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Comment by tasty_freeze | Hacker News Reader

I love ice cream. But if I had to eat a billion gallons of it, it would lose its appeal. Life is like that too: if we had it in infinite supply, it wouldn't have much value.

If I could extend my life by 50 years of good health I might take that offer. If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline. If I had to extend it 5000 years I'd certainly say no. 5M years of existence would be torture.

When people express the desire to live forever, either here on earth or in an imagined afterlife, I wonder if they have really thought through the consequences.

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> If I could extend my life by 50 years of good health I might take that offer. If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline. If I had to extend it 5000 years I'd certainly say no. 5M years of existence would be torture.

is this a thing you worry might happen? like, if life extension is developed, you're concerned it will come in the form of a 5 million year increment, take it or leave it, no possibility of suicide in the middle?

> When people express the desire to live forever, either here on earth or in an imagined afterlife, I wonder if they have really thought through the consequences.

i wonder why you interpret the desire to live forever as some enforced, not only eternal, but literally unendable existence.

i expect we'll manage to simply end aging first. that won't prevent you from walking out into rural alaska in your underwear.

The Christian idea of an afterlife that I was raised with and apparently most people in the US follow is an eternal afterlife and there is no opting out of it once you get there.

As for the hypothetical, no, I don't worry about for a microsecond because it won't become reality anytime soon.

> I love ice cream. But if I had to eat a billion gallons of it, it would lose its appeal.

How do you know? Besides, if you had to eat a billion gallons of it, but over a billion years, I'm pretty sure it would've not lost its appeal at all. It's not "too much" but "too frequent" that takes the joy away.

To counter your example: I watch more TV series than I probably should. What I've learned is that while there's no fun in rewatching the same show just after you finished your first run, rewatching after ~5 years feels almost as if you were watching it for the first time.

I think life is the same. Brains are physical objects with limited capacity for memories and experiences. A million years of life won't be a million years of memories. But it will be a million years' worth of refining your person.

> if we had it in infinite supply, it wouldn't have much value.

Maybe "economic value" under capitalism. But emotional value to the person living.

> I wonder if they have really thought through the consequences.

I know I did. I fail to see a problem with everyone extending their lives indefinitely, past the initial hurdle of rebuilding our economic system to not structurally depend on people dying on schedule, and actually getting space exploration started.

And remember, if you get bored living forever, you could always check out. Right now, we don't even have an option to live long enough to get bored.

> Besides, if you had to eat a billion gallons of it, but over a billion years

That is changing the analogy. The billion years of life would be experienced every waking minute of every day.

Why? You won't be experiencing a billion years a minute, you'll be experiencing a minute a minute.

Here is the difference. If I eat one gallon of ice cream per year, that is 0.1% of my life eating ice cream, whereas I spend 67% of my time experience my life (assuming 8 hrs sleep per day).

You say you’d decline 5m years of life. But have you been in love? How would your answer change if he/she was ready to live 5m years with you?

given the option of spending 5m years with another human I'd pass. A lot of other variables would need to change (ability to retain long term memories, fertility, time it takes to raise a child, how we raise our kids if at all ...) But even changing one of these variables would change things in ways we can't fully imagine (complex system so there would be lot of emergence/chaos)

While the first years of such a "long term relationship" are probably great, (I am high on my hormones imagining that I potentially will spend some millions of years with my partner) they might also be a nightmare for the same reasons.

The more successful relationship I had were all about managing each others long-term expectations, and not risk breaking promises. How would I do this over that horizon idk (more importantly I trust potential partners even less to know)

What would reality look like if we only lived twice as long and were able to retain memories along the way. Holocaust survivors, Spanish flu survivors are dead now and I wonder what they could teach us about 2020. I wonder how such a Malthusean society would feel about Tech, the environment, urbanization, wars, politics, ... Our inability to live long enough and remember things keeps coming back to bite us in the ass I think so doubling our life expectancy would be cool but 5m years is an unthinkable dystopian horror show.

Considering most people are unable to have a great relationship with themselves. Many consider their love / partner a person that "completes" them. In other words they don't love themselves enough to think they need another person that makes them whole. That's a lot of pressure in 40 years but 5m it would be hell. But maybe this would solve the actual problem and it would force people to love themselves first? 5m years isn't just a lot of time to make it a nightmare but also to get many things right we currently don't. I'm not convinced we can accurately imagine/paint this picture tho.

No offense, but long term relationships are a fuck-load of work. You don’t just stay in love with someone indefinitely. People change significantly over 10 years, let alone 100 or 1000.

Being stuck with one person for 5m years is worse than living for 5m years without a guarantee of being with someone the whole time.

Half of marriages end in divorce and only a subset of people who are “in love” get married. HARD PASS

Yes, multiple times. I'm 25 years married and we still have a great relationship. You have a very romantic notion of love if you think it could last even 5000 years.

I'am always intrigue by these "range problems / statements" I guess there are no great insight other than most timelines(ranges) are subjective.

My S.O is always complaining that we are spending too little time together( I really don't think so).

I asked her once, so if we had to spend 23.5 hours together that will be obviously too much, and spending 0.1 hour together will be too little (we could both agree on the extremes), yet somewhere between those extremes are a number we both are comfortable with and feel is correct. It's just not the same number.

On the face of it, it sounds like you have a great bargaining chip here. For the extra hours you think are "too much", come up with an activity which involves you both, but you immensely enjoy. You might both grow!

Good tip :)

In my experience, it's almost never actually about how much time but how you spend that time. TV doesn't count, doing dishes doesn't count... Walks, talking, mutual hobbies do.

> If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline.

500 years sounds like just enough time to become an expert in dozen interesting things.

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