One of the proposed benefits of life extension is that it will help us long term plan as we will be around in the future, so we will be more likely to care about the long term future of the world if we live longer.
So is this true? Are we rational in this respect or will the mind recoil from thinking in time scales longer than 40-60 years even when we are living hundreds of years, due to biases intrinsic to the mammalian brain.
I don't have time to research this question right now, so I thought I would experiment by throwing out this question to lesswrong and see how people treat it.
I would submit that it's less an issue of the biologically-imposed limit to our life spans than the biologically-imposed limit to our predictive abilities, to the amount of "moving part" data our brains can work with simultaneously. Considering that we only seem to achieve anything like accuracy when predicting events on a very, very small scale of both time and complexity, one might argue that we actually plan in too long a term.