What is it like to be human, but to live for millions or billions of years?
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Well, in some ways you are…your splinters keep going, not sure how memories get divvied up, and certainly memories diverge after the split, but some part of your consciousness keeps going….
Not sure if each child thinks it’s you or what?
Might make sense to break off smaller slices over the years to preserve a majority of conscious continuity over time–assuming memories are proportional to volume/mass.
It’s a very fascinating topic actually. I think I was a biologist for about a hundred years, a few hundred thousand years ago–pretty sure I’d have found it fascinating to study how memories are distributed through out your gelatin. You aren’t allergic to petri dishes and slides are you?
Wait–was I a biologist or did I just eat one? Hmm. Not sure now–but does it really matter if “you are what/who you eat?” I know that’s how it works for iZombies. Which, I think, are zombies animated by the ArchDemon Jobs…
[quote=Gelcube;7445]Grey Goo?[/quote]
George! You know, I haven’t seen him in a while. Wonder what he’s up to now?
And I’m aware of the Gray Goo, I just wasn’t aware there was such a technical term for it.
A good representation of it was in Walter Jon Williams’s “Aristoi”. It was called Metaglap Nano. Very insidious stuff. Half a dozen or so years back, we had an interesting discussion on the now-defunct Amazon forums for Astlan.
The thread spanned over a thousand pages, and naturally wandered all over the heavens and hells.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYnVYJDxu2Q[/youtube]
One of the topics we touched was immortality, and the practicalities of living forever.
When we tell stories about human interactions, they have their foundations in certain unspoken assumptions about what it means to have a personality, how to express one, what the natural stages of human development are, the archetypes representing those, and finally, how great a reality TV show one can produce by exploiting people suffering of personality abnormalities.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOKQFTH5w5I[/youtube]
At the border of human personalities, and what looks human but isn’t, folklore tells us about immortal gods, vampires and zombies. Some contemporary authors have explored what long-lived vampires might think and say, but still on a human yardstick of a generation or a handful of generations.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOnqjkJTMaA[/youtube]
Hard science fiction from the 60s to the 80s was hopeful, and attempted to consider what kinds of social changes might result from advances in the medical science. When microprocessors came out, and the uploading of human personalities into computers and AIs became a topic, we were in full blown cold war mode, and science fiction spent most of its energy on projecting cold war themes onto the canvas of futurism.
Iain M. Banks was an exception with his optimism and imagining of interstellar utopia, but in his universe, Minds were explicitly not human, and his stories were more about adventure than what-ifs.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DBc5NpyEoo[/youtube]
What is it like to be human, but to live for millions or billions of years?
Can you be considered to be one person across this span? How widely will your personality vary?
Can you have long-term friends? Can you have long-term enemies?
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btPJPFnesV4[/youtube]
In that Amazon thread, we discussed how the long-lived have to reset their personalities occasionally in the Astlan universe. Perhaps the concept has still evolved after that?
The key question for the formulation of the Astlan universe is whether the long-lived keep evolving their personalities, as well as their strategic and tactical objectives.
Imagine knowing that one day you will totally reverse your beliefs of what you sincerely believe to be in your best interests today.
In our everyday human lives, most of us have the core belief that the person we can ultimately count on, is ourselves. It’s usually not even mentioned, as it’s so obvious.
We don’t live with the absolute certainty that our worst enemy, who is certain to undo our most sacred pursuits with complete access and perfect insider information, is ourselves after so many new life experiences and personality changes.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVikZ8Oe_XA[/youtube]
What would you do against such an adversary?
Would you stop considering long-term pursuits as something worth a serious investment?
Would you force yourself into a personality statis? Stop new experiences, or stop learning from them?
Would you create a secret service inside your own organization, to protect the interests of now-you against future-you? Even if that meant forcing someone else into a personality stasis? Or would a bureaucracy do the job impersonally?
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La4Dcd1aUcE[/youtube]
Deeeeeep, man.
I have nothing to add to the discussion, as I’m only intelligent when compared to my free-roaming gelatinous cousins. Though we slimes and oozes can be considered immortal in the sense we don’t age, just continue to grow, in practice our population is controlled by natural predators and accidents. So it’s extremely unlikely any of us would be able to answer your rather specist question. Though I can extrapolate from my own current size growth, that within 100,000-120,000 years, I could be large enough to engulf an entire planet. To last a million years would require some form of space magic to allow me to eat other worlds. I could possibly see that happening, but I’m not entirely sure what my mental state would be after that long. Probably extremely bored. Just eat, eat, eat. I mean, if you eat the entire internet, what else is there to do? No funny cat videos, no tentacle hentai, no videos of adventurers falling into pit traps. BOOOORING!
Hmm,
I’m not sure, but don’t gelatinous cubes spontaneously break up into smaller cubes after the reach a certain mass? Pretty sure that’s how you reproduce…I know that’s how you reproduce–you said so, but I think I read that at some point your size gets so large and massive that have trouble maintaining sufficient viscosity and you split in two–or more.
All I can say to Mikey is that–wow–sucks to be human. Fortunately, having always been me, I don’t have to worry about such things, I am me, was me and always will be me. I mean, why mess with peak perfection?
Tizzy
As for us dragons when we get bored we take a nap for a century or so than wake up to the world completely changed, so that usually keeps things interesting.
[quote=Tizzy;7430]Hmm,
I’m not sure, but don’t gelatinous cubes spontaneously break up into smaller cubes after the reach a certain mass? Pretty sure that’s how you reproduce…I know that’s how you reproduce–you said so, but I think I read that at some point your size gets so large and massive that have trouble maintaining sufficient viscosity and you split in two–or more.
All I can say to Mikey is that–wow–sucks to be human. Fortunately, having always been me, I don’t have to worry about such things, I am me, was me and always will be me. I mean, why mess with peak perfection?
Tizzy[/quote]
Well, you are right (as always) Tizzy. I’m not sure that I’d be able to hold together that long, but to imagine what it would be like to live that long, I had to make the assumption that I COULD live that long. I still assert that I would totally be bored after having ate the internet.
No, there are racial memories, and maybe some vague, foggy personal memories…if the Piece of Slime is lucky. Really, when there’s a fracture, the amount and clarity of the memories is directly proportional to the percent of mass breaking apart. And the bigger the piece released, the more fractured the personality matrix in the bigger portion. So a really small cube released would have few if any personal memories, and I’d feel a little off for a day or two. Breaking into two nearly equal parts would shatter my personality, and there’d be two completely new personalities, with some odd fuzzy “parent” memories.
I wonder. If I eat the internet, would I remember all the cat videos and tentacle porn?
Ok, so rather like I thought.
You definitely don’t want to keep getting super massive the risk of large chunks breaking off under the force of gravity becomes too great.
Also, it would seem that for gels, regular, modest weight loss is essential to mental stability, or at least memories.
So what happens if you break a piece off and forget the contents of volume 2? You remember volume 1 and 3 but have no idea how Tom suddenly ended up ruling a bunch of D’Orcs. Shudder. It’s like a reader fugue state.
Fugue states sound kind of cool, but I’d really prefer to have a montage super power….
It would be so cool to just montage one’s way through long tedious tasks that one doesn’t want to do…
Gelcube, have you considered combining the sci-fi concept of “grey goo” and the fantasy concept of gelatinous cubes into some sort of a hybrid monster?
Of course, I can’t even think of Grey Goo without thinking about why I don’t eat yogurt.
[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/uE6Z1nBqLwo[/YOUTUBE]
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