Heaven/Life Conundrum

I had dinner with some friends last night and one friend got to talking about "trans-humanism," which, I'll tell you upfront, I am not currently interested in wiki-ing up for my own edification at this moment. The way my friend explained the short version was that it's a way of viewing the future that is concerned with/interested in the implications of the manipulation of the genetic map of human beings and our relationship with machines and how to make peace happen in the future with all of our knowledge about how to monkey with ourselves, and imagines a "post-human" sort of state of society. Neat-o. At one point he said that we are basically the last generation of "regular humans," and it just sounded so freaking true when he said it that I was alarmed. I think we might be. I am in favor of being a regular human as much as possible.

Anyway, as Friend #1 explained, one of the happy potential implications of post-human or trans-humanist society is a state of being or consciousness that is only peaceful and transcends conflict and angst etc. Friend #2 at dinner said this sounded horrible, and that passion and struggle and pain and love and elation are the human experience and he wouldn't want a perfectly happy experience, bleh, no way. And then the question was this: so what do you imagine heaven to be like, Friend #2? Answer? Well, it's basically a peaceful state of consciousness transcending conflict and angst etc. So why wouldn't he want to experience in his earthly body the feeling of his imagined heaven? Why? Because we are so attached to our identities in this turmoil? Wrongly attached? I think Buddha would say so. Buddha says, as I understand it, that we have access to heaven right now and we choose suffering out of ignorance, confusing our delusions and distractions with our "self" - but do we prefer our ignorance (out of ignorance?)? Is the habit of longing for things and clinging to our pain so ingrained that we don't think we even want happiness? Do we think we have to experience earthly turmoil in order to enjoy heaven in a relative way? What is happening here? I'm not sure. It's pretty interesting.