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Because it means that nothing humans build matters and even if we beat all other obstacles and colonize the galaxy it’s all for nothing.
by edgyquant 4y ago
Because it means that nothing humans build matters and even if we beat all other obstacles and colonize the galaxy it’s all for nothing.
- jurimasa 4y agoBut you are going to die. Why did you study then?
- Jackim 4y agoSo the only things that are worthwhile are permanent?
- DeRock 4y agoYou’re going to die too, does your life not matter? Everything is temporary, and in one sense, that is what makes it special.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoWhy on earth would the heat death of the universe on such a time scale mean everything is pointless. We are the ones that create meaning in our actions. It's not given to us by the universe, it's up to us to decide with our consciousness. Meaning will always be on the scale of human lifetimes. The ultimate fate of the universe is irrelevant to that.
- edgyquant 4y ago>We are the ones that create meaning in our actions This is your opinion. Most people are religious and derive meaning from an outside source.
- the_af 4y ago> Most people are religious and derive meaning from an outside source. People who are religious believe their lives are meaningful even if the physical universe ends. In fact, for some mainstream religions they are counting on it eventually ending.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y agoI think even most religions ask actions of their followers. Living a life aligned with their religious teaching is an action that created meaning.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoThey are making a choice of what religion they believe.
- alasdair_ 4y ago>Meaning will always be on the scale of human lifetimes. There is a nonzero possibility that "human lifetime" becomes unfathomably long eventually.
- Qem 4y agoProbably not. Even if we succeed in stopping senescence completely, most people would still die of accidents in a scale of hundreds to thousands of years, eventually.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoI can guarantee you your individual contribution would stop mattering far earlier than that. Not saying that as a slight, but for realities sake. If what we do matters in 100 years after we die we're doing better than most of entire human history. It's the height of hubris to think that it's going to be heat death that finishes our accomplishments off. Better to realign expectations to something less grand than "have an effect that last forever".
- edgyquant 4y agoYea I will, but the entirety of all earth life won’t. Anyway it’s not me, I’m just responding to a question with the obvious answer.
- mannykannot 4y agoFair enough, but the reply you got is just as obvious. Update: That may be a bit harsh, so here's something to balance it: there's a sense in which what has been achieved is timeless, regardless of what the future brings.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MichaelZuo 4y agoHuh? How is that obvious for "entirety of all earth life"?
- mannykannot 4y agoBy "fair enough", I was mostly thinking of edgyquant's second sentence. With regard to "entirety of all earth life", I think the point here is that these are all subjective opinions - The universe either will or will not undergo heat death regardless of what any of us think about it. Obviousness is an opinion, and in my opinion, SketchySeaBeast's attitude to the possibility of heat death is just as obvious as edgyquant's, and there is no objective reason to adopt one over the other.
- birriel 4y agoI've always tried to reconcile this idea with the hope that some future advanced civilization (maybe even evolved from humans) might figure out a way to "escape" the Universe, by manipulating spacetime itself, "accessing" other dimensions, &c.
- wolfram74 4y agoLiving up to your name there, nothing was for anything anyway. Meaning is entirely self constructed whether or not the heat death, the big crunch, or the big rip are going concerns. If you think the meaning of life is "being excellent to each other" that's totally achievable, and from a pragmatic perspective, likely to make things go pretty smoothly while we run out the clock.
- BucketsMcG 4y agoThat's right. Liberating, isn't it?
- edgyquant 4y agoMaybe if we had any reason to believe it was true. It’s just an apocalyptic prediction and nothing more.
- bmitc 4y agoNothing we build does matter. Technology is not a purpose.
- Zach_the_Lizard 4y agoI met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
- slowmovintarget 4y agoPercy Shelley I like that one.
- HPMOR 4y agoI wrote my Cornell essay on it… guess where I am now!
- Frog0fWar 4y agoThis is so much time that humanity (if still alive) could advance technology so much that we would be able to workaround heat death too. This is borderline sci-fi, but I believe we could bend almost any known laws of Physics with enough advancement.
- safety1st 4y agoI used to say this sort of thing a lot. It's a variation of the main idea behind existential nihilism: that life has no intrinsic meaning or value, and any meaning you assign to it is arbitrary. As far as I could tell it was correct but it bothered me enough that I started reading philosophy and looking for counter-arguments. I never discovered the meaning of life, but have definitely changed my point of view. I now think the belief that life is meaningless is a consequence of epistemic arrogance, not a rational conclusion. How can we say existence has no meaning when we don't really understand existence in the first place? There's way too much we don't understand about the universe, the laws which govern it, and even ourselves to draw any firm conclusions. I do know that hundreds of great thinkers have spent many collective man-centuries considering and writing about this question, and come up with far more interesting output than if they'd just punted on the question. I think if we punt it says more about us than about the question itself. I'm partial to what is arguably Nietzsche's main idea, or how I interpret it anyway: that as society's belief in religion wanes, we've barely even started to discover what we're really here for. The greatest challenge in our era of civilization is deciding whether or not we're ready to find out.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago"The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide." -- Sean Carroll https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-life-arose-on-earth-and-how-a-singularity-might-bring-it-down/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-life-a...
- Gooblebrai 4y ago> How can we say existence has no meaning when we don't really understand existence in the first place? Do we need to understand something to assert if it has meaning or not?