they can afford the initial release. sure. but lets not pretend the world best and brightest wont attempt day and night to steal the information needed to make it public.

the dam will break, eventually.

Nah, it'll be expensive but just barely affordable for a decent size of the population.

The retirement age will be increased to 150.

I loved the first season of this show. Second season was rough.

Let’s see…. Ultra wealthy exchanging their blood for the blood of young people to live longer, and in the meantime US life expectancy dropping… yep. Checks out

But governments will see a way to turn expensive retirees (in civilized countries that look after them) into taxpayers again. So, long lived slaves...

We're kinda already in that situation. The wealthy can afford medical treatments and life prolonging procedures, as well as healthier food and circumstances. They already live longer while we suffer and die.

Would you like to build a better future?

Will do!

It will be for the worst people you know.

And if it takes fresh organs to pull off, selling your own organs for cash will suddenly become legal.

Yet.

Good eye

that's too pessimistic. I got a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted in my chest, I'm on the transplant list waiting for a new heart and I've taken like 10 normal heart meds and some that weren't even fully released. without that I would've been dead at 15

I'm so happy for you! Today you learn the world has gotten better! https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

Just improved hygiene and treatments for babies have essentially doubled humanities life expectancy in the last century. But even restricting to older cohorts (ie, assuming you live to 70, how many more years?), life spans have grown. The vast majority of people are not wealthy, so these gains are very much seen by the poorer folks.

That’s not true look at Loma Linda your regular people live up to 86 years, longer than any regular sized state.

The maximum age hasn’t changed because its increase is irrelevant for the sake of trait propagation. In fact, fast breeding population with regular turnaround can deal with environmental fluctuations way better than a long living one.

There’s nothing inherent to multicellular biology that prevents immortality. Every problem preventing us from living longer and healthier has been solved by evolution somewhere else. Often in a way that’s insultingly similar to how our bodies already work. Hell, good chunk of solutions is present in our genome never to be expressed!

But then evolution is all about populations of borderline inadequate survivors. Turns out, being depressed, hurting, and cancerous in your fifties is just good enough.

It's not an inherent property of matter. The fact that two 30 years old can make a zero year old baby means it's strictly a software issue.

It’s a hypothetical scenario. Putin and Xi Jinping allegedly discussed about this today.

Good leaders usually step down on their own anyway so a longer lifespan won’t change much

If anything, I might expect that if life expectancy increased enough, that in itself might create some pause for authoritarian leaders. Consider that it is rather rare for the dictator type to peacefully retire, they usually either die of some age/disease related cause, or they get overthrown in some way (rebellions, coups etc.) Its probably not possible to entirely eliminate the risk that such a thing will happen, so long as you actually require people to do things somewhere in your system. As such, there should be a theoretical amount of time before which it becomes statistically likely that a leader will be overthrown, and when overthrown, theres a high risk of death, or at least a lot of unpleasantness (imprisonment, exile with loss of quality of life).

What happens if you manage to extend lifespans enough that the average lifespan, especially for someone with excellent health monitoring like a world leader, significantly exceeds the span of time in which it can be expected an overthrow will occur? At that point, anyone that becomes a dictator is essentially signing up for a violent end and a life shorter than it could be if they didnt earn the ire of a country's population (one that either will have more time to build up resentments if they have access to the tech too, or who will each feel personally doomed to an early death and therefore resentful if they dont).

I dont expect that this kind of thinking would mean no more authoritarians, I suspect greed for power is a bit too strong an impulse for them all to limit themselves in their own long term interest, but it might prevent some of them, and it isnt like not having longer lifespans prevents a new generation of evil world leaders from simply taking the place of the old.