In short:
A live-stream broadcast of China’s military parade has captured Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin discussing biotechnology’s potential to extend life.
An interpreter translating Mr Putin can be heard saying in Mandarin that human organ transplants could let “us live younger and younger, and perhaps even achieve immortality”.
Mr Xi responded that it may be possible for people to live to 150 years this century.
That sounds like the average conversation of a group of guys on their 3rd beer on a Friday afternoon.
Or a bunch of morons who have completely lost touch with reality on account of having unchallenged absolute power for far too long.
Probably that’s because that’s exactly what this is? They’re watching a parade having a beer. What did we expect?
That’s what I’m trying to convey here
I hope they try it. At their age recovering from major surgery will be a breeze. I wish I was on immune suppressants for the rest of my life. Oh and don’t forget another surgery when the organ fails! Sounds like immortality to me
Even better, you know these guys love their Scotch. Lets see how long they can go without indulging after they get that new liver
You never know. Friend of mine had a liver transplant and was completely off the immunosuppressants in 18 months, never took 'em again.
Liver is a weird one. The liver is one of the only organs that can regenerate. Anyone can donate a chunk of their liver. It just regrows after awhile, as well as in the recipient. So livers are better at staying under the radar from the immune system.
Hadn’t thought of that! Yeah, got my first negative results from my liver a few months ago. Cut the bad habits, and not simply beer, tested fine a month later. LOL, my doctor was so proud! Thought I had quite drinking! Nope. Just cut the kratom powder that enabled me to stay up and drink more. :)
Long term heavy drinking is really rough on the body. My cousin’s ex husband recently passed away from drinking. She left him because of if and his kids didn’t want much to do with him. He had been sober for a year and was just talking with my cousin about trying to have a relationship with his kids. It was going well. Then he died. It just doesn’t seem worth the risk.
Gross. Absolutely gross. Powerful old people are already living too long.
Oh is he doing experiments on Uyghur people
You know, its crazy how many times I’ve heard this rumor floated relative to the very real organ harvesting business that’s been happening in Israel since the 1990s
More than one country can be bad. Israel is very bad. China is also very bad.
I was going to say there was no actual evidence, but huh, I actually fell for some of the tankie lies after enough time. China’s deputy health minister Huang Jiefu repeatedly publicly acknowledged that most organ transplants came from death row inmates, and separately China was exporting organs to south korea on a massive scale prior to 2007.
(though it’s notable that this has not been connected to the Uyghur situation specifically)
(Also noting that it’s Israel claimed to end the practice in 2000, while China claimed to end the practice in 2015)
sources pre-emptively posted: the guardian, (old) beijing times, zhenhua.163.com, der spiegel
It is weird to point to a country that’s actively engaged in a holocaust and compare it to one that has eliminated poverty and boosted life expectancy by decades. One is slaughtering hundreds of thousands and the other is dramatically improving the lives of hundreds of millions.
You were the one that brough up the comparison in the first place.
I noted a real well-documented instance of organ harvesting, yes. I wasn’t just farting out speculations because I hate the country’s politics.
Look let’s ease of the Xi Jinping dicksucking. The CCP is an objectively oppressive regime with a terrifying human rights track record. All the tankie whataboutism in the world isn’t going to change that.
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
So it’s likely
Probably not
Probably*
In china, heart surgeon, number 1!..
us as in literally “the two of us”. fucking hell, die already and stop leeching
Bullets.
Death Cab for Putie.
Bullet for my Vladimir.
Putin On The Fritz.
Bullets are the beauty of the blistering sky
These people are idiots, because that’s definitely not how aging works. But please go through all the organ transplants, it will just kill you both and do the world a big favor.
It’s weird because Xi is a chemical engineer. Putin and Kim I understand being gullible and clueless about scientific matters but I don’t expect the same from Xi.
smart people are wrong sometimes
issac newton thought he could synthesize a philosophers stone
Maybe they are lying to Trump about this, since he is freaked out about dying, to get some kind of favor or financing, or just to taunt him
Engineers disease is a thing. I understand heat transfer, therefor I can understand everything
I honestly believe people could live to 150 within the next century and if organ transplants are part of it it will either be due to cloning or far better control of the immune system than we have now. I don’t expect those advances to be soon enough to help either of these guys, no matter how much money they have.
I honestly believe people could live to 150 within the next century
It’s a fun and easy thing to believe. Significantly harder to accomplish.
I don’t expect those advances to be soon enough to help either of these guys
They’ve already benefited substantively from the last 70 years of health technology. And I wouldn’t be surprised of Xi, in particular, is enjoying some knock-on effects of being the head of state in a nation that’s on the cutting edge of medical research.
But there’s a huge difference between “living to 100” and “being a functional adult at age 100”. Xi’s already pushing the line in his 70s and should have been queuing up a successor two terms ago. Putin’s in it even worse, having trotted out Medeved and watched him flop in front of Parliament back in… what? 2008? Now he’s got the tiger by the tail as he coasts into his own golden years.
The fact that the US is floundering amidst its own techno-fascist gerentocracy should be a giant alarm bell for every other national government. You can’t just stack the fate of your country on whether Chucks Grassley and Schumer can maintain a pulse indefinitely. But I guess when its your turn in the big chair, its easy to think you’ll live forever.
