[orionblamblam]

To me, the choice here is obvious. If an "immortality" serum or treatment ever becomes available... and I have no doubt that it will, sooner or later... then it should be made available to any and all who want it.

But make it available *only* on a space station.

And once you get it, you can *never* return to Earth.

On pain of death.

This way, Earth will avoid the unutterable hell that would inevitably follow if some people were immortal and the most weren't... AND it would spur space colonization.

[Arthalion]

Interesting, "space colonization" was the first thing that popped into my mind as well.

With modern technology, we could realistically put colony ships around other stars with 150 to 200 year transit times. We consider this impractical nowadays because nobody is going to take a trip through space that they'll never see the end of, but what if we lived to 1500? When you measure your lifespan in millenia, spending a couple hundred years in a spaceship doesn't sound quite so bad.

I agree though, that people who go this route either need to be ejected off the planet or be sterilized before applying it. One could quite easily spawn 500 children in a two millenia lifespan, and if they go the same route, the entire planet could easily become and unliveable wasteland within a few generations.