&gt; The Founding Fathers would still be here to settle the arguments about what exactly they meant in this or that amendment when the Supreme Court argues guns or personhood, for instance.<p>Would we really want that?  They would be elevated to an even greater stature than they are now when they&#x27;re dead, greater than what they probably wanted individual men to be in the government they devised[0].  They could become corrupted, or change their minds, so that &quot;what the Founding Fathers wanted&quot; becomes an actual moving target, rather than just something that can appear to change by us debating it.  What&#x27;s the point of writing a law if you plan to indefinitely query the writer on what they &quot;really meant&quot;?  Why have a representative government at all, if the Founding Fathers are so great that they did everything perfectly and they are still around to run it for us?<p>Maybe it&#x27;s better that people die, and all we&#x27;re left with is our memories of them, or written statements of their ideas or accounts of their deeds.  We pick up what we find useful from them, and have the freedom to discard what isn&#x27;t.  Every political movement has a built-in time limit based on the deaths of its most powerful leaders.  Greater diversity in people and thoughts grows, because we don&#x27;t have the luxury of keeping them the same forever.  Many mistakes will die with their creator, and everyone else can move on.<p>Longer lives would amplify the negative effects of human frailties, just as you hope it would amplify the positive effects of smart and noble people.  It&#x27;s possible the Founding Fathers&#x27; ideas were only good for 50-100 years around their lives, and that as rigid adults they would be unable to formulate better versions for the changing world.[1]<p>The world would be a vastly different place without death, or with much longer lives.  I think it&#x27;s naive to simply assume it would be better.  I&#x27;ve explained some reasons it could be worse, but I&#x27;m open to more detailed analysis of why it would be better (for humanity collectively, not just the recipients of longer lives.)<p>[0] Though to be fair, maybe they would have thought differently if they planned to live hundreds, thousands of years.<p>[1] Assuming immortal or very long-lived people become &quot;set in their ways&quot; as we do now.  How much of this is internally self-generated, based on watching our &quot;biological clock&quot; tick away?  To be fair, maybe we would behave differently in this respect if we had more time.  Or, maybe we would just reach peak open-mindedness (or whatever the metric) at 300 years instead of 30.