Life

There are different ways in which we might want more of life. We might want to live on, perhaps forever. We might want to live our lives over again. We might accept our own deaths but want our species to continue indefinitely. Yet each of these involves repetition: the same things, the same lives, the same sorts of lives just go on and on. Won’t these lives be boring, or trivial, or lacking in meaning? Suppose, as is argued here, that these challenges can in part be met. Can they equally be met? Or ought we to prefer some forms of life extension to others? This chapter claims, first, that present lives matter more than future lives, and second, because of this, that we should care more to gain immortality than to avoid extinction