Philip Hart wrote: > I have no desire to be alive hundreds of thousands of years from now - > The best thing would have been never to have been born, to quote Heine. That's a particularly meaningless sense of "best," I think. I've thought a lot about existence, consciousness, self-perception, identity and death. Being, as I am, quite soundly nonreligious, I'm convinced that consciousness and identity cease at death. We go back to exactly as we were before we were born, that is, to mindless nonexistence. Death, as a thing in itself, only has meaning in relation to those left alive. That's one. The other is that I'm reasonably sure that a greatly extended lifespan would not change a human in any really significant way. It would just be life, but without the bit at the very end, the ceasing-to-exist stuff. We do, after all, live in the present. Personally, I think that someone who dislikes the idea of living a very, very long time (essentially forever) is either in a lot of pain or is simply very unimaginative. I've been the former but never the latter. :-) -- Frank Mayhar frank at exit.com http://www.exit.com/ Exit Consulting http://www.gpsclock.com/ http://www.exit.com/blog/frank/