I might need a better title (It has now been updated), but here goes, anyway:
I've been considering this for a while now. Suppose we reach a point where we can live for centuries, maybe even millenia, then how do we balance? Even assuming we're as efficient as possible, there's a limit for how much resources we can have, meaning an artificial limit at the amount of people that could exist at any given moment even if we explore what we can of the galaxy and use any avaliable resource. There would have to be roughly the same rate of births and deaths in a stable population.
How would this be achieved? Somehow limiting lifespan, or children, assuming it's available to a majority? Or would this lead to a genespliced, technologically augmented and essentially immortal elite that the poor, unaugmented ones would have no chance of measuring up to? I'm sorry if this has already been considered, I'm very uneducated on the topic. If it has, could someone maybe link an analysis of the topic of lifespans and the like?
Upvoted after seeing the comment. I thought about downvoting when I came to the thread and thought of doing so for a minute or three. The problem I had was the title's tone of summarizing once and for all what "the consequences of transhumanism are" and then doing the job really really poorly. I have a vague (but declining?) "my tribe"-feeling towards transhumanism and don't like seeing it bashed, or associated with straw-man-like arguments.
I think a title that avoided this inclination could have been something like "Is immortalist demography bleak?" or maybe "I fear very long lives lead to resources crunches and high gini coefficients" or you know... something specific and tentative rather than abstract and final. Basically, good microcontent.
One thing I've just had to get used to is that LWers are bad at voting. Comments I'm proud of are frequently ignored, and comments that I think are cheap tricks frequently get upvoted. Whatever people see first, right after an article will generally get upvoted much more than normal. Its not because quality comes first when sorting by that, because if you look at ancient posts where the sort order of comments is forced to be chronological, the very first comment will frequently have many upvotes even when it is inane.
I've been wondering how to "fix it" but I have nothing concrete. I fear that it is just that "typical internet users" are habituated to clicking on accessible "like" buttons because that's how they interact with facebook, and internet communities inevitably decay absent heroically good site design/management, and so on.
Thank you! That was what I was looking for in a title, I just couldn't seem to find the right words. I'll be editing the title in a minute. I also got pretty intimidated - within 10 minutes I'd lost about a fifth of my total karma and no one would tell me why. That seems to me another weakness - we are too quick to vote and seemingly not good enough at debating some topics and explaining WHY something deserves to be voted up/down.