> That's the Human-centric way of thinking as described in the essay, where you care about the outcome of the solution - "having a house as shelter".

Yes. Because we have finite lifespans. We do things for a reason. To suggest anything else is pure philosophical wankery.

There isn't a hard physical reason why prolonging lifespan would be impossible. Maybe it's philosophical wankery but I do think these questions have some meaning for us:

1. whether human mind would remain stable on such timescales, or how to alter it

2. whether elven approach to nature as described is feasible and sustainable and how (separately from eternal life considerations)

A single human mind won't do it, but we have a way to record information for successive generations, AND now we also have a method to validate information and tell it apart from myths and superstitions.

So maybe it's time to start thinking long term?

Provided the mechanisms are discernible. Maybe it's possible to do it in thousands of years of pure observation without resorting to hypotheses and experiments. But I doubt human mind is capable of discerning individual variables and relationships behind natural phenomena just so, without seriously disrupting them.

A single human mind won't do it, but now that we have computers and the scientific method, we can build models to study how those variables behave; and reduce intervention to well chosen interventions to check the quality of the model.

But there's the paradox, the more accurate model we have, the more bigger interventions we do. Because we can and because there's too many of us.

Also, our models, no matter how accurate, tend to exhibit butterfly effect and can't account for external influences. These can swamp out minor interventions.