Natasha wrote with one of her incurable but delightful typos: >Most people seem to correlate immortality with never dying >and envision Sartre's "No Exist". That would surely be a terrible fate for an Exist-entialist. :) The most famous line in J-P's play NO EXIT is `Hell is other people.' I like to turn that around and on its side: `Hell is the *same* people.' This might well be one of the fears many folks would hold, faced with the prospect of physical rejuvenation and extended life. What, stuck with those same bloody bastards *for eternity*? Oh no! At the same time, we really do have very powerful drives to sacrifice our own comfort and even security and life itself for our offspring and (up to a point) other people's kids. Given the historical near zero-sum regime of scarcity most humans have lived in, that cashes out into a rather angry insistence that those who *won't* put kids ahead of themselves are bastards who deserve contempt and perhaps punishment. The most frequent objection I hear to the idea of superlongevity is: What about overpopulation', followed by, `Oh, you mean the selfish immortals will refuse to have any new children? How unspeakably *selfish*! And what a bleak future that would be! << shudder> ' It *entirely* misses the point to explain patiently (as many extropians and other transhumanists would do, with or without the patience) that the deathless will ceaselessly enhance and modify their core identities, or clone versions of themselves for life beyond the planet or in upload space. It is very odd that people who go on about evolutionary psychology as much as we do should close our eyes to these bone-deep (or at any rate long culture deep) urges and constraints. In a very real sense, for many people `No Exit' really *does* imply `No Exist'. Damien Broderick