Question: can humans be immortal one day?

With the question of whether we could, the question of whether we should be or even if we wanted to be, would also have to be answered. Eliminating death from old age would have huge effects on our use of resources, population, society and more. For example, without death from old age, the population would rise rapidly. We consume too much land, water, food, space and resources as it is. The problem would become far worse if the population exploded due to the abolition of death from old age. To compensate Governments might have to intervene and strictly control fertility, the right to have children, to keep the replacement rate just enough to cover losses due to violance, disease and disaster. That would be a huge intrusion into the most private aspects of people’s lives. Would enforced contraception or sterilisation be accepted by the population as a price worth paying for eternal life?
There are hypotheses that suggest that the structures of states reflect the structures of families – that authoritarianism, social democracy and liberalism stem from the most basic unit of society, the family. The state is just the family on a larger scale. What would happen to state structures if there were no families? No children, no elderly. Persumably the societal structures designed to support or raise these would be the first to go. Would society then crumble from the bottom up? Without its foundational structure in the family, would Government inevitably fall into anarchy or despotism?
Then there’s the question of would we want to? I’m a little over half-way through my career, and, probably, my life. My work doesn’t involve great stress, danger or hard labour but even so I have to admit I’m starting to quite look forward to the day when I can lay down my tools and enjoy a period of relative rest and peace before a I’ve a much longer period of involuntary absolute rest. The idea of death, of laying down our cares and burdens and perhaps the potential for reincarnation in another form or an afterlife free from care is a common and powerful one in human society, it makes our current burdens a little easier to bear. What, then, if there was no prospect of a change or an end, no promise of another life or an afterlife? An eternity of misery and grind. Replacing a life that’s solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short with one that’s solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and unending might not sound like a good deal.
If immortality is possible, perhaps by the time we work out how, we’ll have also worked out how to deal with it, or have come to the realisation we needed to shred the research, destroy the records, encase every trace in concrete and bury the lot at the bottom of a very deep mineshaft.