“[T]he conversion of humans to more or less immortal near-gods” that David Friedman describe[s] as the upside of galloping twenty-first-century scientific advance […] seems rather a dubious plus, and certainly less of one than extinction would be a minus, especially since changing us into “near-gods” could be thought itself a form of extinction rather than a boon because of the discontinuity between a person and a near-god. We think of early hominids as having become extinct rather than as having become us.

Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, New York, 2004, pp. 148-149