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We live in but a bright second, yet are determined to fill it with darkness unending.
This is the main reason why, if you come across a genie in a lamp, you should probably not wish for immortality. You’re gonna be hellafuckin bored for a loooooooong time.
If you get the chance, ask for omnipotence or to become conscious energy systems or something. You can still choose to experience being a human and having all these experiences, but you will never be stuck, you will never get bored or feel anything related to being mortal if you don’t want.
You could even choose to live a whole lifetime. Maybe billions of lifetimes, each one feeling totally and completely indistinguishable from reality, because it would be reality.
You could be experiencing that right now.
conscious energy systems or something
Like Kevin Spacey? Ew.
I would wish for a life that ends when I want it to. Like the numenoreans had in LoTR
Just one trillion years will do
Ideally our species survives and manages to send ships away from Earth well before that or you’re going to get a really warm summer eventually, followed by sitting on a charred ball of barren, airless rock for the majority of those trillion years.
Why? Are you bored now? If so, why is it a problem? If not, then what’s the problem?
From what I have read on the internet so far, it’s probably best to not wish for anything at all. Just throw it in the deepest ocean to do us all a favour.
Fuck that, I will mess with shit.
“I want all humans to be able to change sex, race or species at will.”
“Give every human being the ability to experience what someone else has experienced by pressing a small button on the top of our heads.”
“Make volcanoes erupt food. Just endless, nutritious food for everyone.”
“Babies are hatched from eggs. I dunno man, seems like it would be silly.”
“No more mosquitoes. Replace them with tiny little airplanes that sometimes circle around you and you have to swat them down like king kong.”
I suppose you could wish for all genies to be instantly annihilated. Maybe toss the GOP in there for good measure.
“Your wish shall be granted.”
genie destroys the universe
“Eh, worth it.”
What about extreme longevity though
Seriously, even halfway through my expected lifespan and I’m already seeing a point where I’ll be ready to get off the ride. Not in terms of self-harm or depression, but just generally as the decades go on it gets less and less enjoyable in a broad sense.
Our brains absorb too much information and memories than our minds were meant to handle. Our emotions become an annoying liability. Our memories reveal themselves to be these tenuous and bizarre amalgamations of experiences and imagination and cannot be trusted, and maybe most annoying of all is seeing people making the same mistakes around you all the time, and tuning you out for being “old” more and more, determined to fall into the same holes and traps that could be easily avoided, but dragging all of society with them over and over. It takes away a lot of the magic of seeing the future.
Even all that would be something manageable, if I had a loooong life I would probably escape from everyone and just read in the woods or something. But holy shit it has to be alongside physical health because by far the worst, worst, worst thing about getting old is the aches and pains and minor irritations that turn into crippling infections, unhealed strains, and degrading senses.
I am quite positive that something happens after you’re dead for an infinity amount of time, no idea what, but it happened before so it stands to reason it may again, and even the slimmest chances become 100% assured after an infinite amount of time.
and what comes after that guys
No, really, this is a fantastic question we should all ask more.
Because on the outside, in terms of space and the physical universe, it will undergo phase transitions, it will experience a long, slow cooling into rarified energy… but those terms “long” and “rarified” are just from our human reference frame. Roger Penrose’s work demonstrated how even a vast, infinite expanding space with tiny particles zooming through it, from other reference frames behaves exactly like the big bang. IE: as the universe cools and expands, it’s still infinitely dense and exploding outward from a different perspective of time and space. It’s perpetual.
That’s one thing. The other thing is this… time passing is meaningless if nobody is there to observe it. You will be dead for an infinite amount of time, you won’t notice a moment of it. But every passing moment you’re dead, the universe is rolling dice. It’s always rolling dice.
Eventually, even if it takes so incredibly long that we don’t have numbers to express it (we actually do) then something is bound to happen again. Eventually these “somethings” will be just right to create a kind of universe, complex information systems, and maybe even a consciousness that can experience it.
It sounds kind of fantastic and overly fanciful, but I am basing this on the evidence that it happened at least once before that we know of.
Wont there also be balls of iron-56 just chilling?
Oh shit that’s true
Want to live forever? Tough. Cos even if you could stop your body from growing old and dying, the planet is going to get too warm and nothing will be able to live on it. Then the sun will expand and destroy the planet. But even if you could leave the planet, theres no where close by to get too that wont have the same problems later on. But even if you could get to another solar system, same thing happens again. But then eventually the universe runs out of hydrogen and its fucked. Or the universe gets spread too thin, and its fucked. Or some fucking quantum field takes a shit, and creates a bubble of true vacuum that expands at the speed of light and everything’s fucked.
Im fucked, youre fucked, the earth is fucked, the solar system is fucked, the galaxy is fucked, the local cluster is fucked, its all just fucked. One way or another. At some point nothing exists except an endless absence of anything. Not even nothing will exist…
And people say there are no good arguments for weekly drug fuelled sex orgies…
This always blows my mind to think that we are here and we are experiencing this life and in the grand scheme of things its so fleeting, but that it all came from somewhere and its all going to die eventually. Could it really be true that there will just be nothing for eternity after this? Or are we not just a random chance in a previous eternity. Can we ever really know or is it all just our best guess?
Its humbling but also makes me feel even more like life is important and should be taken seriously.
You know, I often find myself coming at from the other direction. Trying not to take life too seriously, because after all in the end, nothing really matters. It matter now, of course. You and I sharing a conversation, matters. Well, as much as a conversion on a social media platform can without one or both of us showing our arseholes. But in the end, the very end, when theres no one left for us to have influenced. We… do that blade runner thing in the rain.
