Originally published at: "The Immortals" is a podcast about Silicon Valley billionaires spending loads of money trying to stay young indefinitely | Boing Boing
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Being a vampire is definitely a rich man’s game these days.
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This ‘has’ to be based upon the old 1970s TV show which was based on the James Gunn scifi novel…?
The Immortal is an American television series, starring Christopher George as a man whose blood chemistry and resistance to almost all diseases (including old age) makes him both almost immortal and a target of several wealthy men who would basically use him as a personal blood bank, aired on ABC from September 24, 1970, to January 14, 1971. The series is based on a pilot film of the same name, which aired on September 30, 1969, as an ABC Movie of the Week. The pilot is based on the 1964 science fiction novel The Immortals, by James Gunn.
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Good to see (not really) that reality is almost catching up with pre-WWII science Fiction. In Methuselah’s Children by Heinlein, published in 1941 before the US was formally involved in the war, he wrote:
“I’ll try,” Miles Rodney answered, “though I must ask Master Hardy to bear with me. It’s not one process, but several-one basic process and several dozen others, some of them purely cosmetic, especially for women. Nor is the basic process truly a rejuvenation process. You can arrest the progress of old age, but you can’t reverse it to any significant degree-you can’t turn a senile old man into a boy.”
“Yes, yes,” agreed Hardy. “Naturally-but what is the basic process?”
“It consists largely in replacing the entire blood tissue in an old person with new, young blood. Old age, so they tell me, is primarily a matter of the progressive accumulation of the waste poisons of metabolism. The blood is supposed to carry them away, but presently the blood gets so clogged with the poisons that the scavenging process doesn’t take place properly. Is that right, Doctor Hardy?’
To solve problems including the young sacrificing their health to keep old rich folk alive, they figured out how to clone blood, an explicitly socialist government service, as was the research to develop the techniques used. In the real world, bone marrow cloning and related blood production has been around for about 20 years, and is now at the “grad students are regularly doing this in experiments” level of difficulty, though there seems no real push to get it to the public. Guess we’ll have to wait at least another 80 years before that happens. Or more.
(Yeah, he wasn’t the first to propose it, which I suppose goes all the way back to the vampire legends and the Báthory story.)
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And Doctor Jackson said Trump was in excellent health, and an inch taller.
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This is the only life you will ever have. This is it. Find happiness, don’t waste time trying to extend it. Burn brightly while you can.
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All due apologies, but we’d really prefer not to eat you alive.
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Netflix just put out a movie (which was kinda ok, but not great) about the societal implications of a new medical technology that allowed the transfer of youth from poor folks to rich folks. Naturally there’s a lot of economic coercion, forced transfers to settle debts, exploitation of migrants, etc.
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Can we officially treat these ghouls as cancer to society yet? In literal sense? They gobble up all the resources (nutrition) at the cost of others (other cells) just to exist. I don’t think anything else fit the definition more.
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It would be a shame if one of the techniques these billionaire modern Madame Bathory’s were using caused progeria.
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Amazing really how thoroughly hairy chests have gone out of favor (at least in mainstream media).
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I, for one, am glad that the Hulk now sports a bit of manly chest hair. It would be kinda weird if he, of all people, took the time to shave his chest.
Though he should really be even hairier, considering the starting point.
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Ruff Ruff!
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You can hear all ten podcasts via the BBC Sounds app or web page right now, free of charge, but for that you need to register with them, i.e. surrender your e-mail address (and possibly your listening habits?). Or you can exert some patience while you age. The choice is yours.
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