This kind of thing makes me wish that all the rational people could club together and go have a country of their own, and leave the irrational people to reap what they sow.
Of course, in a sense, that has already happened. We call the countries where the irrational people live "the third world".
[Poor institutions that result from certain kinds of cognitive or knowledge deficits or cultures that are not conducive to civilization working very well are, in my opinion, the real reason why these countries have failed to get anywhere. Perhaps not idential with rationality, but certainly related]
There's a much more obvious link between the majority of third world countries, which is that until recently they were colonies. And quite a lot of previously third world countries have "got somewhere", the more appropriate comparison is between these and the countries that have maintained or further declined from their colonial status, not between the victors and losers of the massively economically significant wars of the preceding centuries. And for that matter the various first world countries that failed to "get anywhere" relative ...
Last Wednesday (2010 Dec 01), BBC Radio 4 broadcast a studio discussion on the question: "should we actively try to extend life itself?" The programme can be listened to from the BBC here for one week from broadcast, and is also being repeated tomorrow (Saturday Dec 04) at 22:15 BST. (ETA: not BST, GMT.)
All of the dreadful arguments for why death is good came out. For uninteresting reasons I missed a few minutes here and there, but in what I heard, not one of the speakers on any side of the question said anything like, "This is a no-brainer! Death is evil. Disease is evil. The less of both we have, the better. There is nothing good about death, at all, and all the arguments to the contrary are moral imbecility."
Instead, I heard people saying that work on life extension is disrespectful to the old, that to prolong life would be like prolonging an opera, which has a certain natural size and shape, that the old are wise, so if we make them physically young then old people won't be old, so they won't be wise. Whatever cockeyed argument you can construct by scattering into a Deeply Wise template the words "old", "young", "wise", "decrepit", "healthy", "natural", "unnatural", "boredom", "inevitable", "denial", I heard worse.
If I can bear to listen again to the whole thing just to check I didn't miss anything important, I may write something on their discussion board.