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Comment by pilom | Hacker News Reader

Oh but how much fun is it to contemplate? How does love, war, work, retirement, achievement, purpose, etc. change once you can live forever? Or once some subset of humanity can live forever? If you were nearly immortal how long would you mourn the death of a non-immortal spouse? Would you work an additional 5 years before retirement on the off chance that they figure out how to make you immortal between now and then? How would you treat a person who was immortal because they spent $1 million on a treatment that you couldn't afford? How would that treatment affect inflation? How would immortals affect inflation? There is so much awesome material here for science fiction writers!

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If you were immortal, you could pay off a loan over hundreds of years. Imagine a mortgage of $500K being paid off over 3 years. Suddenly, paying $1M-$2M isn't such a barrier.

It doesn't work that way -- the upper limit is still the monthly interest on the loan. So at 3%, 1M is still 25K per month. Unless I'm missing something? (I believe that there is a classification of interest-only loans currently).

Yes, your math is off. At 3% the annual interest on a $1M loan would be $30-$40K (depending on how the interest is calculated), per year. Monthly, that would only be around $2500-$3500. Principal repayment be +/- $833/month.

> How would you treat a person who was immortal because they spent $1 million on a treatment that you couldn't afford?

I'm thinking of a great Prachett-esque scene where the newly ageless billionaire walks out of the clinic and then slips on a banana (or a soylent puddle) and dies from head trauma.

You could come up with a better ironic hell than that.

They walk outside, get assaulted by an angry mob of people opposed to the rich paying to live forever, and end up with locked-in syndrome for the next thousand years from the head trauma.

I'm a terse man. Take pithy on me.

I fully intend to write this science fiction, but the fact that this COULD be reality (and I think the biology is tractable) should be sparking some sort of policy debate. There is actual capital flowing into these ventures... Speculative fiction is ten years behind where the money is.

As frequently happens, Bruce Sterling was there. Pick up a copy of _Holy Fire_.

Drew Magary beat you to it.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10673576-the-postmortal

(It's a good read)

Pandora's Star is the first book of a series that explores many of these themes as well.

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