Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Rodale Books, ISBN 1-57954-954-3), published in 2004, is a book authored by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman. The basic premise of the book is that if middle aged people can live long enough, until approximately 120, they will be able to live forever—as humanity overcomes all diseases and old age itself. This might also be considered a break-even scenario where developments made during a year increase life expectancy by more than one year. Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey called this the "Longevity Escape Velocity" in a 2005 TED talk.
The book focuses primarily on health topics such as heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. It promotes lifestyle changes such as a low glycemic index diet, calorie restriction, exercise, drinking green tea and alkalinized water, and other changes to daily living. They also promote aggressive supplementation to make up for nutrient deficiencies they believe are common in Western society. In contrast to his previous book The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life, in which he recommended a diet with 10% of calories from fat, in this book, Kurzweil recommends consuming less than one third of calories from carbohydrates (and less than one sixth of calories in his low-carbohydrate diet) and consuming 25% of calories from fat.
The book states that the purpose of these changes is to obtain and maintain idyllic health so that an individual can extend his or her life as long as possible. The authors believe that within the next 20 to 50 years technology will advance to the point where much of the aging process will be conquered, and degenerative diseases eliminated. The book is peppered with side notes on these futuristic topics, showing how current research is leading us toward life extension, and explaining how future technologies such as nanotechnology and bioengineering might change the way humans live their lives. Ray Kurzweil discusses these topics at further length in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near.
A follow-up on Fantastic Voyage, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, was released on April 28, 2009.
Read more about Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough To Live Forever: Organization, Criticisms
Famous quotes containing the words fantastic, live and/or long:
“Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)