Life Styles of the Rich and Immortal on Holovision and Kurzweil's

Well, what can be done about it? Tell rich people they can't spend
their own money? Tell business they aren't allowed to offer for sale
any product or service that average people can't afford? Tell old
people they have to die, because some of us are worried about Immortal
Overlords? Tell the entire Baby Boom Generation, in a couple of
decades, that they aren't allowed to use the new medical technology to
save their own lives? Good luck.

The problem you express is real. The solution is to find ways to
bring the blessings of technology to rest of us, not trying to take it
away from those who already have it. Ask yourself, what upsets me?
Does it bother me more that some are rich, or that many are poor? In
all truth, railing against the rich is easier than helping the poor.
Taking away some billionaire's cislunar cruise won't feed one starving
child in Africa, or anywhere else. Raising taxes on the rich might
pay for some stuff like that, but raising taxes on the rich to the
point where they aren't rich anymore has no support; not among the
rich, not among the middle class, not among the poor. I know that
there are some (most of them not exactly on food stamps themselves,
to be honest) who advocate such things, but their are also those who
advocate legalizing prostitution and marijuana, and they outnumber the
"tax the rich into poverty" crowd. Besides, the more rich people
there are, the more taxes they will pay, even if it isn't at a 95%
rate. Also, who will be able to invest in a powersat company if
nobody has lots of money?

I fully agree that powersats, asteroid mining, and expanding into a
new frontier are much, much more important than a boy-band singer
getting to go to ISS, or some billionaire going around the moon. But
we won't get our powersats, or any of the rest of it, until the world
realizes that you don't have to have the Right Stuff to go into space.
To test untried experimental equipment in space, yes, but not just to
be there. And the world realizes that rich folks have no more Right
Stuff than the rest of us. More money, but not more Right Stuff.
And, we need to bring launch costs down. That takes volume, and it
seems that only passenger travel can provide it. Everything else that
might provide volume has to have CATS first, and CATS has to have
volume. Only pleasure trips provide a market *before* CATS, and oh so
much more market once the meowing starts.

I know that some of the anti-gub'mint types here won't like this, but
longevity *will* be available to the masses, whether the rich give it
away out of the goodness of their hearts, or because the government
gives it away. Telling a whole generation that some social classes
get to live forever (or even just a very long time), while the poor
shmucks without bucks have to sicken and die, has got to be the best
formula for creating chaos that could possibly be imagined. In the
words of Den Valdron: "I cannot imagine anything more calculated to
produce ferocious class schisms than a selectively administered
longevity serum. For the poor and disenfranchised, every gray hair,
every wrinkle, every creak would be a call to revolution. The aging
and deaths of friends, relatives and family would feel like an assault
by the immortal classes."

Valdron is speaking here about the science fictional world of Amtor,
but think about it. The same would be true on Earth. So yes, most of
us will become gods, because it will be too dangerous if only some do.

EGADS! but I seem to be running off at the keyboard today!