It's a concept I've considered before. What if Flamel had at some point publicly shared the secret of making the Philospher's Stone?

Naturally gold wouldn't be worth much and most or many people would be ageless immortal. But what other effects would there be? I presume without old people dying off conservatism would be more prevalent. There might be a strong divide between younger generations and the older. The divide might border on rebellion at some point as young people feel they're under their elder's yoke. Alternatively more progressive youngsters might need population to overcome their ancestor's views.

I was reminded of the question by this complete shitfic I found a few days ago:

Spoiler

I mean it when I say it's a shitfic. It's harem, has drama rape and the world AU!Harry grew up in is so dark it circles back around to become comic absurdity with students who don't having a stone being treated in an unimaginable way. Hogwarts is basically the hunger games where children are encouraged to kill off their classmates and take their Philosopher's Stone fragments as a form of population control. It's so dysfunctional I can't take them seriously.

The concept is interesting though.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/7232674/chapters/16418791

 

An infinite amount of gold that could be created by anyone would probably lead the wizards to switch to the nonmagical currency, since presumably some of them already have to deal in it.
There's some argument that people would not reproduce if they could simply become immortal. If that were the case, I would imagine the small amount of young people left in the wizarding world would conform to the majority as they aged. Eventually your birth year would be irrelevant. Wizards would simply never die and continue to grow more powerful. There would be those who argued that death was a natural thing, but they would eliminate themselves.

 

There's not going to be an ever increasing small number though, old people will attrition though other means, young people will keep multiplying.

 

Why would they multiply if they could live forever? They don't want to be noticed by the muggles and the wizarding population would grow to dangerously high levels if they kept reproducing without killing each other in masse, and if this proliferation of Stones took place during a period of peace, they would have no reason to kill each other. Boat-rockers like Voldemort would be ignored. The Blood Purists were worried about magic ceasing to exist, but with their lives lasting forever, that concern would be nullified.
I suppose it would be different in the middle of wartime. The Elixir would be used as some kind of battlefield cure-all, but that's only for the people who would be willing to fight when the option of running off and waiting for it all to blow over was a potentially viable one. With both sides almost inevitably having Stones and Elixir, they would both be using killing curses.

 

Humans arent logical, people want kids.

 

I shouldn't need to explain why that line is stupid.

 

Very well, I shall assume you are referring to the fun of the multiplication process. There are ways of replicating that experience without producing children. I would imagine that a few spells exist that provide for even more ways.
In the event that wizards continue to produce children without dying, their world would be exposed to the muggles after a few generations. With the constant expansion of the wizarding population, there would be an exponentially greater amount of interactions between wizards and muggles, making the probability of discovery increasingly certain. With this being the inevitable consequence of producing more children without a constraint on the growth, I went in with the assumption the wizards would try to avoid that. I doubt they would all decide at once to just stop having children, but an absence of mortality, the central fact of the human condition, would logically have ways of changing how society worked.

 

You're completely nuts if you think immortality means people don't want kids. People don't have kids because they want their line to continue when they die.
--- Post automerged ---
Like completely out of touch.

 

Let me rephrase one of your points a little.

What if muggles had abundant access to food?

In a world where muggles had all the food they could ever want, why would they eat and eat and eat. Logically, they can just eat the amount they need based on how much they exercise. I don't see why everyone would become obese.

People want children, even where they shouldn't be having children.

And I don't think your point in exposure naturally follows. Wizards can repel muggles, expand space and redact memories.

 

I have answered your question both on the premise that they would have children and on the premise that they would not have children, or stop having children at some point. If it is certain that the wizards would continue to produce children, then it is certain that the wizarding world would be exposed. For each witch or wizard child that exists anywhere near muggles(some of them go to normal schools as children. Snape must have, and I suspect it's a common thing for half-bloods.), there is an incredibly small chance that a lone child will be caught performing magic(possibly accidental magic) and delivered to a secure location. Consider Lily making flowers bloom and unbloom. What if there are millions of such children doing the same thing every day all over Britain? Perhaps magical parents would be better at keeping the kids in check than the Evans family, but do magical families even know about security cameras? The Internet? The wizarding world could be discovered and the truth could be spread around without their knowledge, making memory charms useless. I would suspect that they have some charm keeping muggles from noticing children going through the bricks to Platform 9 3/4, but if there are 30,000 of them going through in a huge line, the muggles are going to find themselves averting their eyes from a massive area of the train station for a disturbingly long amount of time. Did anyone even know about the time Harry asked a conductor where Platform 9 3/4 was? If so much as two children did that, it would at least be an urban legend. At some point they would have to be constantly memory charming everyone on the island and the rest of the world would be staring confusedly at a country that couldn't function properly. It would make more sense for the wizarding world to give up secrecy, especially if their population had grown to a point where the muggles posed no serious threat to them, if they ever did.

 

Please take your wizards vs muggles garbage to the appropriate thread instead of shitting my thread up, thanks.

 

Alternatively, if the wizarding population gets so large that secrecy becomes a problem due to the volume of interactions with Muggles: double down on secrecy and cut off all contact with Muggles.

Anyway, to return to the OP, I hear that an author did start writing a fic based on the premise that wizards had discovered immortality hundreds of years ago. Maybe check that one out

 

I dunno, I heard that author abandoned that in its crib. What an absolute jackass that guy must be.

 

The Philosopher's Stone doesn't protect against death, it protects against dying from old age.

If someone hits you with a killing curse, y'all still gonna die. You fall off a broom at a weird angle, y'all still might die. It doesn't strengthen/change your body physically at all, and if you look at the new FB movie, it doesn't even keep you from aging. Your body just... keeps working. It's safe to assume that the Philosopher's Stone keeps cancer and other diseases at bay, more so than keeps you young and immortal.

I feel like the world would be more traditionalist (as you would have people with extremely old viewpoints), and more violent. This will be even moreso if the Philospher's Stone kept you from aging as well.

People, hundreds of years old, in young fit bodies is a disaster in the making.

 

I prefer to believe that Flamel created the stone when he was already old and it just stops him getting older. If you started using it at twenty you should always look twenty.