What are you talking about? What medicine has ever been available only to billionaires? Why is this idea so popular?

Amazing! I think life extension is coming sooner than people think. I hope it comes in time for my parents to take advantage of it, too.

Will people please stop the billionaire circlejerk, no medicine has ever been available only to billionaires. Altered Carbon is not a documentary.

They’re not cheap, but we cover the payment with group spending like taxes or insurance because we agree that it’s right for people to have access to them. Sure the system for doing that is pretty fucked up in America right now, but that’s only in comparison to other advanced nations we could easily emulate. From a historical perspective, the access that even the poorest citizens have to lifesaving medicine is crazy good.

There’s absolutely not a chance in hell, at all, even a little bit, that the majority of citizens would permit rich people to hoard literal immortality. It would be completely politically impossible to prevent ordinary people from seizing the reins and distributing the immortality treatment, even if it were really expensive. And I don’t think it will be inherently all that expensive. It will probably be a genetic mod, which has all sorts of theoretical low expense delivery options.

As for all the problems with overpopulation and feeding people etc, immortality affords us the time and opportunity to solve those problems. If you could have the opportunity to either get yourself out of a tight situation through some challenge, or just choose to die, the choice is obvious. Your “solution” to feeding billions of people in the future is to let billions of people die now. That’s not a solution. That’s just a total abdication of any sense of agency or self-preservation or love of humanity.

How is this meme so popular? Why do people turn off their brains and forget about how all technologies start expensive and then get cheaper over time?