Faust was a 16th Century practitioner of arcane magical arts who reportedly sold his soul to the Devil to gain youth, knowledge, and (implicitly) immortality. I learned all that by Googling his name. Google’s mantra used to be “Don’t Be Evil,” but lately it has morphed into something more like “Don’t Make Waves.” Google doesn’t like its boat rocked, now that it’s steaming full-speed ahead in a Calico craft toward a Faustian bargain with the Prince of Darkness himself. Google’s insiders, in common with other Silicon Valley billionaires, wish to become immortal. Problem is, they’ve already paid Lucifer handsomely by instituting an intellectually constraining corporate monoculture; but Beelzebub, being a mythic entity, will never deliver.
The Devil, as they say, is in the details. As nutritional guru Bill Sardi pointed out recently on this site, billionaires want to invent an anti-aging pill but have no idea how to do it. That’s partly because the science isn’t settled. Quite a few theories of aging exist, many of which are mutually compatible because they cover different aspects of the same underlying problem. It’s like the group of blind men trying to describe an elephant. Lacking a sufficiently all-encompassing grasp of the problem, plus disdaining diversity of thought (evident in their recent firing of engineer James Damore), the Google moguls will be unlikely to achieve what they yearn for.
Aging: What It Is, and Isn’t
Let’s help them. First: aging is a universal degenerative process among eukaryotic organisms (like us animals) that renders them progressively less able to cope with environmental stress, and ends in the death of the individual. The math behind it was elucidated by Benjamin Gompertz in 1825, who found…