On the benefit side, we not only keep people from dying a slow, withering death, we also make pension schemes obsolete, which means more money being used by consumers to buy stuff instead of supporting pensioners. Medical costs are gonna fall like a rock as aging diseases ain't a thing anymore. The only expense is the Youth Treatment, which is probably fairly cheap in comparison.
Point of order: Eternal Youth would probably make pension systems more relevant, and that's not a bad thing, because frankly thanks to VIs, PI's improved VIs, and, hopefully soon, PI's AIs, there's just not going to be much useful work for the average, non-exceptional person to do. As I see it, once we're done implementing P&P skills, Eternal Youth, and Blue Box AIs, the average human's life will eventually be:
1) Be born into a family that will always be able to support having children, because the state can and will pay people to have children (because otherwise the birth rate will fall so much as to be unsustainable; this is already happening in every industrialized nation and appears to be a trend that increases as the wealth level of the nation increases; the only way to stop it seems to be to pay people to have and raise kids).
2) Spend the first 20-25 years of your life in socialization training and various schools/apprenticeship programs. Getting an education is much easier and less boring, and other than the required "core" courses like math, science, history, communications skills, government and law, medicine, and computer science you can basically follow whatever rabbit hole you want in terms of rare or specialized fields.
3) For the next 80-100 or so years, receive a guaranteed wage of 50,000 cr/year, 5% of which goes by default into a retirement account. If you want more than that, for whatever reason, then you get a job, start a business, etc, but that wage will stay with you as a safety net, so you can take whatever risks you want and not have to worry about starving or being homeless, ever.
4) After about 80-100 years, your retirement account will have roughly 2.5-10 million cr in it (ah, the wonders of compound interest!), more than enough to live off the interest for the rest of eternity.
I doubt it. While sure a 10 year journey isn't much to an Asari having a crew makes the whole thing incredibly more difficult, dangerous, and expensive.
Because now you have to carry supplies (air/water/food), a larger reactor and hydrogen supply to support the increased power demand, manufacturing equipment to replace damaged parts since failure now means death, and a whole bunch of other stuff I'm likely not even thinking of. Then on top of all that you need a larger thrusters and FTL Drive as well as more reaction mass for those thrusters to account for all that extra mass.
Multi-year space missions are hard. It's the reason why IRL we haven't gone to Mars yet after all.
I'm very skeptical that the Council would ever allow an unmaned drone to open a Primary Relay, ever, given their "Shoot first, ask questions never" approach to people opening relays. What's more likely is that they send a bunch of drones to do the preliminary report, as well as a small handful of comm buoys so they can get those reports instantly when they arrive. If conditions seem favorable, then they send a manned mission to do
another survey, only after which they'd consider opening the relay.
