourage life extension.) <\/p>\n
Hey, living forever means looking at Google ads forever. ROI, baby! Not to mention that being a billionaire often breeds the kind of hubris that makes you think hey, why shouldntI be immortal? <\/p>\n
For instance, takethis quote: <\/p>\n
One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, youd add about three years to peoples average life expectancy, Page said. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing thatll 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 its very, very sad, but in the aggregate, its not as big an advance as you might think. <\/p>\n
You know, it would be a cool little lifehack to cure cancer, but why not think BIGGER? <\/p>\n
Just spitballing here, but maybe devote some dollars to the comparatively mundane cause ofdeveloping new antibiotics? It doesnt take big data to figure that one outyou just have to pay attention from the CDCs panicky dispatches. <\/p>\n
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\nGoogle Wants Us to Live Forever So We Keep Clicking on their Ads<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"