Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

Actually, I think the greatest risk in a society of immortals would be murder. Everyone would constantly be eyeing each other as a potential resource to allow themselves to reproduce.

The world is not the only planet in the Universe.

This is not immortality, this is eternal youth, until you die for some reason (war, an accident, suicide, whatever) .

Thermal engines were a radical change in society, it let us do things that were impossible before, like flying. There will be new changes in the world, like nuclear fusion, DNA editing(with actual understanding of it not like we do today), symbiosis between man and machine with high bandwidth communication...

With nuclear fusion you could irrigate the Sahara dessert, you could irrigate Australia. Take Google Earth and look how big those places are. Those places are bigger than Europe and the USA.

With nuclear fusion you could LED grow plants without pesticides and almost without using water(you recycle it).

You can grow food or live in space, mine asteroids and planets like Saturn( do you know how big is Saturn?).

Immortality will force people to reconsider the consumption of non renewable resources

Paper:

http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31664-6

Caveats:

1) Doing anything to the aging of cells in culture has next to nothing to do with what goes on inside aging tissues, or where it does that is heavily dependent on the details. The article doesn't tell you enough to decide, so you should look at the paper.

2) Doing anything that attenuates the effects of an accelerated aging phenotype, actually usually a DNA repair disorder, almost always has nothing to do with aging as it happens in normal individuals. You can hit mice with hammers, and then evaluate the effects of a hammer-blocking cage, but that doesn't tell you anything about aging - and for exactly the same reasons. This is generally true except when it is isn't, and that depends on the fine details. Again, go look at the paper.

3) The interesting experiment is the one in which pluripotency-inducing factors are upregulated in a normal mouse, but temporarily. This is the thing that people have looked at in the past and said, well, turning on widespread transformation of somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells sounds like a really bad idea. Cancer seems the likely outcome, and that has in fact been demonstrated in a couple of studies in mice, but there is also the point that your central nervous system rather relies upon maintaining the fine structure it has established in many cases, such as data stored in the brain. Running in and randomly reprogramming any CNS cells that take up the vector or the pluripotency signals seems like a bad idea on the face of it.

So on the whole it is fascinating that a good outcome was produced in the normal mice, analogous to the sort of thing that has been produced via stem cell transplants and telomerase gene therapies. But I'd still want to see what happens to the mice over the long term after that, and would expect cancer.

Old people are expensive. If the people on Medicare were as healthy as the average 50-year-old, it would basically solve Medicare's long-term funding problem. If it cost, say, $100K every 10 years, it'd be worthwhile to give it to everyone for free.

Edit: checked numbers. There are about 40 million Americans 65 or older, and Medicare spends about $600 billion/year, for average annual spending of $15K each.