Our bodies need to perform different roles as we age and mature. We’d also need different sets of skills depending on our current developmental phase. It would make sense for our brains to change too, that the developmental path of our brain is planned to make it undergo changes that’d make it more adapted to the tasks it’ll have to tackle over different developmental phases.
It’d make sense for our brain to be more fine tuned for grabbing resources from family when we’re a kid, to grow as fast as possible, then better tuned to search for sexual partners once we’re getting mature, and lastly, more fine tuned to take care of our kids once we got them.
And if there’s a mechanism which makes our brain undergo developmental changes along a pre-planned path, then we might also expect that past the age at which we reproduce, there’d be less and less evolutionary pressure to shape that developmental trajectory.
I don’t think either that evolution would have much of a reason to cleanly engineer a stable end-state after which development just entirely stops, and leaves you with a well-adjusted, perfectly functional body or brain. That may not be a trivial task after all.
To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing quite like SIAI or lesswrong in continental western Europe. People aren’t into AI as much as in the US, and if there’s rationality thinking being done, it’s mostly traditional rationality, skepticism, etc.
Atheism can score high in many countries, as a rule of thumb countries to the north are more atheistic, those to the south (Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc.) are more religious.
There are a few scattered transhumanist as well as a few life-extension organizations, which are loosely starting to cooperate together.
The European commission itself started prioritizing small-scale healthy life extension a year or two ago. This could help focus more people on such questions in the years to come.