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There's a video on that. The end of the universe: https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA This is so weird to think that for most of its life

• webkike 5y ago
  Super Mario bros is pretty fun
  • lemonberry 5y ago
    I imagined this as a modern buddhist story: The student approaches their master lamenting the meaninglessness of everything. The master, "Super Mario bros is pretty fun". Enlightenment ensues.
    • itronitron 5y ago
      And then two schools of Buddhism diverged, one favoring Super Mario Bros and the other Super Mario Bros 2
      • rbanffy 5y ago
        I hate both, but Super Mario 64 is great.
    • handrous 5y ago
      Life before enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water. Life after enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water.
    • jsolson 5y ago
      Without going into details that would spoil things, the TV series "The Good Place" touches on this idea, although it's Madden rather than Mario.
  • xamde 5y ago
    CATS ARE NICE (Death in Discworld)
• deleted 5y ago
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• lemonberry 5y ago
  "Nothing matters" This is true in the biggest sense of the word. But it's also false. We all have things that matter to us and the various communities that we belong to. In some ways, to me anyway, it's very liberating: life as a blank canvas to imbue it with the meaning we want on. That won't resonate with everyone or even most people, but it's motivating for me.
  • malfist 5y ago
    Check out the philosophy of "Thrownness": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrownness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrownness It's a branch, kinda of absurdist. Nothing matters, nothing ever has, but that's liberating, just enjoy and make the most of what comes.
  • krylon 5y ago
    Albert Camus wrote a beautiful (IMHO, at least) book about it, The Myth of Sisyphus. His point, as I understand it, is that nothing matters in the sense that the universe is vast and empty does not care what happens to you or me. But that also means we get to choose what matters to us. Life has no meaning, but it has meaning to us, and we can, in a way, choose what we want it to mean. I agree, I find this perspective very liberating and positive, but I can see how some people might find it bleak.
    • NateEag 5y ago
      In this framework, Stalin and Kim Jong-Il created their own meaning and no one has a basis for saying what they chose is worse than anyone else's choice. To many of us, that is horribly demoralizing.
      • eludwig 5y ago
        >>no one has a basis for saying what they chose is worse than anyone else's choice. Of course they do! If your parents were killed by Stalin you probably have an opinion one way or the other. That is exactly what this thread is talking about.
• simonh 5y ago
  It's about the journey, not the destination.
• bntyhntr 5y ago
  (Simplification, I'm happy and "well-adjusted" whatever that means): I've accepted the fact that my body has an urge to survive and it's not worth (and why would I want to) trying to weigh that against the grand nothingness that my life will amount to. I don't think there's a point to it all but if my body's gonna make me live then I'm gonna live it up. But it is kinda weird.
• eloff 5y ago
  Even on shorter timescales we all die and cease to matter. That doesn't mean life is without meaning. Life is amazing, and terribly short. I wish I could live 1000 more lives, and live them all differently. There's so much I will never do.
  • vidarh 5y ago
    > Even on shorter timescales we all die and cease to matter. If you really want to drive this home, genealogy very quickly shows you how entire families ends up reduced to at most a few lines in archives. The proportion of people who ends up leaving anything of note beyond birth, marriage and death record is minuscule. Even an obituary in a paper is rare at scale. Even most of those who left something behind are all mostly forgotten. E.g. most old novels are rarely if ever read (most new novels are rarely read). The proportion of even the people who are famous today who will be remembered 100 years from now is tiny - if you go back and read old newspapers, the number of people who were famous in their day you'd recognise the names of are a tiny little fraction. One can choose to be depressed about that, are accept that measuring our lives based on whether we'll be remembered is pointless.
    • falcrist 5y ago
      I agree with you. “I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.” — Banksy That idea has been around a lot longer than Banksy, but I disagree. Just because you're not directly recorded in great detail, doesn't mean you didn't have some influence on the world around you. We all contribute in some small way, and our influence spreads out like ripples in a pond. I like how John Donne said it: "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
    • eloff 5y ago
      Yes, focusing on your legacy and being remembered is pointless. It's also not going to bring you any joy specifically because you won't be around to appreciate it. I think live a good life, treat others well, try to leave things a little better off than you found them, and enjoy the short time you have. We waste time on so many things that don't matter and don't bring us joy - as if we had infinite time, but we don't.
• deleted 5y ago
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• kibwen 5y ago
  Is there an axiom of your personal philosophy that causes you to conclude that something must persist for infinite time in order to possess meaning?
