Fear of death, among various other fears, sorrows, frustrations, etc. Death isn't bad. Unpleasant feelings are bad. Unpleasant feelings are the source of anything in the universe that's supposedly bad.
The people at Lesswrong, a site run by a guy who shares your obsession with immortality and is actually a good enough writer to have developed a like-minded cult of personality around himself, like to say
the map is not the territory. The way I see it, "bad" isn't part of the territory; it's just a label that we put on certain parts of the map that make us feel bad because of our evolved neural wiring. I'm what Lesswrong would call a proponent of
wireheading. I think that the things we claim to value, like food, art, reproduction, being alive, etc., are just proxies for the feelings those things produce. If today's crude antidepressants and anxiolytics can be used to mitigate unpleasant feelings, then by the same token that you expect some miraculous future technology to conquer death, I think it's just as feasible (if not much much more so) that technological advancements could allow us to conquer unpleasant feelings.
I gave up on people on Talk Freethought a long time ago. I failed; I admit it.
What do you hope to achieve in this discussion, then?
The verdict is in: nobody wants to die, and nobody is going to do anything about it. I just have to accept this bewildering fact.
Everybody is already doing something about it. They're coping with it. The fact isn't bewildering in itself; it's your failure to understand other people that causes you to feel bewilderment at it. You don't have to just accept it. You could try to understand where people are coming from without dismissing them for being irrational. People are irrational, of course, but that doesn't mean they're unpredictable, inexplicable, or uncontrollable. Irrationality is something you can work with, if you figure out the patterns. Politicians, religious leaders, advertisers, writers, actors, directors, lawyers, etc. can work with people's irrationality instead of just complaining about it, and harness it to get what they want.
You seem pretty focused on the hard science, but your biggest obstacle(assuming what you want to achieve is even physically possible) is that not enough people are on your side. Get enough people working hard enough on the technical issues, and throwing enough money and policy decisions at the goal, and sooner or later, they'll be solved.
But getting enough people to work on the technical issues is not something you want to leave to chance. A disaster could destroy or seriously cripple human civilization while you're waiting for people to come around to your way of thinking. I mean, which advances faster-- the technology to save lives, or the technology to end lives? Do we have the ability yet to push a button and
heal half a million people on the other side of the world? Is there as much demand for that as there is for the ability to push a button and kill those people?
So the way I see it, maybe you, or more people like you, should be studying marketing, PR, politics, etc.-- applied social science. More people like you should be putting serious effort into learning how to understand and engage people on an emotional level, not merely a logical level.
