To live forever
On Betty White, hot microphones, and why a couple of autocrats should think twice about hoping to live to the age of 150
When autocrats are shooting the breeze, what topics are on their minds? A "hot mic" moment captured between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping seems to have answered that question: they're talking about trying to live forever.
■ It's not an especially deep philosophical desire; few human feelings come closer to universality than the fear of death. Almost everyone has it.
■ Nor is it especially advanced thinking: Even without taking a sojourn to the weirder corners of transhumanism, there have been lots of widely-reported advancements in bio-engineering, even including steps towards 3D printing of brand-hew organs using healthy donor cells from the intended recipient.
■ Thinking hopefully about these possibilities isn't weird on its own. If we could reliably and cheaply create rejection-resistant organs from our own cells, that could be transformational for health and life-changing for millions of deserving people. Some wild things have been happening in medical technology, and that tends to spark imaginative forecasts about the future.
■ What is weird, though, is that despite all their trappings of power, neither of the politicians involved in the conversation comes across as a deep thinker -- or even a modestly bright one. Normal people might well muse aloud about the possibility of living to 100 or 150, and might even give a fleeting thought to what it might mean to live forever. (Again, nothing new: Immortal characters have factored into human stories since the very first gods and demigods.)
■ Deep thinkers with great power here on Earth, though, would naturally stop to consider the consequences of their own choices. Specifically: Am I building a world in which I would be welcomed a century from now?
■ A person can live for a century and still be missed when they are gone -- think of Betty White, Bob Newhart, Norman Borlaug, or any number of beloved grandparents and great-grandparents. But all of these souls are missed because they intentionally left behind good in the world while living.
■ That's not the way Xi or Putin will be remembered, and they certainly ought to know it. Joseph Stalin was born in 1878 and Mao Zedong was born in 1893, which would bring them both under the 150-year mark even today. Surely both would have faced serious consequences for their barbaric decisions by now. The successors to those genocidal dictators are making similar evil in the world today, and the world shouldn't forgive them, now or 100 years from now.
