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

--- In spacesettlers, Lucio de Souza Coelho wrote:

> I, for one, welcome our Immortal Overlords. ;-)

Sure, you say that now. Just wait until they use for cannon fodder in
one of their wars. After al, if you get blown to smitherines, you
only lose a few decades (at most). But one of them would lose an
eternity.

>> 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."

> Well, I am not so sure that a elite of rich people living 700 years
> while the rest of the population continues to live only 70 will bring
> social chaos and stuff. The fact is that rich people *already*
> statistically live more than poor people. We can check that, for
> instance, in the average life expectancy of people in the developed
> countries (some in the over 80 years range) versus the same number
> for developing countries (some of them probably still in the under 60
> years range). Even though there is this already noticeable gap, I
> have never seen terrorists or guerrillas or anything like in poor
> populations fighting against the Long-Lived Infidel Imperialists
> because they are long-lived, but rather because they are either
> infidel or imperialist, or both (in their point of view).

It is one thing if I live in a society where I, and most other people
I am ever going to meet, live to be sixty, while hearing that in a far
away land some people will live one and a third times as long as I
will. I don't have to see it, I might not even believe it, and
anyway, it's only another twenty years.

It is quite another be sixty, know that I have ten or twenty years
left, and to see people in the same city in which I live looking
young, despite having been born in my grandfather's time, a
grandfather I lost ten years ago due to old age, and to know that the
Immortals will still be in the flower of youthful health and vigor
when my darling little granddaughter draws her last gasping breath in
an old folks home. And all because they won't let my grandparents, my
parents, me, my children, or my grandchildren have a treatment that is
known to work. Most of my aunts and uncles are dead, and those who
still live face the same infirmities of age that I do, only more so.
My children will face them about the same time that I draw that last
breath. And there the Immortals sit, forever twenty, as everybody I
have ever loved dies around them, needing only that treatment that
*they* have already partaken of.

GGGGGRRRRR!!!!! Where's my gun? Hell, I'll only be losing a decade
or two if they shoot me, but maybe I'll get to take one of those
ageless bastards with me!

Now take that and multiply it by 85% or so of the population.