[Writing Prompt] By the year 3000, immortality poses some problems (Patreon)

This was just something I threw together while in a coffee shop.  I'm not sure if I like it, honestly.  I feel like there's some more worldbuilding hidden here that I could have tapped into, but I mostly just wanted to give a reply to a prompt that seemed to be pushing a grimdark dystopia with something that was a bit less awful.

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The  world has changed dramatically since life became longer.  You would  think that people would value their own lives a lot less when they had  so much extra time, but it turns out, it's kind of the opposite.   Humans, for all that we have this uncurling terror in our guts to even  think about our own deaths, are still mostly accepting of our lifespans.   So when someone just comes and hands us an extra millennia or two,  well, suddenly?  Suddenly our 'life' is a lot longer, and a lot more  valuable than expected.

Shit like climate change gets solved in a hurry when the fuckers  who'd planned to die before it was a problem suddenly can't build towers  tall enough to escape the rising sea levels.  

Anyway, we built ourselves a utopia.  Sounds simple when I say it  like that, in one sentence with all the decades of hard work stripped  out, but really, at the end of the day, that's what it was.  Just hard  work.  Not easy, but simple? I think I could call it simple without  lying too much.

We want to trust each other.  We want to be friends, to know people  all over the world, to see the awesome sights and share the quirks of  our cultures.  Once people have the time to really learn who they are,  to transcend our impulsive anger? Well, then it gets a lot simpler to  start to make a humanity we can all be proud of.

A post scarcity world.  No starvation or suffering.  No war.  I won't lie and say there's no  hate, but there's a damn sight less of it than when we started.   There's less of us, too.  Us Originals.  Immortality doesn't mean  invincibility, and the world can still be a hard place.  It's not so  pacified as to not be a place too boring to be worth living in yet.  But  there's no more children dying in their cribs.

There's still children, though.

That was a topic of some... let's call it 'spirited'... debate.  Are children ethical when we're suddenly at way, way  above replacement rate for the population?  Aren't we going to run out  of space?  Isn't this going to just kill the planet again?

Kinda, yeah.  But also kinda not.  That question, out of everything  I've seen in my few hundred years of blessed life, is probably the most  complex one out there.

We're filling more space, but we're building smarter.  Our cities are  masterpieces of integration of nature and urbanization.  Arcologies  that house millions in perfect harmony but take up only the space of a  dozen city blocks.  Underground and underwater habitats.  Space  stations.  The outworld colonies are on hold until we can crack the  speed of light, but we're working on it.  We're also automating stuff  like farming; less space, more output, all that good stuff.

Need less, use less, make the most of what we have.

Of course, we're immortal.  So if we let ourselves go unchecked,  we'll eventually turn the planet into one massive human-machine.  And  that's... weird.  Ethically, and emotionally.  It's weird to have lived  so long that the changes to our selves start to seem so alien from what  we were born into.

But the birth rate is dropping.  Turns out, having kids is cultural,  too.  We'd seen it before; developed societies have fewer children as  the infant mortality rate goes down, and manual labor is less depended  upon for basic survival.  Kinda happened to us, too, though it took a  few generations to adapt.

Kids are a lot rarer, now.  We have Parent Cities, where people  specifically move to, to have a place to raise their children alongside  other kids, other families.  Only a few of them, but they're just as  amazing as everything else we've built.  I even worked on one of them  myself.

There's twenty nine billion humans on earth and the space around it.   Overpopulation is a creeping specter, but those are something that  humanity has experience dealing with.  Fossil fuels, global warming,  the helium crisis, the radio destabilization... we've got looming  specters on lock.

And with twenty billion immortals?

There's not a problem in the universe we won't eventually break to our will.