Organic Chemistry: The Key to Eternity
I’m a software engineer, through and through. Honestly though, as of recent, I’ve been fascinated by organic chemistry. The two disciplines don’t often intersect, but I’ll get to my somewhat radical shift in interest in a moment.
I need to talk a tiny bit about my history. My dad was a physicist, so a strong interest and general interest in science was inevitable for me. But it wasn’t until I started really thinking about how much there really was to learn about the universe, that the reality set in: I would never be able to know it all.
Regardless, I have a strong, perhaps primordial desire, to know everything. If I could spend an eternity learning everything there could to be learned, about every principle and detail of existence, I would take the opportunity to do so in a heart beat. I spent the vast majority of my youth cultivating my desire in “galactic omniscience” because of many, many man hours of time spent playing games like Master of Orion.
For anyone with any sort of interest in really evolved and immersive gameplay, I suggest checking it out. I grew up with Star Trek, and Babylon 5 (somewhat) and Event Horizon. The only sadness I’ve ever associated with those games is the (currently) finite time I have on this planet absorbed in playing my time away, instead of pursuing a solution to humanity’s greatest conundrum: The puzzle of eternal life.
So what sparked this radical shift in my professional and personal motivations? In 2018, I developed a bit of a fascination with the galaxy and the stars and the universe and its wondrous, multifaceted “unknowableness”. I wanted to learn astronomy and general relativity so I could really expand my daily and mundane thoughts past the banalities of my day to day existence. To that end, I discovered the concept of Galactic Super Structure. Now, to really appreciate such a concept, you would need to spend at least a month understanding how finite we as individual beings are, and just how infinite our universe is. And how could I understand the structure of the universe with only 80 or so years allotted to my lifespan? 80 years is not sufficient to do what I need to do.
Now back to eternal life. I used to think of such things as fully relegated to the realm of fantasy. And I sort of only toyed with pursuing the idea in my teens, 20s and early 30s. It was a mere fantasy, that if by happenstance was ever actually solved, I would simply purchase a magic pill and make the disease of aging mysteriously vanish.
Now that I have a much firmer grasp on reality, do I understand that even if such a pill one day becomes available, that being of very finite financial means in this world, that I would damn near never be able to get my hands on it. Such wonders would only be reserved for the ultra-wealthy, if it was even attainable at all. No I would never be worthy of attaining such a treasure. Not unless I had a much more solid stake in the game than that of a mere “consumer of miracle cures”.
I realized that if you want to control your own destiny, that you would have to seize life by the proverbial balls. What that means is that, you have to become a part of the world that you are trying to master, let alone navigate. If I wanted to become the Ponce De Leon of my eternal earthly destiny, and find the Fountain of Youth, I have to equip myself with the tools to find it on my own, or at least figure out how to recognize it when I do find it.
Such words are surely those of a madman, right? But back to Organic Chemisty. For those who don’t know anything about it at all, it’s for 99% of pre-med students considered the bane of their collegiate existence. For the other 1% however, it’s truly a wondrous that gives you 1/3rd the toolset to control the very fabric of life. The second 3rd is of-course the understanding of biology, and the final 3rd is the understanding of quantum mechanics. There’s no understanding of chemistry without understanding quantum mechanics.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I realize that’s only through understanding how warp my DNA in a fundamental way, whether it’s through controlling the rate of my telomere degradation, without causing myself cancer. I’ll be cataloging my journey and understandings through a series of posts. I have so many more thoughts on this subject.
