NationStates Jolt Archive

A friend and I were talking on IRC, and he asserted that, if humanity achieved immortality within 20 years, we'd be able to sustain ourseles without expending the earth's resources/landmass long enough to colonize other planets.

What do you think?

Uh.. Don't think so. Our earth is in such shit position at it is..

But a question is, how do we acheive immortality first? Better medicine and food? As it is, only the advanced nations would live forever.

Or unless your talking about genetic engineering.. Probably engineering our DNA's so that we'll continue living.. And maybe we'll turn green and can absorb the suns rays as food! Which we are still probably hundreds of years from doing so.

Ask Allanea, he touted some biologist that claimed we could achieve immortality in the next 20 years.

SPORKINATING BABY!

I just don't see the land area or population being intense enough to require us to grasp off world resource bases and living room that fast.

Whats the point? We can't achieve inmortatality any way so that is a moot point.

Whats the point? We can't achieve inmortatality any way so that is a moot point.

We must continue to strive to achieve immorality until everyone in the world has the same god-given right to be immoral.

Immorality is possible within our lifetimes. Why, if everyone would take responsibility for their own immorality, then immorality could be enjoyed by all instead of just the privileged few. Immorality….

What?

Immortality?

Oh.

Never mind.

I voted yes because, initally at least, only a small portion of the population in the would likely benefit from immortality - specifically those people in the first world where population growth is pretty low, and where there are them most resources to deal with the consequences.

In the third world people would probably keep dying for decades at least. Some sort of worlwide population control measures would have to be enacted eventually, but I'm not sure how easy that would be.

Presumably, if immortality were expensive, then any nation providing it to all its citizens would have to be wealthy and developed enough to have a relatively low population growth rate and the ability to enforce population controls. Obviously, in nations where immortality wasn't provided by the government, only the wealthy would have it anyway, so it wouldn't have a devastating effect on demographics.

If achieving immortality were cheap, I'm guessing things would get pretty bad.