[Mc_Big_G]

Immortality is not just another technological advancement. It entrenches power permanently and creates a world of slaves who will never escape the grip of their masters. Democracy would permanently die and the rule of law would be whatever the overlords decide. Imagine an immortal Caligula. Do you want Elmo to be your permanent master, for example?

[southernplaces7]

Dude, let's not jump the gun here. If a fear of an entrenched immortal oligarchy is your justification for the idea of forbidding billionaires from funding medical innovations that extend life and health-span, you're being a huge bit too optimistic, to the point of absurdity.

We'll be struggling, failing and incrementally advancing with medical advancements that merely stave off the vast hellscape of age-related and degenerative diseases for a moderately longer healthy life long, long before we discover a way to enable a reality of immortal billionaires.

That aside, even if we did, I have my massive doubts about the inevitability of all you predict. The vast range of technologies already available to billionaires today would make a medieval king or Roman emperor salivate at having them with dreams of total control, yet if anything, the technologies they do have (and which states have), have only increased the complexity and Swiss cheese nature of the modern world in the direction of also expanding basic freedoms and instabilities of power of all kinds for more people than ever, often directly at the cost of former power monopolies.

What's more, right now, both massively wealthy states and huge corporations administer much of what happens in the world, and both could arguably claim to have much more power, resources and even in a certain way near immortality than any hypothetical immortal billioniare oligarch as per your prediction, yet hysterics aside, I don't see either totally killing off democracy at all.

People still protect, governments still change and fall, big companies still go bankrupt or lose market share, and no one power center is nearly as in charge as some paint it to be. If it were, you wouldn't be predicting, you'd be speaking in the present tense perhaps.

Either way, the groundwork of you fear already exists in a fashion, and it's not creating quite the total boogeyman you're trying to depict.

Don't let sci fi guide your perception too much, reality is so much more complex and counterbalanced all over the place.