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What do warmongers and strongmen chat about? Living forever, of course.
Xi and Putin would hate having anything in common with this guy.
Queen once asked, "Who wants to live forever?" And while the band's frontman Freddie Mercury only made it into his 40s, the song's question continues to haunt people—especially aging tyrants who fear that the icy hand of death is upon their shoulder and want far more time to ensure both national and personal glory.
At a Beijing gathering this week, China's Xi Jinping, Russia's Vladimir Putin, and North Korea's Kim Jong Un met to commemorate Japan's defeat in World War II. The three men and their translators were caught on hot mics having an "unscripted moment" in which the conversation turned to life extensions and immortality.
"Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 years you are still a child," Xi told the other two, according to Bloomberg.
(This is gross hyperbole, of course, as China's overall life expectancy rate is 77.6, while in Russia it is just 70—below the global average of 71.4. The US average is 76.4.)
Putin then responded with the somewhat creepy claim that, thanks to biotech, "human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality."
Xi then responded with the claim that people may live to 150 by the end of this century.
In a later press conference, Putin confirmed the discussion and said that "life expectancy will increase significantly" in the near future and "we should also think about this" in terms of political and economic consequences. (In Russia, life expectancy has actually decreased significantly in recent years, and the overall population is declining.)
The brief snippets of conversation suggest that immortality is on the minds of the world's strongmen, though it's interesting to see how it takes a different form than in Silicon Valley, where robots and software are more often seen as the key to longevity instead of, say, recurring organ transplants into an aging bag of skin.
Shows like Upload and Alien: Earth present visions of a world in which consciousness can be scanned by machines and perhaps even loaded into other machines. Meanwhile, Putin and Xi are thinking more about repeated organ transplants and life extension rather than "the Singularity."
So, which dystopic future are we more likely to get? (
, I am presuming, based on the current state of the world, that the near future will be pretty dystopic. I think it's a good bet.) Clones being raised for organ transplants, as in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go? Or some kind of "download your consciousness into this machine" situation in which the mind of Elon Musk inhabits one of his beloved Tesla robots for all eternity? Given either alternative, I'm not entirely sure I'd want to live forever.
Xi and Putin would hate having anything in common with this guy.
Queen once asked, "Who wants to live forever?" And while the band's frontman Freddie Mercury only made it into his 40s, the song's question continues to haunt people—especially aging tyrants who fear that the icy hand of death is upon their shoulder and want far more time to ensure both national and personal glory.
At a Beijing gathering this week, China's Xi Jinping, Russia's Vladimir Putin, and North Korea's Kim Jong Un met to commemorate Japan's defeat in World War II. The three men and their translators were caught on hot mics having an "unscripted moment" in which the conversation turned to life extensions and immortality.
"Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 years you are still a child," Xi told the other two, according to Bloomberg.
(This is gross hyperbole, of course, as China's overall life expectancy rate is 77.6, while in Russia it is just 70—below the global average of 71.4. The US average is 76.4.)
Putin then responded with the somewhat creepy claim that, thanks to biotech, "human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality."
Xi then responded with the claim that people may live to 150 by the end of this century.
In a later press conference, Putin confirmed the discussion and said that "life expectancy will increase significantly" in the near future and "we should also think about this" in terms of political and economic consequences. (In Russia, life expectancy has actually decreased significantly in recent years, and the overall population is declining.)
The brief snippets of conversation suggest that immortality is on the minds of the world's strongmen, though it's interesting to see how it takes a different form than in Silicon Valley, where robots and software are more often seen as the key to longevity instead of, say, recurring organ transplants into an aging bag of skin.
Shows like Upload and Alien: Earth present visions of a world in which consciousness can be scanned by machines and perhaps even loaded into other machines. Meanwhile, Putin and Xi are thinking more about repeated organ transplants and life extension rather than "the Singularity."
So, which dystopic future are we more likely to get? (
, I am presuming, based on the current state of the world, that the near future will be pretty dystopic. I think it's a good bet.) Clones being raised for organ transplants, as in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go? Or some kind of "download your consciousness into this machine" situation in which the mind of Elon Musk inhabits one of his beloved Tesla robots for all eternity? Given either alternative, I'm not entirely sure I'd want to live forever.