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[Writing Prompt] By the year 3000, immortality poses some problems
🕑 Added 2019-12-05 07:15:55 +0000 UTCThis was just something I threw together while in a coffee shop. I'm not sure if I like it, honestly. I feel like there's some more worldbuilding hidden here that I could have tapped into, but I mostly just wanted to give a reply to a prompt that seemed to be pushing a grimdark dystopia with something that was a bit less awful.
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The world has changed dramatically since life became longer. You would think that people would value their own lives a lot less when they had so much extra time, but it turns out, it's kind of the opposite. Humans, for all that we have this uncurling terror in our guts to even think about our own deaths, are still mostly accepting of our lifespans. So when someone just comes and hands us an extra millennia or two, well, suddenly? Suddenly our 'life' is a lot longer, and a lot more valuable than expected.
Shit like climate change gets solved in a hurry when the fuckers who'd planned to die before it was a problem suddenly can't build towers tall enough to escape the rising sea levels.
Anyway, we built ourselves a utopia. Sounds simple when I say it like that, in one sentence with all the decades of hard work stripped out, but really, at the end of the day, that's what it was. Just hard work. Not easy, but simple? I think I could call it simple without lying too much.
We want to trust each other. We want to be friends, to know people all over the world, to see the awesome sights and share the quirks of our cultures. Once people have the time to really learn who they are, to transcend our impulsive anger? Well, then it gets a lot simpler to start to make a humanity we can all be proud of.
A post scarcity world. No starvation or suffering. No war. I won't lie and say there's no hate, but there's a damn sight less of it than when we started. There's less of us, too. Us Originals. Immortality doesn't mean invincibility, and the world can still be a hard place. It's not so pacified as to not be a place too boring to be worth living in yet. But there's no more children dying in their cribs.
There's still children, though.
That was a topic of some... let's call it 'spirited'... debate. Are children ethical when we're suddenly at way, way above replacement rate for the population? Aren't we going to run out of space? Isn't this going to just kill the planet again?
Kinda, yeah. But also kinda not. That question, out of everything I've seen in my few hundred years of blessed life, is probably the most complex one out there.
We're filling more space, but we're building smarter. Our cities are masterpieces of integration of nature and urbanization. Arcologies that house millions in perfect harmony but take up only the space of a dozen city blocks. Underground and underwater habitats. Space stations. The outworld colonies are on hold until we can crack the speed of light, but we're working on it. We're also automating stuff like farming; less space, more output, all that good stuff.
Need less, use less, make the most of what we have.
Of course, we're immortal. So if we let ourselves go unchecked, we'll eventually turn the planet into one massive human-machine. And that's... weird. Ethically, and emotionally. It's weird to have lived so long that the changes to our selves start to seem so alien from what we were born into.
But the birth rate is dropping. Turns out, having kids is cultural, too. We'd seen it before; developed societies have fewer children as the infant mortality rate goes down, and manual labor is less depended upon for basic survival. Kinda happened to us, too, though it took a few generations to adapt.
Kids are a lot rarer, now. We have Parent Cities, where people specifically move to, to have a place to raise their children alongside other kids, other families. Only a few of them, but they're just as amazing as everything else we've built. I even worked on one of them myself.
There's twenty nine billion humans on earth and the space around it. Overpopulation is a creeping specter, but those are something that humanity has experience dealing with. Fossil fuels, global warming, the helium crisis, the radio destabilization... we've got looming specters on lock.
And with twenty billion immortals?
There's not a problem in the universe we won't eventually break to our will.
