If you devote any time at all to serious life extension, that's the first reasonable objection you hear. Assuming of course, that you have the nerve to bring it up in public at all. Thirty years ago it was thought "eccentric". But today's a new day, and more and more people find the idea at least plausible. "O Brave new world that has such people in't!" The animal results were helpful that way.

So, let's say the science is successful. Moral objections have gone away. The therapy (or what have you) is effective and inexpensive. Now what do we do?
Where shall we put all these extra people?

Right about now is when deep thinkers start spinning dystopian scenarios about quality of life, tragedies of the commons, and "Do you really want to live in the cramped, impoverished, polluted world of our children?"

Well, if it's that or death, then yeah, I guess I do. But I'm a cockeyed optimist. I don't think it'll be that bad. But let's just consider this for a moment as a serious objection.

Would you rather be dead than live in a cramped apartment?

Would you rather be dead than live as a vegetarian? Honestly?

Would you rather die than take the bus to work, or breathe smoggy air?

How about long runs in the country? Would you rather die than give them up?
If it's "Yes" to that last question, congratulations. You are probably Bill McKibbin.

Would you rather die than live in Hong Kong or Manhattan for the rest of your life? Well, city life isn't for everyone. What a fate. Sentenced to life in New York City.

Still, I think we can do better than "Soylent Green". I think that the reality will be much more pleasant. So much is changing at once these days, it's hard to keep track. Medical breakthroughs will arrive in company with rising capability in many other fields. Let's look at some of the most basic worries. Will we have enough to eat and drink? Will we have enough power? Will we have enough raw materials to make our "stuff"? Will we have enough space to keep our "stuff" in? Can we avoid grinding up nature, and utterly consuming it? Well, sure, why not?

I've written elsewhere of my Malthusian teen years. To counter my conditioning, I read widely on questions of resource abundance. If we avoid doing something stupid (now I really am scared) we should be okay for a while yet. And if we really work at it, we could postpone any final reckoning by an astoundingly long time. Eventually, some sort of levelling off in growth will have to take place. But this is also true with our currant lifespan. In neither case can we expand forever.

The late Herman Kahn wrote a book back in 1976 called "The Next 200 Years", which I thought was terrific, albeit a little dry. Here's a small excerpt.A more hostile view is exhibited here, but what would you expect from "Dieoff.org"? By all means, feel free to check out the opposing arguments, and they do give Kahn's perspective a fair shake.

The Kahn book is hard to find, and might be fairly decribed as stylistically... neutral. If it were a color it would be beige. I liked it fine, but you might prefer something shorter and more colorful.Like this essay by Jesse Ausubel. I found it oddly charming, not least because it lead me to swissmetro.com. So the Swiss are building a maglev! Who knew? Ordinarily, I would discount it as one more pie in the sky vaporware project, but I have a vast admiration for the Swiss. The STM was developed in Zurich. They just might pull this off, so click around their site, see what they're up to.

So how will we power our shiny populous world? Kahn, in his exhaustive way, covered every option known to him, ranging from the humdrum to the bizarre. I believe he mentioned space solar power as one of the more exotic possibilities. One key point of his book was that we wouldn't need the resources beyond earth to achieve prosperity for all. He was convinced we would eventually use them, but he didn't think they were necessary to his argument. Earth would be enough. Here's a novel version of SSP that doesn't require free floating platforms the size of Manhattan. I think he might have liked it. He might also ask what happens if you beam 10,000 gigawatts worth of separate microwave beams at the same square mile of ground, simultaneously. Probably nothing good. Maybe we should stick with groundbased.

So, there are more than just a few good ideas kicking around that may prove useful. Everybody take a deep breath. Resource exhaustion, long term, is the least of our worries. Engineering may be hard. Not engineering is harder. Considering how "crowded" it will be, we may have to rent our flying cars, instead of owning them outright.