  • stackbutterflow 5y ago
    I can try. If the result of doing something vs doing nothing is indistinguishable after a certain time, does it matter that it ever happened?
    • sjaak 5y ago
      Turn it around. If the result of doing something vs doing nothing /is/ distinguishable at some point in time, does the choice matter? Yes, it does at some point. Granted: it doesn’t matter at /most other points/ in time, sure. But it’s something.
    • cortesoft 5y ago
      Why wouldn’t it? I feel like things matter MORE when they don’t last forever. If something lasts forever, then each moment isn’t important, because you will have infinite more moments of the same thing. Only when something is limited does it have specialness.
    • rbanffy 5y ago
      It depends on your perspective. If you experience time as a spacelike dimension, you can look at this part of spacetime and be amazed at the rich tapestries we, the weirdos who perceive time as timelike, weave with our lives.
    • kibwen 5y ago
      That's a good question, and I'm certainly not trying to suggest that there exists a right answer. My thoughts are that the formulation assumes the perspective of an observer outside of the system, treating the system as a sort of black box, waiting for the system to produce some sort of signal. And because our current understanding of heat death means that the "signal" will always be something indistinguishably meaningless, the outside observer (who cannot inspect the inner workings of the system) is free assume that, from their perspective, nothing of meaning occurred inside the system. But even if we assume the above to be true, this is still compatible with an alternative interpretation: from the perspective of an observer inside the system, we may distinguish differences in the system and may find meaning in those differences. Although that's "may find meaning", not "will find meaning"; determining the meaning of one's existence is intensely personal. However, given the above axiom, I don't believe it precludes finding meaning.
• ansible 5y ago
  Thinking about this stuff is what prompted my thinking about things like suicide. The Universe is so vast. So much space, most of it with only the barest wisp of gas. Most of the solar systems we see in the night sky may not have life (we don't know yet). And yet here we are, a rare event in a vast Universe. In the end it doesn't matter what you do. What you accomplish or did not accomplish. What awards were won or lost, life goals achieved or not. Everything you can see (including the stars in the sky), everything you have ever heard about will be less than dust at some point in the far future. No statues will survive, no history books, no songs of glory. The stars will wink out, the galaxies red-shift past the point of visibility as they rush away from us. It will eventually be a vast, empty and quiet expanse, as the last of the black holes slowly evaporate. But right here, right now, you are alive and able to experience the Universe. Yes, you may be in a shitty situation now, but you are still alive and you still have possibilities to experience something wonderful. It won't last, it never lasts, but that isn't the point. We all have to appreciate what we do have, when we have it. Some people are in truly shitty situations, and legitimately have no way out, with no possible means to create even a little happiness for themselves. But for everyone else thinking of ending things prematurely, I urge you to consider how rare and precious you are. If you can give even a little kindness to someone else, it will have been worth it, because that's all that really matters, on our journey to infinity.
  • rbanffy 5y ago
    We live on some of the nicest and most interesting part of all of spacetime. I cherish every moment, even knowing our names and deeds will be long forgotten (at least I hope some of mine are) well before the first proton decays.
  • allendoerfer 5y ago
    It helps to think of time as a dimension. Sure, you, anyone or anything will not last measured on this dimension. But it still has a span. You would not call objects meaningless or less beautiful just because they physically end at some point in space. Why is time so different? It is just the fourth dimension of their shape, giving them a more unique character.
• unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
  I've been enjoying the kurzgesagt collection of videos[1] which discusses the same phenomena, and how we literally can never travel to large swaths of the universe. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkD5SeuwzM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkD5SeuwzM
• kubanczyk 5y ago
  Chances are it is a simulated universe, so no need to be so grim. (No sarcasm.)
  • morpheos137 5y ago
    What would the universe be a simulation of? What is the practical difference between a simulation and the real world.
• majormajor 5y ago
  If this is all we get, if there's no point of life outside of life, it's all the more important to treat it preciously. If someone ends your life or abuses you, you don't get a second round.
• ryandvm 5y ago
  The Last Question (by Isaac Asimov) is my favorite take on this topic by far. https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
• ud_0 5y ago
  > Like what's even the point of all this, of life, of us, if in the end nothing matters, everything decays into nothingness. I don't understand this reasoning. If the universe had a different end state, or if it collapsed in on itself only to erupt again, would that make any difference to the meaning of your life or that of our civilization? Probably not, because things still end. It seems to me that you'd arrive at this conclusion of meaninglessness in any case. The thing is, while the universe may not care, there are many things we as humans do care about. They have meaning because we give them meaning. Isn't that liberating?
