Isn't our willingness to take risks connected with our inevitable, eventual, death? Without a guaranteed eventual death few would take risks without massive compensation.
Consider the need in human societies for revolution. With a massively long lifespan, no one will revolt when the need arises, due to risk of death. Leading to a pretty shitty state with no way out.
20 year olds are the ones that go to war though, aren't they? And yet they have the most life ahead of them.
Of course, everything looks bad if you only look at the negative aspects of it. Certainly risks would change. Life does seem like it would get more valuable. However, on the positives, we'd see huge technological progress - experts could be experts in their field for hundreds of years, rather than working for a short window and having to publish their results and hope that the next guy can pick it up and take it a few steps further.
So I feel that we'd end up in a society that is quite different than current human society - with plenty of their own problems. One thing that I do think though is that it would be very wrong to project our morality on this and accuse it of screwing up the natural order of things. Aging is just another disease.
There's a great short story along these lines from Larry Niven. I can't remember the name or the collection, but maybe somebody else will.
A spaceport bar's noise suppression system is on the fritz, so the human bartender keeps hearing random bits from a conversation somewhere in the bar. One alien, a DNA-based one, has come to sell their life-extension technology. The other points out innovative things that humans are doing, and speculates that it's related to the short lifespan. Eventually, the DNA-based alien agrees and decides to wait a few human generations just to see what we do next. The bartender looks around desperately trying to figure out which of the many tables it was, to no avail.
It's a commonplace among artists that constraints force creativity. A small example is the 6-word-stories thing [1]. An example more relevant to your comment is Kevin Kelly's life clock [2]. If you talk to people who have cheated death, you might expect them to talk about being more careful. But the ones I know all talk about being reminded to live fully while we can.
> Isn't our willingness to take risks connected with our inevitable, eventual, death?
Is it? Does anybody who takes risks really do any kind of mental calculations involving expected lifespan?
I might be too young, but having 60+ years in front of me feels almost like being immortal, and I have to constantly remind myself my time is short. But personally, I have never ever had the issues of death and short lifespan crossing my mind when thinking about taking risks or doing something creative.
Consider the need in human societies for revolution. With a massively long lifespan, no one will revolt when the need arises, due to risk of death. Leading to a pretty shitty state with no way out.