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Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

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201–210 of 293 posts

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#201

“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal. It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with. But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead. It’s quite something to stop and thin…

Sci-Fi movies aren't that far from reality. It was just a matter of time.

Seems like we'd want to be careful about the one(s) we're picking though.

Sci-Fi movies don't tend to be all happy, happy, fun and joy for everyone in them. o_O

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#202
post #47

I was just thinking about heart transplants and how they’re treated as commonplace now, but they are nuts when you think about them. You can hook up the nerve wires and blood pipes from one body into the heart from another body and it works? Just thinking about the simple physical connections would make me nervous. Why isn’t there blood just leaking out in your body? Why isn’t that other heart sliding out of place wh…

Fun fact: the nerves between the brain and heart are never reattached. A heart already has all of the facilities to keep working all by itself. Even weirder is that an adult kidney transplanted into a child will actually shrink to fit.

Another fun fact: you can remove all of the brain of a cat on threadmill except the brainstem and he'll keep walking.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2024 Bell Riots were the tipping point[0], but there was still World War 3 a few decades later. A global nuclear exchange probably helped a lot in kicking human civilization off the dystopian but locally optimal path it found itself stuck on[1]. Meeting a technologically superior alien race a decade later also helped solidify a different perspective :). But yeah, I too was disappointed when 2024 came and gone without…

> [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me. There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nucl…

> Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s,

Back in the 80s. In the 60s it was just megadeath, with a chance of mutants.

(The Krakatoa movie was in 1968, but the winter thing took a while to sink in)

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#204
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The donor pig is turned into bacon. Normally the liver goes in the trash.

Asking out of ignorance. Why is the liver thrown out? Isn't it edible too?

I like cow liver, it's nasty to handle while raw, but I like it cooked in thin beefs with fried onion.

I also like chicken liver. It's small enough to be cooked whole.

I'd like to try pig liver.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#205
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. > And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer…

> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow. > What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. The writers were surpr…

> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too.

Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste.

> The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers

Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining features. Are you talking about the real world or the characters?

> is that they understood natural language and intent.

Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean and don’t know what the right answer is. The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology. The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves. I just asked GPT-5 about itself and it replied it’s GPT-4. And if I ask it again in five minutes, it might give me a different answer. When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#206
post #178

“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal. It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with. But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead. It’s quite something to stop and thin…

> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. > And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer…

People keep forgetting that the surveillance of 1984 was just the surveillance of socialist countries in the 1940s.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#207
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a doctor, but I suppose she should’ve eventually told them in the interest of science. Also, pregnancy has a heavy toll so who knows? Maybe it was a good thing she didn’t. We don’t know.

> Not a doctor, but I suppose she should’ve eventually told them in the interest of science. Glad she had a largely fulfilling life, but also thinking this. As much as it was her choice what to do with her body, it’s probably a good idea to at least tell the healthcare professionals about things like that, even if after the fact.

> it’s probably a good idea to at least tell the healthcare professionals

No, the pipeline to handle this feedback is completely missing from modern medical practices.

There is not really any way for a doctor to make use of this information to advance medical research.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#208
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted. > And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer…

People keep forgetting that the surveillance of 1984 was just the surveillance of socialist countries in the 1940s.

The states were listening to people through their TVs in the 1940s?

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sci-Fi movies aren't that far from reality. It was just a matter of time.

Seems like we'd want to be careful about the one(s) we're picking though. Sci-Fi movies don't tend to be all happy, happy, fun and joy for everyone in them. o_O

Unfortunately not everyone is careful.

Re: Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me. There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nucl…

> Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, Back in the 80s. In the 60s it was just megadeath, with a chance of mutants. (The Krakatoa movie was in 1968, but the winter thing took a while to sink in)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter But you are right that the concept was only made popular in the 80s, and a lot of the earlier works were classified or unknown and obscure to the public.
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