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Comment by lowdest | Hacker News Reader

>Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable.

This seems very subjective, I don't agree at all.

Seriously... the idea of living a quadrillion is hardly an extension of 100. You can still never go backward. You still need to plan your life. Death would still be a common occurrence.

I would much MUCH rather live much longer. I don't hate my life at all.

At some point you will have heard all possible jokes. What is life without humor?

That's nonsense. There are infinite possible jokes.

And memory is limited. What if one were a forgetful god. What if that is _already_ the case?

Possibly where the Alzheimer's patients are told the same joke over and over, and it does bring them joy, comes to mind.

This is not true. Jokes that take more than (say) an hour to tell are boring and thus not really jokes.

Literally there are about the same number of atoms in the universe as the number of shuffles in a 52 card deck (52!). The number of topics that can be played with in a joke is beyond even this limited number.

Remember, jokes about tinder/grinder dates didn’t even exist a decade ago.

Agreed it's subjective.

That said, what would you do with your quadrillion year long lifespan, assuming you're healthy during it? It's way past everything you can do and learn, and cosmic level events are not what the human mind can perceive as they slowly unfold...

I would like to live a couple thousand years though, as long as my loved ones get to be along for the ride. Though I wonder if my loved ones would eventually become my hated ones...

It seems like you assume you would remain human for a quadrillion years. Why? I'd assume a technology to upload yourself into a better substrate (one you have full control over) will appear within next few hundred years. From that point there are no limits on what you can do or become.

Your answer is the only valid counterpoint, in my opinion. Since the human mind cannot perceive the passage of quadrillion years, we would have to become something else, something inhuman.

I don't know whether this is something I would wish for myself. Maybe. I like being human. But maybe, who knows?

What do you like about being human?

This extends to a cohort of people living thousands of years, having memories of each other to thousands of years in the past. Plus they all need beds.

I'm fond of my loved ones, but I also like creating new ones. I also would like to see very long term plans come to fruition. It seems very much like a "640K ought to be enough for anybody" problem.

Works of art that require thousands of lifetimes to complete. Deep understanding of the physical world. Exploring the universe. Much more.

I get what you mean, but I don't think the human mind can contemplate things that take thousands of years to unfold; it's just not wired for that. Even things that take years are difficult for us to comprehend.

Re: creating new beings. How long till you also get bored of that? Remember we're talking about quadrillions of years.

An additional thing to consider: if you could live quadrillions of years and still be able to perceive things that take thousands or millions of years to unfold, wouldn't you subjectively be living the lifespan of a normal human being? That is, your life wouldn't feel long to your mind, but normal (your mind would have to adjust to run more slowly). Wouldn't then regret your "short" lifespan and wish you could live longer?

> It's way past everything you can do and learn

Such arrogance, humanity isn't all that far beyond it's banging rocks together phase. We haven't even scratched the surface. There is so much more to learn.

It's not arrogance. There aren't an infinite number of things to do and learn. It may seem so when your lifespan is less than a century, but quadrillion years? You'd run out of things that make sense for a human being.

How do you know it's way past everything you can do and learn?

No one has ever had the experience to be able to say.

In Ursula Le Guin's book "Changing Planes", there's a story called "The Island of the Immortals." Spoiler alert: living forever is no fun.

If there was no tension the book would be no fun, so I don't think we should pay much attention to story lines created for entertainment.

I mean if you were a god your experience would be qualitatively different. You could make it pass by as fast as a minute takes for a human being.

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