A worse problem is that whatever generation is in control when immortality is achieved will rule the world forever. Falling fertility makes this even more likely.
Even if you argue that this would go against the interests of the highest class, what could they do? Technology is pretty unstoppable, and individual actors are usually pretty bad at conspiring together unless there's something in it for everyone involved. Not to mention that there's not even a way to define what specific dollar amount moves you from "wealthy commoner" to the "wealthy elite", especially if taking into account different countries.
Odds are we're talking about a suite of many procedures, some of which are intrinsically very expensive and that humanity doesn't have the resources to provide to everyone. But if it's really cheap...
> The providers will surely want to sell it to the maximum number of customers in all countries.
The maximum profit point isn't likely to be just above that really cheap price. People would be willing to give a significant fraction of their wealth for a magic bullet life extension, and most of the world's population has no wealth. Providers' ability to perform price discrimination isn't going to be perfect.
If it's anything like medical procedures that exist today, it sounds like at least in the US it will be impossible to afford without insurance, and therefore employment. "You can live forever, as long as you work forever" is exactly the amount of depressing I'd expect from real life.
Recurring revenue is best revenue. Customer's LTV would be only limited by astronomical circumstances like the Sun turning into a red giant.
https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Time-Joe-Haldeman/dp/038070439...
There was a followup comic book series, which was decent.
That book popped into my mind; it took two tries to find it with Copilot and I was pleasantly reminded of who the author was.
>particularly the ones where he sets out to kill a Heinlein book
Interesting statement, I'm grabbing those books now.
It will be an spectacle: the true test of how useful wealth is against the Universe, compared to other things like knowledge or wisdom.
This is casting categories of people in very rigid and binary terms. Wisdom and knowledge is not more prevalent amongst the non-elite is it? Isn’t it distributed more evenly?
Iain M. Banks probably said it best. "I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame?"
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the...
If by forever, you mean until they actually disappear from something they have failed to foresee or couldn’t avoid, then, yes maybe.
Nothing is forever. Prolongating human life would probably barely make a dent in the grand scheme of things.
Falling fertility makes us extinct very soon. The idea that the youngest generation, raised by many generations to be dismissive or even outright hostile to fertility will, by some miracle, be the ones who say "no, I will have 2.1 children" is silly. And because it's falling fertility and not just "stable but below replacement fertility", demographic collapse comes quickly. and extinction within 200 years.
If you're worried about immortality, then the good news is we don't even have enough time to figure it out.
They couldn't. They're not exactly wishy-washy, they happen to be one of the most authoritarian regimes on this planet, even if they understand the benefits of a velvet glove. If they couldn't raise it, why would you think anyone else can?
And we're already at sub-replacement. The same people who make the next generation of people (as small as it is), are the ones who also raise that generation and instill their values in them. What does having one child teach that child about their parents' values? It teaches them that, at most, they should have just one. Or maybe even that they should have none at all. Not only is this a self-reinforcing problem, it accelerates. You don't have a few decades to solve this.
Nor will "evolution" fix it as the other guy said. While some still have large families, it's not just the parents' own values that are instilled, but that of our society collectively. The many who have few or no children have far greater influence on the children of those families, than those families have on everyone else.
Population is counter-intuitive, and none of you understand it.
For example, a war would kill lots of young healthy soldiers, leaving even fewer people in to care for the old, young, and infirm.
I’m guessing Ukrainian and Russian dependency ratios are getting worse and worse.
Evolutionary processes will prevent total extinction, even if "the next generation is raised" one way, new trends will emerge.
A population of few thousand is enough for humanity to come back. Even if population dropped 50% every 30 years, it's still 500 years to get down that low. And we haven't even started trending downward yet.
The earth currently has billions more people than are necessary to keep humanity going; there's plenty of slack in the current system. Yes societies will have to evolve if birthrates stay low for a while, but they always have to evolve and if populations ever did drop precipitously low people already know how to make more babies.