The Rich and Powerful Want to Live Forever. What If They Could?

Class power, revolution, and immortal elites

• Many fear that life-extension available only to the rich would harden class divisions and provoke unrest or violent revolution.
• Some argue historical revolutions simply replace one exploitative elite with another, so revolution is no real solution.
• Others stress modern gains (safety nets, labor protections, democracy) came from long struggles against entrenched elites, implying immortality would impede further progress.

Aging, death, and political power

• Several see old age and death as socially beneficial: they force turnover of power and wealth, preventing gerontocracies.
• Others counter that deciding who has “lived long enough” is dangerous; better tools are term limits, mandatory retirement ages, or cognitive tests for office.
• There’s debate over whether older leaders bring wisdom or are simply out of touch in a fast-changing, tech-driven world.

Value of mortality vs desire for immortality

• Some find the idea of living forever inherently bad: it could sap urgency, lead to boredom, and distort human relationships and ecosystems.
• Others strongly want biological immortality and see death as undesirable; they’d delay it as long as possible, regardless of what happens afterward.
• Several comments point out that no one actually knows what death feels like; analogies to pre-birth nonexistence are framed as plausible but still conjectural.

Ethics of sacrificing others for longevity

• Hypothetical scenarios about trading others’ lives for lifespan extensions spark sharp disagreement.
• A minority suggests many people would accept killing “unsaveable” or hated elites to extend their own lives; others call this straightforwardly evil and reject it.
• Animal slaughter is raised as evidence that moral concern is highly contingent and culturally shaped.

Inequality, access, and tech critique

• Some expect longevity tech to start as a privilege of the ultra-wealthy, reinforcing a “techno-feudal” order.
• Others argue most technologies get cheaper over time and that making longevity widely accessible is the only just path.
• There is criticism that today’s ultra-rich are less technically competent than past industrial titans, yet would wield immense extended power.

Fiction, systems, and feasibility

• Multiple science fiction works about practical immortality are cited as thought experiments about stratified, semi-immortal societies.
• One systems-oriented view holds that “forever” is incompatible with complex living systems without runaway maintenance costs, implying true immortality may be structurally unstable.
• Some dismiss the whole discussion as premature, noting current science can’t reliably get humans even to 130 years.