Life expectancy at 25 hasn’t changed dramatically in the last 2000 years, less than 10 years in most parts of the world. Life expectancy at birth has improved dramatically, and that isn’t doing much for me, Putin, or Xi at this point. Certainly, the improved healthcare afforded to Putin and Xi is going to help their life expectancy more than the average. All that said, a lot of improvements have happened in the last couple centuries, mostly based on our knowledge. Sure, exponential growth isn’t going to happen forever, not even in gaining knowledge, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen in biology for the next century. If it does, extending life expectancy at birth to 150 could be quite conservative.
Life expectancy at 25 hasn’t changed dramatically in the last 2000 years
Heavily dependent on where and when you lived. In Tibet, for instance, life expectancy topped out at around 35 years in 1950 and is now cresting 75 in 2025. In the Palestinian Territories, the last ten years have seen life expectancy actually grew from 67 years to 76 years between 1992 and 2022. Then, in 2023, it fell off a cliff for some reason.
A nasty famine, a brutal war, or a global pandemic can clip the lives of senior citizens short very quickly.
But otherwise, sure. Solving the problems of agriculture and sanitation modernization have been comparatively easy relative to addressing telomere erosion or alzhemier’s treatments. Simply not killing people is a lot easier than keeping them alive indefinitely.
Although, one might also argue that the problems of aging haven’t been felt so acutely prior to the 1950s, because comparatively fewer people were living into their senior years. Now that we have a bumper crop of senior citizens, we’ve been given a strong economic incentive to pursue technologies at an industrial scale. It’s not just The Qin Emperor downing cups of mercury, thinking his exceptional wealth and privilege will grant him an extract century of youthfulness.
There is a difference between maximum age and life expectancy, just as there is a difference between life expectancy at different ages. The life expectancy at 25 in Roman times was about 70 years old. All of our advances have added about 10% to a person’s life span after they got past childhood diseases, the recklessness of youth, and serving in the military in the case of Romans. And I’m not entirely sure of the relevance of a genocide in Israel to Xi’s prospects.
The life expectancy at 25 in Roman times was about 70 years old.
Maybe for a Senator or other member of the patrician class.
But even in the last century, we’ve seen more movement than what you’re describing.
in the early 20th century (around 1900-1902), a 25-year-old could expect to live approximately 39 to 40 more years, reaching around age 64-65. By 2017, a 25-year-old could expect to live about 55 more years, reaching roughly age 80.
So, closer to 20%
of our advances have added about 10% to a person’s life span after they got past childhood diseases, the recklessness of youth, and serving in the military in the case of Romans.
The vast majority of these advanced have occurred in the last 70 years. The intervening 2500 has been relatively flat.
And I’m not entirely sure of the relevance of a genocide in Israel to Xi’s prospects.
Mostly just a comparison of wealth and technology.
I would expect nothing or much more than 150. You only live as long as the weakest links in your body. Solving one isn’t going to get ypu to 150. And if you solve enpugh to get to 150, you should live a lot longer.
I wasn’t setting an upper limit. There is good evidence we are closing in on some of the causes of the symptoms of aging, as well as gaining evidence that dealing with the symptoms may reduce the effects of aging. If we only have those basic tools in the next 100 years, I could see lifespans being pushed to 150 to 200 for the typical person. If we can also deal with the lesser regenerative capability of the brain, I could see people living for centuries. As you said in other comments, there are a lot of interconnected pieces, and just fixing one or some of them won’t be as useful as fixing all of them, which really takes transplants off the table as a general solution, but also means we may see limited increases in life span rather than getting past the tipping point of life extension research outpacing the gain it gives you, eg., extending lifespans more than one year per year.
There also is one thing I believe is still unknown. Why 115ish seems to be the upper limit. The ones who make it that long are often in relatively good health. But they still die (usually in thier sleep) anyway. With no real reason why. So we need to figure that out to break through the current line.
Bad simulation design?
If it’s running on a k8s cluster, a lot of people do ttl the nodes. Guess the simulation isn’t using persistent storage for people. Lol.
And if you solve enpugh to get to 150, you should live a lot longer.
Really depends on how you solve it. Announcing “we can keep you in a vegetative state for an extra 50 years” isn’t a strong sign that the technology is there yet. Besides, there’s a lot more to living than just heartbeat and baseline brain activity.
They have other sources for organs.
Immune suppression drugs have their own risks, and the older you are, the harder surgeries are on you. Even if they have cloned organs, how does that help systemic frailty?
We need to forcefully redistribute all excess wealth and power.
These delusional sycophants are going to be the death of our species.
Can you imagine the suffering of being an organ donor clone of one of these dictators? That’s some scifi level of hell.
There’s a fictional movie about it.
Honestly kind of idyllic. The premise of living in a childish Utopia until you’ve “won the lottery” seems far more generous on its face than the slaughterhouse conditions most domesticated animals endure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Scorpion
This is another take on the concept, really compelling read.
Not without brain transplants
They will head transplant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplantArthur Caplan, a bioethicist, has written “Head transplants are fake news. Those who promote such claims and who would subject any human being to unproven cruel surgery merit not headlines but only contempt and condemnation.”[10]
I’m not sure if they will transplant head to another body or to the robot or just make a wolverine with artificial heart. China have it’s own rules.
https://interestingengineering.com/science/china-paralyzed-patients-walk-brain-spinal-implantIf that is really true, they can probably create many more cybernetic devices. Far as keeping dear leader alive that way they would need to keep secrecy of it tight enough that nobody would be aware of it until it was too late.
too bad organ transplants dont make you bulletproof.
I will happily help transplant their organs.
Damn. They gonna make me retire at 140 then. Shit.
