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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.
I don’t want to imagine the level of procrastination I would have if I were immortal.
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.
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.”
Why? Are you bored now? If so, why is it a problem? If not, then what’s the problem?
Spending Eternity either crushed to a point in the heart of black hole or drifting thru the darkness of space all alone with nothing to do or even anything to look at.
There’s a bit to go yet before we get there. Can I have a few hundred years more first?
Yes, but we were discussing eternity
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.
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.
Tangentially related great sci-fi short story: “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
Probably my favorite short story. This is another one of my favorites, definitely more obscure:
Thanks for that. I’ve read it before, long ago, but completely forgot about it. Still a great story.
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.
Thus began the Age of Fire. But soon the flames will fade and only Dark will remain.
every soul has its dark
Just like every Knight praise the sun.
Unless that Knight is onion flavored, they just die :(
Unless, of course, that onion knight has a lot of experience in other professions, in which case they can easily punch gods to death.
If only I could be so grossly incandescent!
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.
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…
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I had to google that lol.
She’s right, actually
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.
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.
Comparison is truly the thief of joy. Of course, once we know how long the slow fade of an empty universe will last, the first thing we most do is make 120 trillion years of insane, glorious, beautiful existence seem inadequate.
No! We must be absolutely positively as terse and brief as possible. Concision is the watchword, my friends.
Fucking this.
Why use lot words…?
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
Yoink
Honestly, this factoid is the closest thing to a real Total Perspective Vortex that I’ve ever felt.
What’s that phenomenon that describes noticing things more after you become aware of them because I’m seeing a lot more Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references than I remember now that I’ve started reading it
What happens after the 10^106 years of black holes?
The black holes evaporate eventually.
After that, depends on who you ask. Most physicists would say something like “as close to nothing as possible”. Penrose would say at a certain point when nothing can interact with anything else, distance loses meaning, which makes the universe and a singularity equivalent, so then things restart.
Not sure about the “restart” bit.
If it’s mathematically equivalent to the starting conditions of our universe, why would it behave differently?
I don’t think you can argue that it’s mathematically equivalent. Just because space and time become so spread that they are effectively meaningless is not the same as them having not meaningfully existed and then existing. Neither can you really say that since any baryons that have not decayed are so far apart none of them interact that they behave like the concentration of all matter in the known universe. At those scales of time I’m not even sure that there are any left.
It’s like arguing that one tiny piece of something in one place is the same as all the matter and all of space and time being in one place: it’s I guess analogous but not equivalent. I will of course caveat and say that my undergrad physics degree did not cover end of the universe timelines lol. Kurzgesagt does have a video though.
The cyclical universe approach as I understand it is predicated on an eventual big crunch which I don’t think is being argued anymore.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he’s right. I just thought the objection was to the “restart bit”, and I thought that part reasonably followed if the earlier parts were accepted.
But Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is pretty much the opposite of a Big Crunch.
I guess I’ll have to read up. I have potentially had a long running misunderstanding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC2JOQ7z5L0
The cyclical universe approach as I understand it is predicated on an eventual big crunch which I don’t think is being argued anymore.
The universe is definitely cyclical, the only real question is: how?
There’s lots of theories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoCYY9sa2kU
Unless it’s been disproven it’s not “not being argued anymore”
Yeah I also think it would take a lot more than just one single bit of discrete information in an universe of completely uniform and homogeneous nothingness, to restart the universe lol /s
Because things haven’t progressed linearly with the universes evolution, and, as the op stipulates, we are part of one second vs countless billions of years (relatively) till it’s theoretical demise, it is possible/probable that we don’t know what will happen down the line.
Certain things might change to make it possible that we simply can’t predict due to lack of information (the future) and technological difficulties.
🤷🏻
Nothing really. And since nothing is happening and nothing ever changes time itself becomes meaningless.
Yes.
Alternately, no.
From what I understand, the universe would just be in equilibrium. Nothing but cold particles floating around.
A recent discovery might suggest that we happen to be in a big void, and that a great amount of the universe is much much denser than where we are or what we have observed. If true, Big Crunch time bby
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.
Time can stretch and squish and follow physical rules, if the passage of time is an experience of the mind time itself would remain existent without minds just as real as distance and the passage of distance via movement between objects would remain without minds.
One interesting thing I heard is the DESI data from a telescope observatory in Arizona that was trying to build a more accurate map of the universe identified the dark energy acceleration as slowing. That could mean if the trend continues eventually gravity will overpower dark energy and everything collapses back together again. I don’t think it’s conclusive, but it is evidence maybe heat death isn’t an ending phase.
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.”
Wont there also be balls of iron-56 just chilling?
Oh shit that’s true
maybe
We live in but a bright second, yet are determined to fill it with darkness unending.
I just had a moment of what is everything
I don’t know how to explain it but from nothing to something to nothing again but no why
The ‘why’ is us.
Without consciousness in the universe, there might as well not be a universe.
Typically something a consciousness would say.
The cosmos can’t ponder itself so excuse us for being self centered lol
We are the cosmos pondering itself.
Carl Sagan said it more or this way and he was right.
I’ve heard a funny story somewhere that god created the humans sothat they are worshipped. Because if nobody believes in them, they might as well not exist.
