My favorite response to this view comes from Greg Egan's short story "Border Guards": The tragedians were wrong. They had everything upside-down. Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round. All of its gravitas, all of its significance, was stolen from the things it ended. But the value of life always lay entirely in itself — not in its loss, not in its fragility.
Frankly, I think it's awful when people die. People are so interesting and irreplaceable and wonderful; I don't necessarily think it's an improvement for them to just fall over dead one day and be gone.
Please note that this is a relatively orthodox opinion: Even the Christian church has always felt that death and oblivion were rather horrible, and it thought that humans should live forever, albeit after a bit of debugging so they'd stop being quite so awful to each other. They approved of death only because it was the price of admission to immortality.
Frankly, I think it's awful when people die. People are so interesting and irreplaceable and wonderful; I don't necessarily think it's an improvement for them to just fall over dead one day and be gone.
Please note that this is a relatively orthodox opinion: Even the Christian church has always felt that death and oblivion were rather horrible, and it thought that humans should live forever, albeit after a bit of debugging so they'd stop being quite so awful to each other. They approved of death only because it was the price of admission to immortality.