Bombshell: Explosive Medical Secrets That Will Redefine Aging (9 page)

SS:
Imagine the uses for blood cancers, like multiple myeloma. This is a thrilling concept. Will the nanobots have an intelligence to understand the rhythms of each person, that each person is a hormonal individual and some need more, some need less? Because at
present, replacement, as it stands, is such a new specialty that there is a lot of discrepancy among doctors as to how much, how often.

RK:
I agree. At present it is a complicated issue to correct levels. Hormones, as you write about so eloquently—frankly, Suzanne, your books have changed the quality of millions of lives—have, like you say, got to be individualized.

But what I’m talking about is intelligence within the nanobot to “know” the individual needs of that person. This will be the new method, the new technology to optimize and perfect the levels of each person.

SS:
So you are saying, fifteen, twenty years from now, nanotechnology in the form of nanobots will be the answer to the diseases and conditions that have got present orthodox medicine stumped? If so, this is very, very exciting. It offers not only hope but also incentive. If you know today that you can beat the “big three” in the future, you are more likely to want to make the right choices now.

I asked before, what’s the catch? In order to access this fantastic new voyage, as you say, what do we have to do to arrive there in good health?

RK:
Grasp the concept … take the idea of good health today seriously; be proactive about it. The idea that “I don’t have to take care of myself now because no matter how I abuse myself I can repair anything that’s gone wrong” is just not correct. You have to make your health a priority.

SS:
So help drive this home for both myself and my readers. Taking care of yourself, staying as healthy as possible, and doing the work, as in hormone replacement, getting proper sleep, managing stress, eating healthy and correctly, exercise and supplementation, good thoughts, avoiding toxins. Are these the crucial and necessary steps to take to access the coming technology?

RK:
Correct. It’s simpler than most people think. It will be a very exciting period fifteen years from now, but the goal of “Bridge One” (my steps to health in
Fantastic Voyage
) is what you and I both write about and practice, and that is to get to “Bridge Two” in as good shape as possible. There will be certain types of damages that are hard to repair. Let’s take an extreme example, like Alzheimer’s. At present, when the brain dies, it is not repairable … but in fifteen, twenty years, we will have the ability to turn off Alzheimer’s and we will understand the genetic triggers for that. But this doesn’t mean we can
regrow someone’s whole brain that’s been ravaged by Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, that is a destructive process, a form of death, and it will not be repairable.

SS:
In this book, Drs. Rea, Blaylock, Wright, Gordon, Galitzer, and others are stressing the need to eliminate toxins, to do regular detoxification, and to understand the devastating effects of toxicity to the brain and body. I see it all the time, people who are not able to connect the dots between brain damage and poor health and the everyday choices we make, such as choosing diet soda, and the chemicals in our food, homes, cosmetics, and the water and air we breathe.

I have a friend who is very health conscious, won’t eat any fat or carbohydrates, yet I watch her put twelve packets of Sweet’N Low in her coffee, which is all chemicals. And then, of course, you have to ask how many cups of coffee does she consume daily? Due to lack of knowledge, she has not made the connection; chemicals are here, there, and everywhere … it adds up. It’s a new, dangerous world, a different planet, and most of those who ignore the information, I fear won’t be able to partake in your advances.

Will it ever be possible to reverse a damaged brain?

RK:
I never say never. But that’s not something we think we can do in fifteen or twenty years, because it would essentially mean creating a new person. Basically that kind of brain destruction is very, very hard to reverse because the information, the memories, and the skills are gone. Ultimately, you will be able to re-create a new person, like I talk about creating an avatar of my father, but it’s not the same as reversing the damage that’s been done to an existing person.

SS:
And like you say, the memories and skills will be gone. But, exponentially (your word), with so many working on this goal at the same time, it seems to me that what you don’t think is possible right now may be very possible in the future. See, you are training me …

RK:
Thank you! We are making progress faster, better, and cheaper and at a continually accelerating rate. Whereas science used to proceed at a snail’s pace, that is not the case anymore. We don’t want to limp into Bridge Two brain damaged and debilitated. That might be hard to reverse. Why chance it?

SS:
The big picture I get from you is the sure possibility of ending the conditions that are bringing us down. This is amazing stuff. Like a dream. Would we do this proactively and automatically or wait till the catastrophic event?

RK:
It would be a proactive defense. Health is one application, but the quintessential future application is basically an artificial immune system that overcomes the limitations of our current immune system and would also be much faster and much more intelligent. Our immune systems are intelligent but have limitations that we will be able to overcome. Ultimately, we will send these corrected signals into the brain.

SS:
Give me examples.

RK:
Well, for instance, I’m talking about creating virtual reality avatars like our Ramona we introduced in my movie,
Transcendent Man
. In the future, we will have full-immersion virtual-reality environments and you will feel like you are there, and it wouldn’t be just by yourself.

For instance, I have a lot of information about my father, so I believe ultimately, say thirty to forty years from now, I can create an avatar of my father.

SS:
Will other people be able to see him?

RK:
Yes, you will be able to go into virtual reality and it will be just like interacting with another real person.

SS:
What about people who have been cryonically preserved like the famous baseball player Ted Williams, and now I hear Larry King wants to be frozen after death? I mean, frankly, at present it sounds a little creepy to me, but maybe they are ahead of the game.

