I'm torn about this, I agree that in a world without death we'd view it as meaningless and tragic. I worry about what our path there would look like. Let's say

I'm torn about this, I agree that in a world without death we'd view it as meaningless and tragic. I worry about what our path there would look like. Let's say we find a way to eliminate death or aging. It's expensive at first so only the very wealthy can afford it. Now you have a set of rich people in positions of control that won't age out of them. They'll live forever so they'll continue amassing wealth, if they don't give up control then a new generation with new ways of thinking about the world won't be able to take the helm. I mean, lots of people aren't able to really internalize new ideas in their own current lifetimes, let alone these hypothetically endless ones. The people in control get wealthier, inequality increases, new ideas have a harder time taking hold. Even if this life extension eventually trickles down to the rest of humanity would they ever be able to catch up? Would they want to live an eternal life subjugated by the elite? Also, assuming this life extension is biological and not digital all of a sudden we have lots of people. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that so hopefully we figure out a way to move excess people to other planets/space colonies, but what if that takes too much time? What if we increase the number of people faster than we can solve the scaling problems? Food, energy, waste, ways of transporting these excess people elsewhere. If we don't solve all of them we're talking about periods of extreme pain and tumult. What happens if we need to put a cap on the number of people while we figure some of them out? Are some people now not allowed to have children? Are some people not allowed to live forever? Who decides the answer to these questions? Hopefully not the ultra rich & powerful class that's formed - that might not be good for the average folks. Anyways, maybe I'm being pessimistic and on the time scales we're talking about we'd figure out reasonable solutions but it still feels like this whole area feels pretty hand-wavy today when I hear people talk about eliminating death. Death, for better or worse is a sort of equalizer, remove it and a lot of the problems that exist today could get worse. This is even putting aside questions about what happens to a hypothetical brain that lives forever. Do we run out of space for new memories? Do we start forgetting things after enough time? If so, is the person we are 500 years from now that can no longer remember it's first 100 years the same person as us today?