It’s a cool axiom though. I mean if there’s nothing conscious to know the universe exists, like, so what? A universe needs life to matter to that life. Intrinsic mattering makes no sense. Things have to matter to other things that have the capacity to want or need. But without consciousness, those things might as well be like calculations in a computer.
to matter Why should it?
to that life Tautology
if a tree falls in yhe forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?
Nope, only matters if we hear it.
Indeed. But it’s an axiom, not a tautology.
Not having consciousness might be the best thing that could happen to a universe. Just everything existing, without desire or suffering.
With a universe that peaceful, there might as well not be us.
Not having consciousness might be the best thing that could happen to a universe. Just everything existing, without desire or suffering.
With a universe that peaceful, there might as well not be us.
actually that’s precisely what buddhism is all about. there is no “i” in it all, the universe is a river of colors, flowing, transforming, but it is because we cling to the world that we create the illusion of an “i” ourselves.
There’s a cool video about this by exurb1a, i think it’s this one (but could also be another video, this dude made a lot of great videos.)
What would be the point of a universe if there was nothing experiencing it?
Who or what is it “best” for?
What is the “point” of this universe?
Us. Conscious creatures humans or otherwise. We are the genesis of “point”.
By analogy, what’s the point of a sun, or a planet, being a thing? It just is, right? A mechanism of nature.
Maybe we are do, but it’s undeniable that we experience reality. Experience is the only thing they can have a point, by definition. This is simply axiomatic.
There is no knowing a universe without knowers, so whether something just is, absent is, is a nonsense question. Sense to whom, after all?
Maybe we are do, but it’s undeniable tjsybwe experience reality.
I’m sticking that as text over an image of Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Haha, that we, but same difference.
Why does the universe need to be known?
What makes ‘us’ so special that the worth of a whole universe is determined by our existence, inspite of the brevity of human history? Written history has only been around for 5,000. The oldest homo sapiens has only been around for 300,000 years. Was the universe insignificant for the rest of its 13,799,700,000 years?
It doesn’t. But “needing” itself is an undefined term without consciousness - definition itself is a product of conscious experience.
The point is that there is no fact of a universe existing without something that can know facts. It’s necessarily tautological, after all we cannot know not existing.
Were we not, the universe could not be as we know it. Whether or not it exists at all without us cannot matter, because mattering itself cannot be defined without a definer, nor can existence itself be verified without a verifier.
That which “just is” could be absolutely anything at any time.
In other words, Maybe the big bang happened some 13.8 billion years ago and over all this time events transpired until the first consciousnesses came online. Suddenly the universe knows being. Then one day you come online, somewhere around the age of 5 or 6.
Or… That is just what it looks like to you and in reality someone preprogrammed the simulation and switched it on and you came into existence at the moment of your oldest memory. All that history is true only in the sense that it’s what the simulation shows you. But 13.8 billion years never really happened.
That’s basically how it is, and it doesn’t need to be an external simulation. Those 13.8 billion years had nothing in them to experience, to remember, or to document concepts like duration, and years are a relational measurement we invented.
Its the whole “why is there anything at all” thing for me. Like why is there any energy to have made all of this. Couldn’t there just have never been anything at all? Nothing for anyone to experience. Its so hard to perceive and think about but its absolutely fascinating.
If the universe wouldn’t exist, you couldn’t ask yourself that question. So, by wondering “why is there anything at all” you have already answered the question: because otherwise you couldn’t even ask the question.
Im not sure i follow. Or at least im not sure how me being able to ask why is answered by me being able to ask that.
I see that i can ask it because the universe exists but i dont think that covers why.
it’s a play with conditional probability:
By asking the question (of whether the universe exists), that is already reason enough to know the answer. As such, you could say that asking the question is causal to knowing the answer. And the answer is that the universe exists.
So, asking questions causes the universe to exist, in some sense.
Maybe I’m just not smart enough to understand.
What you are saying certainly answers that the universe does exist (or at least we perceive it to) but how does that answer the why? If i can ask the question then the universe does exist. Great. But why?
why has two different meanings. You can ask “why did something happen” and expect a causal explanation, i.e. event B happened because event A happened earlier, or you can ask it like “why is this happening”, like “what is the purpose in it”. does that make sense to you?
Yes, but neither is what you are answering. Or i just don’t get how that answers it.
You are telling me this answers the question “does the universe exist” but i am asking why there is anything there in the first place so that the universe can exist. Why is there a medium for the fabric of space and time to exist within. There could have just been nothing.
I understand that there is. And we are here. But thats not my question and i don’t think your answering that question.
Well if its just backhoes life will evolve to see infrared/sonar
And dig plenty of holes
It’s just backhoes all the way down
One minor problem is that life as we know it is supported by the continuous input of energy from a nearby star. Without it, no photosynthesis, and nearly all primary energy production in Earth life comes from that.
The slightly bigger problem is that by the time there are only black holes, there are no planets. Because, you know, there’s only black holes. So nothing outside of black holes for life to be on, and the vacuum of space isn’t really the most conducive to life or interaction of any kind.
Entropy is the engine that sustains life.
Like living in a slow motion explosion on a spec of dust
