I wonder why people like us who talk about wanting to "live forever" don't think more seriously about what that could mean in terms of overturning our current assumptions and background conditions, if our lives stretch into centuries and then into mlllennia.

I started to think about this based on something Mike Darwin wrote on his blog a few years back:

http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/04/19/cryonics-nanotechnology-and-transhumanism-utopia-then-and-now/index.html

Many years ago, when I was a teenager, Curtis Henderson was driving us out of Sayville to go the Cryo-Span facility, and I said something that irritated him – really set him off on a tear. Beverly (Gillian Cumings) had just died, and it had become clear that she was not going to get frozen, and I was moaning about it, crying about it in fact, and this is what he said to me: “You wanna live forever kid? You really wanna live forever?! Well, then you better be ready to go through a lot more of this – ’cause this ain’t nothin. Ever been burned all over, or had your hand squashed in a machine? Well get prepared for it, because you’re gonna experience that, and a lot more that’s worse than either you or me can imagine. Ever lost your girlfriend or you wife, or your mother or your father, or your best friend? Well, you’re gonna loose ‘em, and if you live long enough, really, really long enough, you’re gonna lose everybody; and then you’ll lose ‘em over and over again. Even if they don’t die, you’ll lose ‘em, so be prepared. You see all this here; them boats, this street, that ocean, that sun in that sky? You’re gonna lose ‘em all! The more you go on, the more you’ll leave behind, so I’m telling you here and now, you’d best be damn certain about this living forever thing, because it’s gonna be every bit as much Hell as it Heaven.”

So, for example, I've started to question the assumption that the social ideology we've inherited from the Enlightenment - a recent intellectual movement only 300 years old - has gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition. Now I wouldn't assume anything of the sort, and I can see the likelihood of Neoreactionary future societies. Even if we don't get that way because of the inherent weaknesses of the Enlightenment Project itself, we could stumble into them regardless through a drunkard's walk.

I also like to ask christians why their religion can't disappear eventually, and I don't mean through that ridiculous rapture belief some simple-minded evangelicals hold. From the perspective of people living ten thousand years from now, assuming humans survive, their dominant world religion might have started sometime between now and then, and if knowledge of christianity still exists then, only a few academic specialists would know anything about it from fragmentary evidence.

In practical terms, this perspective helps me to disengage from current events that don't matter much in the long run. At my current age (55), for example, American Presidents come and go subjectively quickly, so I tend to ignore them as much as possible compared with longer-term trends like the demographic social engineering in the U.S. that bloggers like Steve Sailer write about. I also tend to ignore geek fads that will allegedly "change everything," like Bitcoin, 3D printing and seasteading, until the beta testers beat the hell out of these innovations and we can get a more realistic view of what they can do despite what the hype and propaganda say.

So what do you think about the conditions of human life over, say, the next 300 years?