When I was a boy I used to stay at my grandmothers a lot. And it was there that I had my first taste of existential dread. She had this painting of a ship, an old schooner or something(I dont actually know the names of types of ships, so we’ll just go with that). It was this ship and it was in the middle of the ocean at night and riding the waves of a storm. And for whatever reason I saw, not only myself in this image, but also the world as a whole. I couldnt really understand what my brain was telling me, but it freaked me out. Seeing this ship in this framed moment of being alone in an endless nothing, and battered by elements with no hope or land in sight. And if the ship sank, no one would ever know it was ever there. It would be lost to time. Our world is that ship. Its alone in the dark, and surrounded on all sides by terrors both known and unknown. And at any moment, it could be dragged down to the depths and never seen again and all that we ever were or ever could be would be lost.
When got a bit older, and I found myself plagued by thoughts of embarrassment, as teenagers at want to do, I would remember that ship. And whatever it was that I wanted to do, I would do because as much as being in the storm terrified me, not steering into it and fighting for every moment would terrify me more. One day I will be at the bottom of that abyss, but right before that, Ill be on a bed. Ill be surrounded by family or I wont, and it will just be a loan nurse whose is tired of constantly fixing my pillows and hearing stories of when I was young, and you didnt need sun block factor 5000. And it will be that quiet moment that regret will get deafeningly loud. And while regret is just unavoidable, the absolute last thing I want to hear myself say is “I wish I had said something.”. Ill have a million “I wish I hadnt done that.”, and they will all be valid. But at least Ill know that it was the wrong thing, instead of always wondering what could have been. I think that if I took life more seriously, I might not have done anywhere near the amount of things that I did. And while they werent all winners, they were all brilliant moments of life. And as cringe as it can some times be to look back, it was always fun. Although, I probably could have done without seeing a middle aged man jumping out of a wardrobe in crotchless batman outfit… Id say never go home with strange older women in Brighton, but that would really undercut everything else I just said lol.
Life really is terrifying. Which is why you really just have to shit yourself and jump in to get most out of it.
That was a great read and an interesting take. (You should write, if you don’t already, it was very engaging)
To be fair i guess i don’t take life too seriously because i know that ultimately none of it matters, but equally this short time i get to spend here is my opportunity to experience as much as possible and i don’t want to miss any of it so i have to take my life seriously and the lives of those my actions impact. Feeling anger and happiness, fear and love, pain and pleasure are all things to be taken seriously because they are all part of the ride.
If i relax too much i will miss out. It may not matter ultimately but right now in this moment it does. So i should make the most of it. But remember to be able to let go of my grudges, and enjoy the ride. And try to pass that on to others. Remind those that are so wound and tangled up that they can just let go and things will get better.
For me the meaning of life is just to live it and feel as much as possible.
We can’t truly know, our math still aims to several couple of extra physical dimensions and we have no other proof of that, our quantum physics show a glimpse of infinite universes and have no way of visiting them, probably ever.
We will die and the universe will continue its course like we never where here to begin with, since a repeat for any other lifeforms past, present and future.
Wait I’ve heard of the vacuum one but never understood it. Do you have a link (or the name of the doomsday theory) so I can read?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-false-vacuum
Long read, but it should have the answers for all your questions. Have fun! lol.
that was interesting. thanks for the link!
i have to wonder, were this possible, why it has not already happened given the sheer size of the universe.
Like living in a slow motion explosion on a spec of dust
We’re doing a pretty bang up job of making that one second as stupid and painful as possible.
One second of light illuminating a torture chamber
There are four lights.
Not sure how accurate this is, but pretty cool video https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA
Tangentially related great sci-fi short story: “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
I feel like reading this story is an internet nerd Rite of Passage. It had a huge impact on me when I read it as a teenager and I think about it a lot.
Probably my favorite short story. This is another one of my favorites, definitely more obscure:
Does thinking about the long dark make anyone else feel like they are going to vomit?
I don’t know, I thought it was pretty fun.
Nope, I think humanity will be long gone by then, so it doesn’t really matter what happens after that.
Yet all this energy and electromagnetic phenomena
from our very limited vantage point and experiments
feels like it bathes everything as it decays gradually
in slow motion, one rung at a time, towards entropy,
zooming down an exponential thermodynamic curve
that aims and trends towards zero, beyond our view,
beyond the horizon, touching infinity itself.
And here’s the craziest part: the space itself where
this is all taking place, is accelerating its’ expansion.
Yoink
coulda said trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion and saved us a little time
we still have 120 trillion years left. we can spare the time for a few extra words
No no, it will be over just like a second! Blink for 120 trillion years and you’ll miss it.
No! We must be absolutely positively as terse and brief as possible. Concision is the watchword, my friends.
Fucking this.
That’s neat, stars are just the sparks after the big bang, and “soon” that energy will be gone. Even with all the bad shit happening, it makes me happy to be alive in this beautifully short window of time in the universe, even if our little dust speck circling a spark is a bit fucked up sometimes
I think the passing of time, as in waiting, is an experience of the mind. Without a waiting mind, the length of time is just another number out there, like the distance between the edges of the universe. If after the dark finale of this universe there exists another event that spawns a conscious mind, there is no actual waiting happening between this universe bright, starry second and the next one.
Reminds me of that Kurzgesagt video about Optimistic Nihilism:
“If you don’t remember the 13.75 billion years that went by before you existed, then the trillions and trillions and trillions of years that come after will pass in no time once you’re gone. Close your eyes. Count to 1. That’s how long forever feels.”
