Think of that from another perspective.
Assuming human lifetime to be 70 years:
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0.4 lifetimes ago, the term “smartphone” was first used
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0.5 lifetimes ago, Internet became a thing
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1.7 lifetimes ago, first airplane rose in the sky
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3 lifetimes ago, we got the first Turing-complete computer
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6 lifetimes ago, we started discovering electricity
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8 lifetimes ago, Middle Ages came to a close
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20 lifetimes ago you’d be at the end of what we now as antiquity.
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75 lifetimes ago you’d be at the beginning of Ancient Egypt and the early Bronze Age.
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105 lifetimes ago you would witness the beginning of first human civilizations.
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150 lifetimes ago people invented agriculture
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4300 lifetimes ago humans as we know them appeared
History is speeding up, and today one human life is enough to witness a change our ancestors wouldn’t see in a millennia.
Sure, we are, as always, grains of sand in the desert of eternity, but we are grains that matter. That make a change. Every day.
It took only 8 lives to rise from medieval times to where we are now, and less than one lifetime to transform…everything.
It’s one thing to know this, but seeing it succinctly like this is rather profound
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Both of these pictures are pretty much exactly the same compared to actual infinity/eternity. Entropy might also like to have a word about whether or not eternity is even possible.
Well, entropy is eternal
Entropy is a concept used to describe, calculate and predict natural phenomena, it doesn’t physically exist.
The way it shows in physical models suggests it’s a very real phenomena tied to free and bound energy.
We can say energy has a tendency to be released with growth of entropy in the process.
Energy along with matter forms everything physical that we observe.
Entropy is the RNG that keeps the simulation from going stale.
I think we are misunderstanding each other. I don’t doubt entropy is real. I was just trying to say that it isn’t made out of any physical substance, but rather ideas and thought experiments. You can not hold it in your hands is what I mean by it doesn’t physically exist. It is the absence or end of things.
Oh, I see!
But then again, same can be said of anything but matter, and even matter as we experience it is just a set of reflections and electrostatic repulsion.
You never truly touch a single object - you just reach the force equilibrium - and all things you see around you, as well as yourself, are 99,99999% emptiness, or rather a few tiny electrons being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Even if we could compress our entire bodies to a grain of sand, it would still be mostly that - an emptiness filled with uncertainty. So, does it even matter?
Eternity: vast and unsympathetic, big but meaningless, awesome in scope but profoundly empty
My life on Earth: just for me, connected to many others of equal specialness, meaningful because of its finite nature
Is this some religious bullshit that I’m too woke to understand?
It’s just that eternity is a long time, especially towards the end
Man… Woody Allen has had quite the story arc hasn’t he.
No, it’s basically the same thing as Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar
It does have that religious understanding of eternity.
kill me so i can rejoin the eternity desert please, i hate waiting for the apocolypse and still having to pay bills in the meantime.
*approximate eternity
Imagine how grand and rewarding a task it would be for us to reach out and grab more than a few grains of that desert.
