Disastrous Consequences of Physical Immortality

[Kanastrous]

Well, imagine what you could get where the methods for oustiage aren't available to the populace.

Something like North Korea, maybe, only Kim and his cronies live forever.

[Forum Troll]

I was thinking more along the lines of a ruling class that will live forever. Vampiric traits aside, a similar situation could exist with humans. There's no shortage of humans who don't want to leave power, and if they don't have to, imagine how things could develop from there?

Any empire has a size limit, and, while lightspeed communications could allow one planetary government, they would not allow a single state to readily control all humanity and its descendents, if some slowly drifted off to other stars. Something that hinders the development of new nations terrestrially is that there is no longer unsettled land, but, in space, you make your own land, your spacestations. You might have one solar system government stopping this with military force, but there's technically more potential for varying forms of government when any nation or group large enough to be mostly self-sufficient can drift a billion kilometers away if they don't like their neighbors.

Any environment that still allowed economic competition between multiple nation-states would at least discourage a nation being ruled forever by the same people unless they remained competent enough to deserve it. The analogy is a 100-year-old established multibillion-dollar corporation versus a new small startup company. The former can have an astronomical starting advantage, but, if it did get too inefficient over the years, it can get outcompeted.

[Forum Troll]

Well, imagine what you could get where the methods for oustiage aren't available to the populace.

Something like North Korea, maybe, only Kim and his cronies live forever.

Such as North Korea is an interesting concern, though I still doubt the regime would last for thousands of years even if Kim was immortal. Some historians talk of hydraulic empires where the state obtains such control over its populace as to preclude internal revolt, yet even those tend to get collapsed eventually from the outside. Assassination, invasion, even economic and societal disruption.

North Korea has fallen more and more behind the rest of the world over the years. They started with about parity of economic GDP per capita to South Korea when Korea was first divided sixty years ago, but now they have only 7% as much per person. If they lasted that long, would they economically keep up with 22nd century or 23rd century military technology, whether anti-artillery lasers, microrobot swarms, or whatever? Would there still be a bunch of North Koreans under the same regime while the sky overhead was filled with space construction and advertisements? I doubt it. Somebody else like China likely takes them over someday if the regime itself doesn't eventually adapt and change first.