That Nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!

November 20, 2019 8:23 AM

Ten Ways to Live Forever by Ed Simon [The Millions]
posted by chavenet (4 comments total)

an answer I posted in MeFi recently almost always pertains in situations like these

An almost omniscient, omnipotent robot was asked why "he" was cleaning a table in ― Iain M. Banks', Use of Weapons:

'And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested.

He smiled in response to the man's grin, 'Well, yes.'

“I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway" - the man laughed - "people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And," the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people. So where are you from, anyway?”

PS: Beautiful essay!
posted by lalochezia at 8:46 AM on November 20, 2019 [4 favorites]

I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morganlink 3D-Vision Interview

I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.
-- Evil Overlord List #230

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
-- Woody Allen

Cryonics is an experiment. So far the control group isn't doing very well.
-- Dr. Ralph Merkle

I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
-- Rick Potvin

Give me immortality or death.
-- Nick de Jongh

Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.
-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden
posted by DataPacRat at 9:05 AM on November 20, 2019 [5 favorites]

I am stuck in a backwards-forwards two step loop, for the moment. I could live for another 30 years, and the question is what could possibly make me want to do that? It rained today for the first time in months. It is enough for now. Just the tapping, tapping, tapping on the defunct swamp cooler, reminds me the world is out there, washed, and the air will be great for at least a couple of days. I am considering erasing my path through time, all personal marks, leaving only my credit reports, ha ha ha. Then "they" can say, she lived a meager life, she died debt free, but, why would they even bother?

I think the task of being Virginia Woolf, had to be so difficult. Have you read her stuff? You have to completely drop your personal operating system to take her in, the data is massive, and of some value. But being Virginia Woolf for the time you read her, is exhausting, it surely must have weighed her, more so than the rocks that actually held her down.

Filling your moments, or not, acquiring or divesting, listening to the rain, or the mockingbirds, or the whispers of cloying water, recording infinity has a value, I don't know repeating it all, is how I want to live. I like my slow explosion moments spreading wide to connect everything. That is how I have lived, at all, maybe for an eternity, depending on how time is really measured.
posted by Oyéah at 10:28 AM on November 20, 2019 [5 favorites]

"The first 10 million years, they were the worst. The next 10 million years, they were the worst too." -- Melvin the robot from The Resta...
posted by sneebler at 12:03 PM on November 20, 2019 [3 favorites]