  • goatlover 5y ago
    > They have meaning because we give them meaning. Isn't that liberating? Liberating from what? There being some objective or higher meaning to it all? Would that be oppressive? While I agree that we give things meaning, it's all rather arbitrary and empty to think about it that way.
    • ud_0 5y ago
      > Would that be oppressive? To be ascribed one authoritative meaning and purpose from outside is probably the definition of totalitarian oppression, yes. You may argue that it's oppression in a delightful state of bliss, or that you much prefer a life on rails. That's hard to argue against, because it's a matter of personal preference. But if you would prefer there to be an external authority who imbues meaning, what in turn then gives meaning to that authority? > While I agree that we give things meaning, it's all rather arbitrary and empty to think about it that way. Again, only if you feel it's empty. Then: yes, it is. To me it doesn't feel that way, so to me it isn't. It feels vast and full of possibilities. And also sad that we're such primitive creatures with such short and hard lives. I'd rather I was born in a few hundred years to better take advantage of the opportunities of existence.
• falcrist 5y ago
  The idea of having some ultimate meaning is (as far as we can tell) an invention of the human mind. Whether life has meaning, whether it needs to have meaning, or even whether the meaning of life is predicated on influencing the universe is up to you to determine. If you asked 10 philosophers and religious leaders about the meaning of life, you'd probably get 100 different answers ranging from "seeking knowledge", "enjoying life", "serving [god or supernatural force]", "making others happy", to "there is no meaning".
  • mod 5y ago
    I would hope to hear ten answers of "I don't know."
    • falcrist 5y ago
      I fear you'd be disappointed. The religious leaders in particular are likely to be very gnostic about this topic.
• fumar 5y ago
  This topic always brings to mind Asimov’s short story, The Last Question. The story spans the life of the knowable universe. https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
  • coldcode 5y ago
    Such a great story, no one writes like this any more sadly.
  • Retric 5y ago
    Amusingly we actually have an answer to that question. It’s possible to extract energy from expanding space time. Though if it keeps accelerating eventually even chemical bonds break down as electro magnetism isn’t enough.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  The Universe (humans) gained consciousness and asked ‘Who made me?’
• breuleux 5y ago
  I'd argue that life is its own point. If you organize your metaphysics in such a way that nothing matters unless it leads to a future that matters, then nothing can possibly matter, because by definition value is always postponed to "the future". But you can never get there, because once you do, it becomes "the present". Basically, you can't say that the value of every moment depends entirely on the value of future moments, that just prevents the actualization of any value. The present has to count for something.
  • TylerLives 5y ago
    We mostly find meaning in moving towards a goal. Once we attain it, it no longer brings us happiness. Having no goals or thinking that some future reward will change our lives doesn't seem to lead to good outcomes. It's strange, but "becoming" itself is meaningful.
    • breuleux 5y ago
      Surely some goals can bring happiness when they are achieved? I have made some things that I like, and I am happy when I recall that I made them myself. Or if your goal is to cure cancer, and you succeed, wouldn't that bring you happiness? Sure, you can set other goals for yourself, but that doesn't erase the satisfaction. Either way, my point was that if your goal is to leave a permanent, meaningful mark on the universe, first, that's borderline delusional, second, the actualization of the goal is basically infinitely far in the future. Personally I'd rather pursue goals that can be achieved within my lifetime and aren't some crazy improper integral over the lifetime of the universe...
      • TylerLives 5y ago
        > Or if your goal is to cure cancer, and you succeed, wouldn't that bring you happiness? You would, for a time, and then you would get used to it. People in the past used to struggle to find food. Today almost everyone in the first world countries can eat as much as they'd like, but do we wake up happy and grateful because we have food? I do agree that not all of our happiness comes from moving towards goals in the future, but a lot of it does. > Personally I'd rather pursue goals that can be achieved within my lifetime and aren't some crazy improper integral over the lifetime of the universe... Me too, but I don't think that you have to choose. Even if you have some less realistic goals, it's still better to focus on the immediate problems.
• orthecreedence 5y ago
  There's a really cool movie called Aniara that explores this a bit. It's pretty dark, though.