Yesterday I came across a documentary (called Do You Want to Live Forever?) about this man, Aubry DeGrey, a man who says he has figured out how to cure aging. Imagine not only living much much longer, but living those years in the best of health. He has his critics and you can judge for yourself, but you cannot deny his passion for this.
A true maverick, Aubrey de Grey challenges the most basic assumption underlying the human condition — that aging is inevitable. He argues instead that aging is a disease — one that can be cured if it’s approached as “an engineering problem.” His plan calls for identifying all the components that cause human tissue to age, and designing remedies for each of them — forestalling disease and eventually pushing back death. He calls the approach Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).
Google, the Internet search powerhouse that in recent years has expanded to include mapping of the stars as well as the surfaces of the moon and Mars and which has an ongoing collaboration with NASA’s Ames Research Center, provided a small seed grant to fund development of the wide-field digital cameras needed for the satellite. Because of the huge amount of data that will be generated by the satellite, Google has an interest in working on the development of ways of sifting through that data to find useful information.
Dubbed the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the satellite could potentially be launched in 2012. ‘Decades, or even centuries after the TESS survey is completed, the new planetary systems it discovers will continue to be studied because they are both nearby and bright,’ says George R. Ricker, senior research scientist at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT and leader of the project. ‘In fact, when starships transporting colonists first depart the solar system, they may well be headed toward a TESS-discovered planet as their new home.’
