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Comment by johnohara | Hacker News Reader

This makes me feel small, sad, and alone.

One man's opinion.

For me, I am grateful I live in a time when I can use a human invention to view images, taken by another human invention, of galaxies 13.5 billion light years away that probably no longer exist and be educated enough to sit down and calculate in terms of miles just how far those specks of light have traveled.

Aristotle, Caesar, DaVinci, Newton, Kepler, Napoleon, Faraday and Einstein never saw what I have seen from my desktop.

Sad? No. Privileged.

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I agree... but it also makes me yearn for what will be seen after I am gone. I constantly wish I could be frozen and woken up every 1000 years to see what else we have learned about the universe. The fact my glimpse into the cosmos is so fleeting does disappoint me.

when we look at the improvements that we've made in the last 100 years it makes me very excited for even the foreseeable future, not even what might happen after that. We live in very interesting times indeed

Perhaps it's not necessary to freeze yourself - if Moore's law just ignores physical limitations and keeps going, we could have the technological singularity within our livetimes. It will get quite boring for people working in the computer science field after that ;-)

http://alcor.org/AboutCryonics/index.html

I've often thought the same. I've no yearning for an afterlife - I am more than willing to accept that once I'm dead, I'm gone. I also have no problem facing my own death - it'll happen when it happens. I certainly don't want to be immortal - that would be one of the most boring things ever, and would completely devalue my relationship with everyone I've met (especially loved ones). I can't however shake this desire to see where we are as a race in 200/2000/20,000 years. I guess all I can do is aim to at least contribute something towards the positive advancement of our race.

That's true but out of all times in history for advancement this may be one of the most interesting to live in. We have developed a global communications and information distribution network, this hasn't been there in the past and you would expect something similar to be present for the rest of all time.

Think of it a little differently. Live in the now. You are currently witnessing a time that some of those before you wished they could live to see. How exciting! :)

The magnitude of your "Aristotle, Caesar, ..." hit me hard, smack dab in the face just now. The magnitude of how accessible knowledge is today is amazing, if not the most amazing thing computing has ever done for humanity.

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