If you knew you were going to live forever, what would you do today?
Opposite of the more familiar thought experiment of imagining you’re going to die in a week
Conversation
I know of only 3 “forever” stories
- The Final Question by Asimov, where a computer called Multivac lives forever
- Wowbagger subplot in HHG (also elements of the restaurant at the end of the universe premise)
- Futurama S6.7, featuring the forward-only tine machine
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There’s a Peter Capaldi doctor who where he’s in a sort of prison for billions of years. Almost forever.
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I also enjoy the trope of watchers/monitors in comicbook extended universes. Characters who stand around on pedestals with long gowns just watching the universe.
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Oddly enough divinities in fantasy or religious mythologies rarely make good use of an eternalist premise. Tom Bombadil is sorta ok as an eternalist character, the Ents are basically watchers. Trad gods seem to just live temporally scaled lives. Like 1 Brahma day = 4b years.
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It’s hard to make characters meaningfully eternal in a non-loop changing universe. Characters who change even a tiny amount per unit time will either transform to the point of resurrection multiple times (finite time escape) or converge to a changeless asymptote
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There’s research by Laura Cartensen claiming that most people have an effectively infinite time horizon if they feel they have more than 20 years left (so old people and terminally ill people have non-infinite horizon outlooks). Dunno how robust this is. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2018-
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Also infinite horizon outlook is only one aspect of an eternalist premise. An eternal would also have effectively infinite past horizon of personal memories.
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Retreading a couple of broken thread tweets
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There is an episode in the Mahabharata where Yudhishthira is asked, “what is the greatest mystery?” and he replies, “that men know they must due, yet live everyday like they’re going to live forever”
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In an eternal life if you made an infinite twitter thread, thread breaks are inevitable. Then you’d do out-of-order rethreadings.
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