What If We Had More Time?

I recently talked about how terrifying my impending end is to me, and I said it's because of how little time I have compared to how much I'll miss.

I'm not sure that's the whole story, though, so I asked myself, "What if I had more time?"

The answers I found were enlightening, but it did take me through a rabbit hole to get there. I'll invite you to come along for the explanation, but again, the existential dread warning applies.

Let's start with something reasonable, like a medical breakthrough that doubles my life expectancy. Say by the time I'm 60 they can add 40 more years to my life. Then, by the time those years are up, they've figured a way to add another 25, and so on. We could almost believe that's possible. And for sake of simplicity, they're all healthy years, not just living on a machine years. I imagine the same medical breakthroughs are helping everybody, so I don't have to worry about outliving my kids or anything depressing like that. Everyone gets to live like the average 60 year old for an extra hundred years. How much would that change?

Well, for starters, I won't be retiring at 65. To survive financially, I'd need to work at least another 50 years. Luckily, I'm in a line of work that I enjoy and isn't physically demanding. It's a mental problem solving job, so think about how much better I could get at it. With an extra 50 years of experience, there'd be no case of "I haven't seen that problem before." Speaking of learning, I'd get an extra hundred years to put off learning the piano like I've always wanted.

So, now I'm retiring at 115 years old with 50 healthy years ahead of me to truly see the world. Climate change becomes a thing that affects me personally, not just the great-greatgrandchildren that I now get to meet. That said, I'm sure there'd be some other, longer term impending catastrophe to ignore. This scenario imagines me being 175 before I worry about any terminal illnesses, long after my grandchildren have also retired. When those days come, will I finally feel "tired" and happy to lay down and close my eyes forever?

I doubt it. I'm still going to want more.

So let's get crazy. Let's just say humans become immortal. It doesn't really matter how, but the closest thing to believable is that we replace our organic parts with electronic ones, with our minds existing inside a computer. The messy medical challenges of keeping us alive become clean engineering challenges; changing a hard drive is easier than replacing a lung. If we live forever, what changes then?

Well, forever only lasts as long as our environment does, so climate change moves to the top priority worldwide. Once that's solved, we would need to figure out how to get interstellar, because the sun will eventually explode. That's a huge challenge, but now we have time. All of it. So you and I donate a few hours out of every day to the challenge. Think about how awesome it would be to have participated in the project that leaves the Earth behind. Imagine sitting on a space-faring city, watching our "old" sun blow up as we settle in a new corner of the galaxy.

We could go trillions of years like that. There are seven billion people on Earth now, and even if that population keeps growing you could meet all of them if you wanted to. Everything you've wanted to experience but never found the time? Now you've got it, and so much more. It would be just a matter of time before someone rebuilt Mount Everest as a ski resort for giggles, but even that is small brain thinking. You could watch stars form. Galaxies collide and merge. Literally everything.

Except … even that can't last forever. We have to get the energy and resources to survive from somewhere. Given enough time, even the longest lasting stars will die. Black holes last the longest, and we'll find a way to squeeze energy from them in the cold and dark of space, for a little while longer. In the absolute best case scenario, milking it for everything we can, one day, we will either starve or freeze to death. If you think life is hard to let go of with only a hundred years of experience, how much harder will it be to let go after trillions? Though they might have felt like forever, in that final moment, rubbing your hands together as the last flicker of fuel burns out, all those years will already be gone.

This is the answer I found: No matter how much time I have to live, whenever it is that I face my death, I will be facing it "right now."

And that will always feel like it's too soon.