7.6 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Publisher Rodale Inc. Media type Print (Hardcover) Originally published October 2004 Subject Life extension | 3.8/5 Goodreads Language English Publication date October 2004 Pages 400 pp OCLC 56011093 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Preceded by The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life Similar Ray Kurzweil books, Health books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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.
Contents
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.
Organization
Criticisms
One claim in the book has been called pseudoscience. Dr. Stephen Lower, retired Professor of Chemistry at Simon Fraser University, disputes some of the book's statements about alkaline water on his web site. Kurzweil and Grossman counter this specific criticism directly in their Reader Q&A.