Death from old age stopped, with expansion to new worlds to handle population growth

One of the biggest 'immortality sucks' issues has always been the question of what to do with the new people being born. Without death, a world's limited resources can't keep up with a never ending increase in population.

Imagine a sci-fi future world where we developed some means of stopping old age, and are even better at combating other common causes of death from disease like heart attack and cancer, but where we also have space travel. Could we expand out to colonize new worlds fast enough to keep up with the constant population growth, to avoid the problem of limited resources? Presuming a government was well aware of the over population concern and real effort was placed into making expansion occur?

I'm specifically thinking a world that is still somewhat near-future, with mostly hard science. With terraforming of planets being difficult but possible, and either no FTL drive, or if I add FTL then one that is difficult enough to exploit to make travel between worlds still relatively difficult or costly.

What would a society like this look like? Would we have difficulty encouraging people to leave their current world for a new one? would strict exportation laws be required to keep from overwhelming a planets resources?

What would new colonists to new planets look like? Would a specific age category be more likely to colonize the new worlds?

Most of all, what sort of hassles and problems would a world like this still have to deal with as a side effect of anti-aging technology?

Keep in mind this is not immorality. Death due to accident, murder, even occasional illness that can't be treated, will still occur. Suicide may also be allowed/tolerated; but the point is people will not live forever. I don't think they would reach the point of wishing they could die out of boredom; if nothing else those who were bored could keep taking more insane risks for fun until one of the risks kill them.

edit:

I wanted to add an extra issue I happened to think of after posting this question, just in case it interested anyone. I think there would also be an issue with getting people from earth and it's nearby colonies to newly colonized areas. As more space is colonized the distance (and thus difficulty/expense) from earth to an uncolonized region will increase as more space is colonized. After awhile it may be massively expensive to send people from the center of your colonized space to it's outer region.

This makes the length of time you can go before someone starts to feel the strain of limited resources more limited. Even if there is more then enough uncolonized space to absorb the new population produced by those on the outer regions of colonized space, earth will likely still suffer from population issues because of how prohibitively expensive it can be to ship people all the way along the radius of populated space and out to new unpopulated space.

posted over 9 years ago

dsollen‭

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