Immortality

Our bodies are sinking ships, and we like to salvage things from sinking ships before they go down. So we pass on our genes while we're alive, so that they don't go down with the vessel.

I've often wondered what profound changes human immortality would have for society. It is equally valid to wonder what profound changes would have to occur in society for us to figure out how to become immortal; I'll leave that to the science fiction writers.

In the meantime, being immortal would almost certainly reduce our incentive to have kids. As we live longer, we have kids when we're older and older. If we become immortal, we could always throw our genes off the sinking ship that is our bodies another time. Just as consumption goes down where there is deflation, why create a dependent NOW if our ship is not sinking but perhaps even being upgraded?

A great deal of people would do it anyway; it'd be strange, as a 900-year-old parent, to have kids who are 850, 700, 200 and 50 years old respectively. What would the concept of maturity mean when you have 700-year olds being taught by 800-year-olds? What would responsibility mean? Would there still be any social order to speak of? What would progress mean? [A sticky concept even today!] More disturbingly, what would people aim for? Thousand-year plans? Revolutionaries and conservatives alike mightn't be so happy to work towards anything in particular.
My best guess would be that the concept of a family would no longer make sense at all, and that we'd kill ourselves well before we turned 850. I'd also be betting humans wouldn't do so well as a species.
Anyone else like to speculate?