Google vs. the Grim Reaper in the fight for your life

It apparently isn’t enough to own the Internet, have the ability to record your every waking moment, create self-driven cars, fund interplanetary travel, deliver the Internet via balloon to the remotest corners of the earth, or anticipate what you’re likely to want before the desire has even formed inside your cranium. Google has even loftier goals: It wants to invent the fountain of youth — or, at the very least, cheat death a little longer.

According to Time.com, Google is about to launch Calico, a new firm whose goals will include “significantly expanding human lifespan,” and has hired former Genentech CEO Art Levinson to run it.

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(My first thought: God, I hope Dick Cheney never finds out about this, or we’ll never be rid of him. Feel free to substitute the nonconservative icon of your choosing as you read that sentence.)

In a blog post made public two hours ago, CEO Larry Page wrote:

Art and I are excited about tackling aging and illness. These issues affect us all — from the decreased mobility and mental agility that comes with age, to life-threatening diseases that exact a terrible physical and emotional toll on individuals and families. And while this is clearly a longer-term bet, we believe we can make good progress within reasonable timescales with the right goals and the right people.

Welcome to your new G-life, old codger. Hope the next 900 years are as fun as the first 100.

The snark wasn’t long in coming. Search engine maven Danny Sullivan tweeted:

Box.net CEO Aaron Levie chimed in:

German journalist Eva de Valk puts it in competitive terms.

And just when Apple was about to announce the Deathpad with the iFuneral app, too.

That’s certainly one way to deflect attention from that scandal involving Sergey and the 26-year-old marketing babe for Google Glass. But the announcement was as short on specifics as it is long on ambition. How is Google going to turn us all into Methuselah, exactly? Via the magic of big data. In the Time magazine cover story, Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman note:

It’s a lot easier to take Google’s venture seriously if you live under the invisible dome over Silicon Valley, home to a worldview whereby, broadly speaking, there is no problem that can’t be addressed by the application of liberal amounts of technology and everything is solvable if you reduce it to data and then throw enough processing power at it.

In other words, take two enormous Hadoop data sets and call me in the morning. Hell, if anyone can afford to throw money at a small problem like mortality, it’s Google. I understand Robert Scoble has already written a ringing endorsement of the idea while in the shower.

The question of course remains: Will Calico be more like Google Search — an indispensable part of the Internet for some 70 percent of U.S. netizens — or more like Google Wave, a …. what was it again? Or Google Buzz. Or Google Knol. Or Google Video. You get the idea.

Maybe it will be like Orkut and be really successful, but only if you live in Brazil. I can see the ad campaign now: Come to Rio Carnival and party like you’re 1999.

As Google has moved further and further away from its core competency — finding brutally efficient ways to manipulate data in order to deliver ads — its batting average has not been very impressive. It’s less of a slugger, more of a banjo hitter.

Still, I’m rooting for Calico. Who doesn’t want to live forever? Even if when we do eventually die, our souls will find their way to the Googleplex.

It seems a small price to pay for eternity.

Can Google patch death? Posit your theories below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Google vs. the Grim Reaper in the fight for your life,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.