To make a deal with the Devil...
So let me create the setting for you… I currently sit in front of my MacBook Pro, to which I've just freshly installed World of WarCraft, ran my updates, and am now sitting here debating whether to login and dive headfirst into an online reality.
And then I realize the problem: for every minute I'm lost in a virtual world, I lose a minute in our tangible, shared reality.
This is worrisome for me.
A very long time ago, I realized that the most valuable thing someone can spend is time. It's the one thing that there is always less of, and until we as a species can copy our consciousnesses into pocket sized super computers and become no longer tethered to this shell of biological matter, we shall always be akin to a lit fuse, leading not to some sort of explosive, but instead to an infinite black nothingness.
I believe that we as a culture are becoming obsessed with this idea, although we're not specifically conscious of it. As far back as history itself, we've looked beyond this world of light and air and promise and pain into the realm of ideas, dreams, and a place where time has much less meaning, sometimes none at all.
As I see it, we currently experience our reality as a 1:1 ratio. 1 second equals 1 second. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could somehow trick our brains into experiencing thirty or fifty times as much? Where one minute is transmuted into a half an hour, or even a whole hour? We would trade a minute for a full day, an hour for full months at a time, and days for years?
The recent blockbuster film Inception briefly explores the concept, where in the dream, every minute is an hour. Also, I've recently read a prequel to the upcoming TRON film, that revolves around the idea of attempting to share time between two worlds, one moving in our normal time, and a second, moving hundreds of times faster.
This becomes the ultimate question: what shall we have to do to gain this...
To make a deal with the Devil...
So let me create the setting for you… I currently sit in front of my MacBook Pro, to which I've just freshly installed World of WarCraft, ran my updates, and am now sitting here debating whether to login and dive headfirst into an online reality.
And then I realize the problem: for every minute I'm lost in a virtual world, I lose a minute in our tangible, shared reality.
This is worrisome for me.
A very long time ago, I realized that the most valuable thing someone can spend is time. It's the one thing that there is always less of, and until we as a species can copy our consciousnesses into pocket sized super computers and become no longer tethered to this shell of biological matter, we shall always be akin to a lit fuse, leading not to some sort of explosive, but instead to an infinite black nothingness.
I believe that we as a culture are becoming obsessed with this idea, although we're not specifically conscious of it. As far back as history itself, we've looked beyond this world of light and air and promise and pain into the realm of ideas, dreams, and a place where time has much less meaning, sometimes none at all.
As I see it, we currently experience our reality as a 1:1 ratio. 1 second equals 1 second. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could somehow trick our brains into experiencing thirty or fifty times as much? Where one minute is transmuted into a half an hour, or even a whole hour? We would trade a minute for a full day, an hour for full months at a time, and days for years?
The recent blockbuster film Inception briefly explores the concept, where in the dream, every minute is an hour. Also, I've recently read a prequel to the upcoming TRON film, that revolves around the idea of attempting to share time between two worlds, one moving in our normal time, and a second, moving hundreds of times faster.
This becomes the ultimate question: what shall we have to do to gain this ability to stretch our time, and once gained, would you be willing to trade moments in one reality for ages in another? This begs another question of 'What IS reality'? As much as I loathe quoting or citing something currently as cliché as The Matrix, one can't ignore the point they were trying to make, the premise they created as the base of that entire franchise: Reality is whatever your mind says it is.
I say, 'Bring it on', and 'Where do I sign up'. If I were given an opportunity to spend the first ten years of my life in normal reality 'having a childhood', and then the next ten stretched into either decades or centuries, where I could constantly be learning, experiencing, growing intellectually and maturing as a person into sometime hopefully better, wiser… I would willingly make that sacrifice. Ten years of mortality for a few hundred years of experience and information. Even if it's only a simulation, wouldn't that be preferred? You come out the other end only physically being a young man or woman, but with the mind of someone who has seen and done it all.
My conclusion is that I feel like there is something on the other side of these sheets of glass and metal, not a sense of immortality not yet, but instead a sense of prolonged life. If a man could life through one set of mistakes, and apply what he's learned to a fresh, new set of circumstances, wouldn't the world be better for it? Would we not better feel charity for each other and humility for ourselves?
My question is, if you could, would you?
So let me create the setting for you… I currently sit in front of my MacBook Pro, to which I've just freshly installed World of WarCraft, ran my updates, and am now sitting here debating whether to login and dive headfirst into an online reality.
And then I realize the problem: for every minute I'm lost in a virtual world, I lose a minute in our tangible, shared reality.
This is worrisome for me.
A very long time ago, I realized that the most valuable thing someone can spend is time. It's the one thing that there is always less of, and until we as a species can copy our consciousnesses into pocket sized super computers and become no longer tethered to this shell of biological matter, we shall always be akin to a lit fuse, leading not to some sort of explosive, but instead to an infinite black nothingness.
I believe that we as a culture are becoming obsessed with this idea, although we're not specifically conscious of it. As far back as history itself, we've looked beyond this world of light and air and promise and pain into the realm of ideas, dreams, and a place where time has much less meaning, sometimes none at all.
As I see it, we currently experience our reality as a 1:1 ratio. 1 second equals 1 second. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could somehow trick our brains into experiencing thirty or fifty times as much? Where one minute is transmuted into a half an hour, or even a whole hour? We would trade a minute for a full day, an hour for full months at a time, and days for years?
The recent blockbuster film Inception briefly explores the concept, where in the dream, every minute is an hour. Also, I've recently read a prequel to the upcoming TRON film, that revolves around the idea of attempting to share time between two worlds, one moving in our normal time, and a second, moving hundreds of times faster.
This becomes the ultimate question: what shall we have to do to gain this...