Okay, so I've started harping on about how 'great' everything is these days. I've realised that there's a lot of detail to my thinking on this subject so I will now attempt to clarify.

"Things are better than they've ever been in the whole of history" I keep saying.

More of us live, and live longer than ever before. I like to think that the net wisdom of our species is raised as wisdom is allowed to develop and mature in an individual over an increasing number of decades.

However, we are still irresponsible with our approach to extending life. We need to be reminded about the importance of death.

Life needs death. The mechanism of evolution is death's continual weeding process. Creativity requires death. Perhaps I am blasé about dealing with death because of my own experiences - perhaps this is a difficult idea for most people to accept.

I would like to live forever, I'll admit this. Not as a vegetable in a jar, but continually retaining all the strength of my prime years. (I should mention that I have no doubts about science being able to sooner or later accomplish this goal - no law of physics prohibits this.) Could is my inability to casually accept my own death hypocritical? I am not sure. Perhaps the immortal lives through more localised change. He lets parts of himself die as new parts are created. We are fixated on the clumsy type of death required by DNA's replication process, but death can be a far subtler process than the death of a body through decapitation or decay.

Anyway - that's a little part of my view on the first metric I have chosen by which to measure the success of our species. More to come...