I also feel a lot of the ‘missing out on the great party in 3,000 years’ effect. I want to see what happens when we travel the stars, for example. But I won’t be around to miss out, so potentially I should feel nothing more than what I feel for not being around to see the dinosaurs.

I like your second analogy and I agree with it. Imagine yourself as a micro thread. You’ve terminated, now there’s room for another micro thread.

But it’s hard not to fetishize our own consciousness I am of course, the center of my own universe.

But if we can keep the same processes longer without degradation and upgrade the hardware to support more of them, then maybe we should?