Topic: How would world politics change if everyone on earth became immortal? (Read 1000 times)

For sure the collective IQ of humanity would go down. Science is propelled primarily by new blood, it needs fresh ideas, a fresh take on existing theories. It doesn't matter how good you are, spend enough time doing something and you'll eventually get bored. The thing is most people don't even realize it when they're no longer at their peak. People living past 100 years would mean stagnation everywhere within the system but then it probably wouldn't even be noticed.

Would they continue to have children?
If yes, the world would very soon run out of space and resources for all of us.

I've flown into DC several times and from the news and everything you would think there's no land available anywhere yet it's trees for miles and miles.

Exactly.

There are about 3,794,083 square miles (including water) in the U.S. If there are 330,000,000 people in the U.S., you could take all the people, place the whole population into 3-story high, 2000 square ft. apartments, with 4 people to the apartment, and situate the apartments on 6000 square miles of land, with 2/3s of each square mile used for parks, roads, even garden plots. The food and industry would have to be done on the rest of the over 3.5 million square miles, but there would be plenty of room for that.

Now, I am not suggesting to do something like this. But it could be done, using up only a tiny fraction of the land in the States.

The point is, there is so much land out there, that people don't realize what land is really like in the States (world).

Other countries are not the same. Consider Japan, with way more people per square mile, or Siberia with almost nobody per square mile. The earth is gigantic compared with the number of people.

As a side-thought, think about all the people in the big cities that don't realize this. Seems to me that government and big business are "herding" the people into the big cities so that they have the land to themselves.

Or all of these people who are very wise and continue to gain intelligence will make it a whole heck of a lot easier to start living on other planets, travel throughout space, go to other solar systems/galaxies.

People adapt. Look at the major cities. They are able to handle millions of people. There is a lot of empty space on this world and other worlds. Plenty of room to grow.

If this included a method so that politicians could not kill or dismember in war or by other means, at least not in such a way that could keep people from regenerating, politicians and the SuperRich would turn their energies from war to finding a way to practically leave earth and colonize other planets.

If the eternal life only included a natural immortality, but people could still die in war or by mass destruction, then politicians and the SuperRich would do everything they could to increase wars around the world, while, at the same time promoting a practical colonization of space.

The space thing would be only so that they (politicians and the SuperRich) could get away, provided they couldn't find a way to ship people off planet in droves.

Politicians are people. People become politicians. If people lived endlessly in reasonable health, somewhere along the line all people would gain enough political understanding so that they would understand the things that politicians were doing. Because of this, politicians and the SuperRich would need to be careful in the ways that they attempted to do what they were attempting to do... manipulate the people.

Again, if people remained in reasonable health, everyone might retain a good portion of the memory of things that he had learned. People who moved into science realms would have a lot longer to learn more and to formulate new theories and ideas. Science might advance rapidly. The idea of space, galaxy, and intergalactic colonization might not take as long as it would otherwise.

Simple, only the top 1% will be immortal.

Thanks for the clarification, true immortality is a greater unknown that biological immortality, since people can still die one way or the other. (Eventually everyone would die from an accident since time is infinite)

In the case of Biological immortality we may be able to develop technology similar to a nerve gear (Can't think of a reference for it directly sort of like Occultus rift meets sword art online) Where we would not need to have our phyiscal bodies do much just connect it to a system and carry on from there when you want to disconnect from reality.

Of course that's only temporary shift which might last for a long time (by mortal terms), while humanity figures out how to make Faster than light travel to colonize galaxies, immersed virtual reality would also work as a passtime instead of cryogenetics to kill some transit time, they can hang out in VR with other people in real time while heading to their new destination in the physical world.

In terms of politics assuming that we have Li-Fi (current fastest communication network) and use it to turn our technology into the Internet of things where everyone can communicate directly and jump into the network instantly, one outcome would be a decentralized governmental system, assuming we have enough automated processes going a theoreticial outcome is that due to society having a sufficient processing of resources Politics itself is not a needed instiution in its present form because everyone can get things done through mechatronics.

(In a short run scale, this is just everyone participating in society using the internet and virtual conferences in immersed reality)

In that outcome humanity would have a lot of free time to create and innovate and live a life of Philosophy and Science as the ancients like Socrates/Plato and others liked to proclaim.

It would be a field for a lot of innovative ideas, humans as a whole would not be very innovative at all times, but the accumulation of knowledge and information may lead to greater inventions.

Related Side questions

New births and human reproduction would probally involve cloning, or are ovaries preserved and then utilized over time (aka no more periods).

The extension into areas such as entertainment would be interesting as well as how money in the sense works, if its developed to the point where most things can be created with a replicator (Star Trek) then credits would be used rarely. (Pure energy) converted into matter is convinient enough that money would rarely be needed for anything.

By then we would be nearing a Tier 4 to Tier 5 civilization so that's a bit far out. Might need to define a timeline in the OP as to how far out into the future you were thinking.

Too far in the future and we get into a whole new set of fun

Headline:
Humanity discovers Alien races on other planets and were entering into a Holy War with them  
Subheading
Politics is needed again we had a good run

As far as I can see it, where we are now in human evolution is envisioning the futures we cannot create yet at this point in time but in essence developing a framework of goals we can achieve in time for future generations.
(Hence Sci Fi etc get created)

If we become immortal and can make that science fiction a reality ourselves given enough time then things get much more interesting.

Also my Apologies if that one got a bit technical feel free to ask if you want additional referencing points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechatronics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Or in comparable terms
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Technological_Achievement_Tiers

Thanks for your input. I enjoyed the read. Let's say for the sake of discussion that everyone becomes biologically immortal. No one dies of old age anymore. (Technically nobody dies of old age at the moment, but from other factors like disease taking advantage of a weakened immune system)

That is an interesting question but total immortality or biologicial immortalty.
The biggest crime would not be murder but confinement because their immortal.

I'm sure that science would progress at exponential rates since people would not die off, so we would send off all the crazys to colonize the solar system (just like Australia and its criminals)

Politicans would be immortal so not sure how the heck that would work old blood or new blood  George Bush in the same room as a Barack Obama, might get some interesting discussion if we had a 100 presidents a ways into the future all discussing politics.

And no politican assinations so my answer is Crazy things would happen, the monarchy if it was 200 years ago may be strong still and we would have wars but it couldn't be conclusive.
Infinite ISIS soldiers spawing vs immortal soldiers from the US in Iraq.

(Think I just thought up a hollywood movie lol)

I was just watching a TED talk the other day about pro-longing human life and this simple question was brought up in my head.

If every single human alive now suddenly had the ability to live forever, how would this change politics on a global scale? How about in the U.S. specifically? What would be the most "responsible" thing to do? Voluntarily die after you reach a certain age as to not cause a burden on society? How would those in power handle this?