Caring about a species continuing is just aesthetics, caring about an individual's wellbeing is ethics.
"First, the most common objection one hears to the prospect of living indefinitely is that immortality would be boring. This is surely a misconception. Once we've gained mastery of our emotions, each moment of our extended lives can be more exhilarating than is even physiologically possible at present. This doesn't mean that quasi-immortals will find everything indiscriminately interesting - any more than a genetic predisposition to lifelong bliss will ensure we'll be uniformly happy. Intellectual discernment can be retained because the functional analogues of boredom and dissatisfaction can be conserved in the form of informational sensitivity to gradients of interest. So perhaps some aspects of quasi-immortal life will merely be fascinating. But our future baseline of mental health can be higher than today's peak experiences."
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
