2) as long as immortals don't have more children than mortals, then immortality has a surprisingly small effect on population growth.
The effects I'd be worried about would be the effects of having the majority of the world's wealth and power being held in the hands of immortals and cryogenic trusts.
http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/netflix-altered-carbon-serie...
That's a great future problem to have, and it's the same problem that people brought up at the dawn of the age of antibiotics. Our lives have gotten better for it.
Who knows, maybe by the time immortality is possible, Earth won't be our only home, so population will be less of a problem.
It always looks like that from the "before" side of things.
Our lives have gotten better for it.
That is the historical trend. But it's only a trend, so beware of inductive reasoning. It's not firmly anchored in any kind of mechanism or theory. There are reasons to believe that immortality overlaid on a capitalist free-market system might be horribly dystopian.
More likely, horribly dystopian and utopian all at once. In fact, I'd say the Bay Area is already horribly dystopian and utopian all at once.
There is still no guarantee we won't end up in that situation again.
"A common objection against starting a large-scale biomedical war on aging is the fear of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation). This fear is only exacerbated by the fact that no detailed demographic projections for radical life extension scenario have been conducted so far. This study explores different demographic scenarios and population projections, in order to clarify what could be the demographic consequences of a successful biomedical war on aging. A general conclusion of this study is that population changes are surprisingly slow in their response to a dramatic life extension. For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million). Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time. Thus, even in the case of the most radical life extension scenario, population growth could be relatively slow and may not necessarily lead to overpopulation. Therefore, the real concerns should be placed not on the threat of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation), but rather on such potential obstacles to a success of biomedical war on aging, as scientific, organizational, and financial limitations."
Only 22% per 100 years? That's, like, 7 times over 1000 years, and 50 times over 2000 years. Two millenia is really not that long period when we're talking about immortality.
That's not nearly as much of a problem as people think it would be.
About 60 million people die per year, and about two-thirds of that comes from age-related causes.
Something like 75 million babies are born each year, and that number is gradually but constantly shrinking as standards of living rise and people have fewer children.
The most likely result in a world of reliable anti-aging treatments would be a gradual slowing of new births to a trickle long before the reduced death rate ever became a real logistical problem.
So saying each person gets one child is basically equivalent to saying each couple gets one child, except there's no need to include the concept of a "couple" in the equation.
But the idea is definitely an interesting one. More so if humanity decides to avoid the science fiction cliche of the simulated worlds all being like modern day Earth and actually has them based on any wacky theme you can imagine. You could let people live in a simulated version of the time period they were originally frozen in. Or an historical period that'd just be interesting to experience. Or even a fictional world with fantasy elements, cause there's probably a certain amount of people that would love to live their main existence in the likes of World of Warcraft.