Do you think a world with immortality would be a world without children?

I just thought about this. If at a certain point in the future, immortality was provided to every human on the planet through one of the various methods which it's speculated to be possible, wouldn't child bearing become illegal?

Allowing it would just make overpopulation become an even bigger problem, surely. Not only that, but a single immortal generation would also make it so that no money and resources would have to be used on children.
Just a thought.

A world of immortals would also be a world of madman. The human mind is not really capable of sustaining itself for longer than few hundred years at most I think. After that everyone will lose their sanity.

You'd think we'd have figured out resource usage and long-term sustainability before immortality.

yea i agree.

I think it would either be solved before that and immortality is the next step, or we're scrambling to make our civilization part of the ecosystem to support immortality.

Another option would be to send the excess people to other planets, but that only goes for so long.

Depends - are we talking immortality as in no ageing or illness? Or as in you just can't kill yourself no matter how hard you try?

Eh, if I was immortal I'd just wait until solid interstellar travel, get my own ship, find a back-*** little **** planet and CREATE LIFE AND BE A GOD OF MY OWN WORLD

And then you're going to build them pools and REMOVE THE LADDER WHEN THEY'RE SWIMMING amirite?

Imagine the horrible implications: The sun dies, the earth shatters, you drift through space for millions of millions of years.

I would be a benevolent goddess.

AT FIRST.

D:

Widespread immortality would lead to stagnation.

The more you learn, the harder it gets to shift your perspective and innovate. A world of people set in their ways might not die physically, but it'd die developmentally.

Doesn't boredom drive innovation though? After doing the same stuff for too long people might get innovative again.

This video kinda talks about the same thing:

Read Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth books. The topic of immortality (or close to) figures in heavily with the societies described.

Immortality would mean that all power would concentrate in the hands of select few people forever, even more so than now, because death would not strip that power away and force change in society.

Basically it would be the ultimate form of nepotism.

There was this episode of Fairy Oddparents which explained that there has not been a fairy baby in a thousand years or so because fairies never die. However Cosmo gets pregnant and him and Wanda have the first baby child. You would still need babies however I would think if you are immortal if you are at war a lot like the Elves in LOTR or Eldar in Warhammer 40k

I don't even want to be immortal I guess. If nobody dies then everything will fall to ruins. People will start doing crazy stuff.

I dunno. For me, immortality, or effective immortality (choosing when you life terminate, whether that be to "upload" into a digital consciousness, or simply cease to be) is one of the steps to move humanity toward post-scarcity. We already see birth rates fall drastically in post-industrial societies. Lots of births and large families are predominantly an aspect of pre-industrialism, where you lack sufficient medical care, and need large families to maintain agriculturally driven economies.

As more of the world moves into industrial age economies - and even better, information age economies, we'll hopefully see more moves toward post-scarcity:

• As solar panel prices drop, energy over the next 20 years (predicted) will normalize toward free. Free energy changes a lot of things about how our economies work.
• As energy moves toward free, you'll see clean water become increasingly common. A single industrial grade purifier is expensive, but if the power to operate it becomes free, it means remote communities in low water areas can have permanent access to clean water, improving the overall quality of life where clear water is actually very rare.
• As energy drives toward zero, people in temperate - and even arctic - climates can grow more and more of their own food, driving food costs down, quality of food up. Greenhouses need two things: Energy and clean water.
• 3D Printing is in its infancy. As they get more and more refined, and capable of printing more and more materials, a manufacturing driven consumer goods economy starts to fade.

Ultimately, this all drives toward information and learning becoming the most important commodity. A society that has learning and information as its primary driving force will need to see its economic basics changes rapidly.

Of course, I tend to err on the side of being an optimist, so I guess we'll see how it plays out.

That's a very optimistic assumption I think, but yeah free green energy, no matter through what technology, would be quite a gamechanger.

It is, but not as crazy as some would think:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...oming-era-of-unlimited-and-free-clean-energy/