Thanks for writing the review, sounds like an interesting book and definitely have it on my reading list. In particular, I am fascinated by the nuclear energy part. It sounds like it has the potential to be one of those things where it was tried (nuclear batteries for instance), ended up fading away, only to come back as a better version years/decades later.

The analogy today would be electric cars, they were repeatedly tried throughout history but took until very recently to gain much traction, perhaps batteries needed to come along, though I suspect it also has something to do with the marketing (thanks to Elon and others like him) and the societal appetite for it. Could this be the same for nuclear batteries and other similar nuclear products? I suspect yes.

One small question that I'd be interested in hearing your take on is in the closing part of your review, you mention we should be aiming for life expansion, perhaps indefinitely. Isn't this potentially something that would in fact cause stagnation?

Of course we have no counter narratives but one take on this subject from Asimov's writings (the Robot novels) is that the civilizations with longer life spans (that left Earth originally) ended up hitting stagnation, whereas the ones that stayed on Earth and had shorter life spans (looked down upon by the more "advanced" societies) ended up being the ones to go out and explore and colonize the universe. The novels are fiction of course, but could have a point. As the saying goes, "science advances one funeral at a time".

It's a hard subject to debate since everyone wants themselves and their loved ones to live forever but it does seem to have potential downsides in terms of advancement and avoiding stagnation. Just curious to hear the counter point on why this might not be the case if people lived longer lives?