Immortality

Spoiler: not very EVE Online-related!

Spending so much time away from EVE reduced the game in my mind to its few core concepts, and those individual aspects stewed away in the magical cauldron I call a brain, and lots of interesting things spewed out. One thing I contemplated in relation to real life was immortality.

Whenever the question “What superpower would you want?” pops up, I’m always the guy that says immortality. Why?

The main qualm about immortality assuming you’re the only immortal is that you live whilst those around you pass away, even loved ones. Could I withstand that emotional turmoil? It’s hard to answer. I could say right now with confidence I won’t spill my secrets if I’m tortured, but if the torturer is creative enough, I could more than likely be willing to tell them everything.

So how will I know I will be able to keep my sanity as I live whilst the world progresses through its slow meander into the deep, dark unknowns of the future?

I don’t. -grin- And that’s exactly what makes it so appealing. Chasing the unknown seems to be something that strikes a cord within me, whether it’s diving into a maths problem headfirst and swimming through numbers to find the answer, reading through countless fantasy books and exploring other worlds, to flying through wormhole space in an online spaceships game, to even just gazing at the sky every once in a while.

I spent quite a few nights contemplating what it’d be like, trying to imagine being immortal. The negatives are outweighed by the sheer amount of possibilities. As a certain pair of step brothers would’ve said…

I could witness thousands not just a fleeting century, but whole millennia. Thousands, tens of thousands of years. My narrow-mindedness could hopefully expand over those years until I can grasp the true essence of the world and the human race and become some kind of prophetic old monk with an ancient beard who knows everything.

Am I being ungrateful to fate and destiny, for wanting something other than what I’ve been given? Am I just some hopeless romantic seeking to defy the stars? Perhaps both, but nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder what it’d be like never to die.

Anyway, beyond the initial trauma of processing your own immortality, the next hurdle would be time itself. What happens when you get bored? What happens to your concept of time, of life? Living forever would mean you eventually experience everything your body is capable of experiencing, perhaps even find a limit to how much you can fit in your brain. What occurs after that point?

Do you feel utter satisfaction, or utterly destroyed? Do you feel like you can peacefully live another thousand years, or wish you had left your natural lifespan untouched?

Again, I don’t know the answers to such questions.

But again, I would love to find out. I guess curiousity gets the better of me even with the doors that perhaps should remain closed.

In conclusion, I’m very curious to see how long it will take me to change my opinion of immortality. Perhaps in a thousand years I’ll look back at this post and laugh at such childish (ancient?) thoughts. Or perhaps I’ll scoff in a mere decade at ever wanting to live forever. The anticipation is killing me. Ah well, all will be revealed in time.

So much for that…

Well! That Minecraft category really took off… NOT. Just deleted it.

I’ll leave the one and only post on Minecraft there as a reminder never to try bite on something that will chew my face off. Lets just say I’m not a hard worker at all, despite what I’ve thought of myself. The challenge for me was trying to work with plugins, making them all work nicely with each other, have a MySQL database linked with the server, and a nice website which I skimped on with a shoddy subreddit, all whilst knowing nothing about how Minecraft plugins worked, knowing nothing about MySQL. Halfway through, I also realised why a subreddit just didn’t cut it as the sole out-of-game source of game information for the server.

Also, every minute I spent working on Minecraft, was a minute my urge to return to EVE grew.

So a few days ago, I dropped my pickaxe and re-entered my pod.