RK:
Well, in a way they might be. Because there is more than their DNA; you have their bodies and brains, and even though they are not functioning, future technologies will be able to map out all their brain connections and probably see the neurotransmitter concentrations. They would basically reverse the damage that the freezing process has done, as well as then curing the diseases and even reversing the early effects of death. I think that will all be feasible.

SS:
[Laughs.] Yes and then they can wake up and see my Thigh-Master commercial and wonder what that’s all about! [I’m referring here to a scene in a Mel Gibson movie where he was cryogenically preserved and woke up to see me. It was one of the high points of my movie career!]

RK:
That’s funny, and I hope you’re still selling them at that time.… But you and I are more than DNA. We have memories, skills, and personality in our brains. It’s not just the DNA that reflects our lifetime of experience. We have connections that we’ve grown in our brains
which reflect our experiences. Every time we experience something or remember something, there are connections made in our brains that reflect that, and those connections are still intact. So you create a person who is basically a replica of the person who died.

SS:
Is the human desire to live forever to preserve brain intelligence? I mean, for instance, it would be a tragedy to lose
your
brain. And tragic to lose my sunny personality (that’s a joke). But the planet needs your gained intelligence, your brain’s ability to understand the complexities of the universe and your amazing inventions, as well as those to come. They’re all invaluable to human existence. If you were to live indefinitely, your brain would only grow and intensify if you were (and most likely will be) utilizing the technology you are telling me about. You are a valuable human asset. Your knowledge enhances life for all of us, and it would be a shame for that to die off in this generation.

RK:
Definitely. And it’s based on the idea that I do want to live to tomorrow and that is never going to change for me. When people say, “I only want to live to a hundred,” that’s not to be believed. Let’s hear them say that when they are a hundred!

SS:
Particularly if they are in good health.

RK:
Exactly. In fact, studies have shown that the only time people take their own lives is when they’re deeply suffering physically or emotionally. There are a few exceptions to that. If somebody has deep devotion to some concepts that they live by, religious or otherwise, then they would choose to follow those dictates. Or if people are suffering, they most likely would not want to live. You see, I don’t have this vision of future life as being repetitive, doing the same things over and over again. My life hasn’t been that way so far, and with these new advances in technology I see the opportunity to radically expand our lives, not just extend them. I’m very much looking forward to living and participating in life. But that’s not something that is just reserved for me. Everyone has a lot to contribute and can continue to contribute, particularly as we unlock human potential with these new technologies.

SS:
But if we extend life indefinitely, what are we going to do with all these people?

RK:
That’s not a problem at all. A hundred years ago there were predictions that with the population explosion we’d run out of food, and as you can see we’ve more than kept up with that. In fact, I have graphs that show continual progress in human wealth, health, education,
and many other different resources. We have ten thousand times more energy than we need for the entire population just from sunlight. Now, for sure, we can’t plug our refrigerators into the sun without converting it into electricity, but that is exactly what nanotechnology will provide. In fact, new nanotechnology-based solar panels are providing much more cost-effective solar energy and are on an exponential rise. It’s been doubling every two years and has been for the last twenty-five years, and we’re only eight doublings away from meeting 100 percent of our energy needs.

SS:
You explain “exponential” in your law of accelerating returns, meaning, as I understand it in its simplest form, starting slow, then growing faster and faster. The rate of change is accelerating, the best example being with knowledge and technology. We hardly notice the growth at first, for example, as in cancer research so far, and then suddenly it seems to explode, particularly as I see it, outside the standard-of-care box.

RK:
I wrote an energy plan for the National Academy of Engineering articulating that view. Well, within twenty years we can meet all our energy needs many times over with sunlight. We have an enormous amount of water even though right now most of it is salinized or polluted, but if we have cheap energy, we know how to clean it up. There are food technologies that are emerging.

SS:
What do you mean?

RK:
There will be vertical agriculture where we can grow high-quality plants in air-controlled buildings that will be very nutritious and low cost. We will have in vitro cloned meats where we can feed millions of pounds of meat from one animal basically by cloning the muscle tissue with no animal suffering. PETA is a strong supporter of this idea. There are many ideas like this that we are exploring at Singularity University. One of the projects is pursuing this new field of three-dimensional printing to print out models that can be put together into very-low-cost, high-quality housing. It goes further with nanotechnology; one of its promises is to have a desktop device where you can print out any physical object from an information file.

SS:
You mean like I could print out a new blouse?

RK:
Right, or a solar panel or a module to build housing. We’ll have all the physical things we need. We can meet the material needs of a growing population. People say to me, “But there’s going to be a ‘have, have-not’ divide.” I respond with, Look at cell phones. Five
billion of our six billion people have them. A kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more information today than the president of the United States did fifteen years ago.

SS:
Powerful stuff.

RK:
Yes, and ultimately these technologies become very inexpensive and very powerful, so even if the population expands somewhat, the power of these technologies doubles every year. Even with the size of the biological population, and even if we substantially reduce the death rate, we’d still have a doubling time of advances of like fifteen years.

SS:
Ahh, there it is again, “exponential.”

RK:
Right, but the rate of growth and the power of technology’s abilities to meet the needs of the population are doubling much faster. We will see advances in the next ten years or so that would have taken over two hundred years before. In fact, medical research moves ten thousand times as fast as it did twenty years ago. Progress is approaching the speed of light! This is why life-extending technologies and cancer and heart disease technologies, which seemed to be advancing agonizingly slow, are about to go into hyperdrive. That is exponential.

SS:
What do you see as your end point? What’s it like? How long will it last?