Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have been caught on a live microphone talking about the potential of medicine to extend human life spans and "perhaps even achieve immortality".

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.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    13 hours ago

    Apart from the fact that your brain ages too and it’s 100% irreplaceable

    Braincells are irreplaceable (barring some experimental stem cell work) but the networks between those brain cells keep growing and intertwining. It’s the network between the cells that defines your mental aptitude. Plenty of stories about people with severe brain damage who still continue to function comparatively normally after a period of recovery and rehabilitation. The human brain is remarkably plastic.

    I guess if you were a monster you could raise clones of yourself to adulthood and then murder them for their body parts.

    Even that isn’t strictly practical. The failure rate on cloning is enormous. What’s legit more monstrous than killing someone for organs is producing all of the failed clones necessary to land on a copy that’s viable.

    Dolly the Sheep was a “successful” clone, and even it didn’t live a particularly long or happy life, being euthanized at half the normal age of a domesticated sheep of her breed due to arthritis and lung disease.

    No doubt someone is out there doing human cloning illegally. But I would not bank on it as a viable alternative to simply getting bumped up the organ donor list the old fashioned way.