Reader alert: opinions upcoming. We are all beings with only our views to define our truths; so take my opinions with about thirty one grains of salt. It is not 'the' truth; it's just my truth. And if you still can't agree, there's always a comment box; somewhere.
No matter what philosopher’s stone you conjure up to keep time with ever increasing accuracy, the time we take to scroll instagram feed at two in the morning is always short. But there are organisms, right along with you, staring at your socials, who lives and dies before you could finish up that eighty eight photo from the cute kitty series (#stressbuster…?). For them, you have spent an entire lifetime looking at a screen (just let that sink in).
Special relativity tells us that time is relative. But apart from quantum physics, which makes as much sense as a saber-toothed pumpkin on uranus, doesn't time flow differently for each of us? If you ask eleven individuals to close their eyes for ten seconds, it is very likely that they all would open back at the same time. But if you ask them to do the same for sixteen minutes, you will most probably not see this consistency. This goes to show that even for the species of apes that use smartphones, meticulous timekeeping goes only as far as we are patient enough to count.
But since none of the eleven kept their eyes closed for eternity (or so to be assumed), it is safe to say that we do keep time. Or rather we must. Life is a race against time; hence lifetime. If it hadn't been for time, life would've been extremely mundane and extravagantly complicated, but yet eternally eventful with things happening, people coming and going, with no track at all of days or years; much like this sentence, which drags on forever, but is interesting only for the first six words. So the apple of immortality is not that tasty after all; and the whole point of this literature is to prove otherwise.
At a quick glance, isn't it strange that humans go for smaller short term rewards over much larger long term ones? If we take a closer look, it would become clear that it is not strange at all. In fact, it is the most normal thing we could possibly do. We haven't got all day to wait around for a reward that looms somewhere in the distant future. We make friends for years, homes for decades, art for centuries, and fame for millennia. That's it. That is how tiny of a speck we are. It is the same reason why the best warranty you could ever get is a lifetime one. It is not that there is no time beyond; it is that we are not concerned.
Today, right now, we have the resources and technology to set up a moon base, and to start the works on an asteroid mining project which would lay the foundations for a mega project like a Dyson sphere (which would ensure us near infinite energy). But we won't make a move. Not because we can't or shouldn't, but because we won't get the results fast enough. Do you think humans made fire to kick start thousands of years of development? No; humans made fire because some cave dweller somewhere liked the taste of cooked meat and wanted it. We often like to think that the 'golden steps' in humanity's history were made by people who wanted the society to leap forward. But in reality, all that happened was one person making one step towards what they wanted then and there. All of our prized developments are, and will be, the side effects of actions that we all would be tempted to call selfish. But are they?
We are not concerned of the sun burning out not because we actually can't do anything, but because it's too far in the future to consider doing anything. With today's tech, we could predict potentially deadly events like a nearby supernova centuries, if not millennia, in advance. And a project like a Dyson sphere and a stellar engine could save us from this grim fate. But we do nothing more than to start a two million year timer of doom. But imagine being on the receiving end of that timer; that the astrophysicists informing us today that a supermassive asteroid shower (which we predicted a thousand years ago) is gonna wipe all life out of existence, commencing this December (and you thought 2020 can't get any worse). Our life and lifetime limits our dreams, though it has no right or reason to do so. We, being the dominant species on this planet, has the liability to keep life sustained on this planet, not for the 'foreseeable future', but beyond.
In this light, let's look at immortality. Many think that it is a curse disguised as a boon. The two main concerns raised are the uncontrollable population growth, and life becoming mundane after a while. But instead of evaluating immortality while staying mortal, let's look at it as an immortal. If we actually do live in an infinite universe, having all the time in the world could only keep opening up new possibilities. We say an immortal life would be boring; but that a seventy year life isn't. That is precisely because we, as a species, have found a way to engage ourselves for seventy years on this tiny blue piece of rock, orbiting an average sized star, which is part of a pretty unremarkable galaxy, in one of the probably infinitely many galaxy clusters in the universe. Even then we explore only a tiny fraction of our home planet. Now talk about a thousand years being a problem in a vast and almost infinite universe. For a species of smart apes who put men on the moon, just twelve years after they learned how to put metal balls into space (the history goes way back if you count wooden discs), intergalactic colonisation would be a piece of cake, given enough time. And with a universe of infinite resources, population isn't going to be a problem. We could always find a new planet to ship our kids off to.
In all seriousness, though, I bow down to all those great people who actually made selfless strides with only the greater good in mind. And a small correction; Quantum physics does not make as much sense as a saber-toothed pumpkin on uranus.It actually makes less. But then again, who am I to tell you that truth does not have saber-teeth and isn’t wandering the icy terrains of uranus? And by the way, you could predict civilisation ending asteroid showers centuries in advance, it's just that the dinosaurs didn't have far infrared telescopes (which we have, but could do pretty much a whole lot of nothing about it).
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