@anaisnein said:                                                                                               just give me the pathetically incremental extra couple of decades to be going on with first and then we can worry about the big shit after that, k?              

I sympathize.  I want those extra decades of lifespan as much as anyone, I assure you.  I changed career tracks, once upon a time, because the people surrounding me were too anti-transhumanist and anti-life-extension for me to deal with it.  But the needs of human psychology actually do matter here.

(And, in particular, it bugs me to see rationalist-types being hypocritical in a way that grows out of “we are going to ignore the counterintuitive high-level long-term implications of our philosophy, because can’t we just be reasonable and practical about this?”  There is something unpleasantly wrong about that.  But even if we are just being practical…)

I see so much sneering triumphalism about this issue.  I see so much “coming to terms with your mortality is for losers, the only acceptable high-status response to death is to kick it in the ass.”  Which is, on a practical level is deeply unkind to all the people alive right now who are in fact almost certainly going to die someday – whatever normative spin you want to put on that fact – and who would be very wise to learn how to face down that truth and accept it, in a way that doesn’t leave them miserable and wretched and terrified.

But maybe there’s an argument that all the sneering and all the pain would be worth it, in the end, if having a triumphalist mindset helped us to actually conquer death for good.           

So it’s worth pointing out that conquering death for good is not on the table, and that if our current understanding of the universe is accurate, transhumans with stupendously-long and stupendously-excellent lives are going to need memento mori even more than we do now.