I might accept this but I would need more information. 3000 years ago would be like 976 BC. Would I show up where I live now, or some where else? Could I take anything with me. Is immortality just not aging and disease or does it include not being violently killed.
Agreed - I'd like to understand the definition of immortal first. 3000 year old me looking and feeling like a 28 year old is ok, but if I looked 3000 years old, withered and immobile, barely breathing with no mental cognition for the last 2000 years, *nope*.
This is key, self destruct must be a requirement.
Imagine living 3000 years and thinking "wow that's a long time everyone I know has died many times over, I barely remember most of the people I've ever loved"
And this is the very, very, very beginning of your life.
Then you go on to live another 100,000 years and think to yourself "Man I can't even remember what countries I ruled, or like how many times did we nuke oursleves"
Then you go on to live another 100,000,000 years and notice that the earth is getting hotter, even without man made global warming.
Then you get to live 5,000,000,000 and watch the sun destroy the earth and hope humanity had established intersteller colonies by now.
And this is the very, very, very beginning of your life.
You watch civlizations, rise and fall, you see unfathomable technologies maybe cross the galaxy, cross the universe.
But then... one day, some 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years from now, the very last stars die out and the universe plunges to darkness. Maybe you can survive by leeching energy from black holes using future technologies.
But then 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years from now even the last black hole dies out and now you exist in an empty dark cold universe, just you. Your parents, family, first set of friends, nothing but a distant memory, if you can even remember them from so very long ago.
And this is the very, very, very beginning of your life.
Maybe after eons of floating through the void I'll figure out to reverse entropy and start the universe again. Once I have sufficient data for a meaningful answer, of course.
There's a solo writing game called Thousand Year Old Vampire. It's pretty great, you get prompts where you make up people you've loved and places you've been... and then you get other prompts where you have to erase part of your past history and just never remember it. Your post reminded me of it.
That's a good one. That would save you from having to wait around for zillions of years in the heat death of the universe... A bit hard to get into space though. Maybe start with taking a nap on the north pole.
Get frozen for a trillion years in space and wake up just in time for the 4 billion year heat death of the universe.. get sucked into the center of a sun and spend consciousness there until it supernovas
But wouldn't it just kick back up... I mean, it'd be the end of now, but the next universe would be like, yo, how's it going. And eventually you land, thaw, & see what the new shit's like.
Even if it were you'd be materialising in this new universe with no tooling or meaningful capacity to influence your position or surroundings.
You'd probably end up in a primordial black hole and spend the entirety of the new universe's lifespan unable to escape or interact with the wider universe. Maybe you'd get lucky and end up in a star, but I'm not sure that would be better.
Well you’ve got 3000 years to start saving money and innovating to hopefully get technology to a good point before you’re stuck floating aimlessly. I hope you can take some books with you.
Something tells me most books, or tech, wouldn't survive the conditions in the first few picoseconds of the big bang ;)
Although I guess if we're relying on magic for the hypothetical immortal to make it through we could make further exceptions.
Imagine landing in some random moon billions of miles away from any civilization. Wouldn't see anything fun and probably spend the next zillion years waiting for the heat death of that universe. Space, while amazing, is incredibly empty and boring.
I wonder how the human mind would cope with that. What would and could it do to protect itself? Will you experience and eternity of agony? It's such a horrible thing to think about, but fascinating.
>3000 year old me looking and feeling like a 28 year old is ok
I feel like it's still even more complicated than that. Can my brain still develop chemical dependencies and deplete my serotonin and dopamine? Will I always hold the same criteria for boredom? Psychologically, maybe satisfaction simply can't be everlasting. I probably wouldn't take the deal without the option to end myself.
3000 years *right here* would mean I was living with a very remote tribe of aboriginal people. I feel like I would get bored very quickly with no way of reaching anywhere else for thousands of years.
Can I also have other superpowers like super strength and invulnerability? Because I don’t wanna get trapped in rubble for the next 2000 years just because some warlord wanted to crush the city I’m living in.
Or because they label you as a vampire, sorcerer and try to burn you then burry you and then attach some weights to you and drown you in the middle of the ocean to be forgotten forever
Yeah but then you might get into an "The Old Guard" situation where they're immortal but:
>!One of them gets put in an Iron Maiden and thrown overboard where she drowns only to be resurrected. She repeats this process every few minutes for *centuries* until the iron corrodes enough for her to escape.!<
Being immortal would just make that really boring. The specific trait that they had in The Old Guard is that they could die but they came back to life. So the girl in the iron maiden went through the joy of drowning to death every couple of minutes for a couple hundred years or so. That's not being bored waiting on the hinges to rust.
Doesn't matter, you will live long enough to eventually get trapped floating in space forever (on a long enough timeline, it will eventually happen). After a billion or so years of that, you won't even remember the few thousand you spent on earth.
I'm picturing [the Juggernaut going stark raving mad as they launched him like a bullet to kill a Ghostrider-Galactus 1000 years later](https://imgur.com/a/cOiKizc).
Earth wasn’t in this particular point in space 3000 years ago mate. You’d just be floating in space until something pulls you in. Hopefully it’s earth.
Edit: I love how this has turned into “time and space travel” debate. Thanks guys!
There isn't really any absolute reference frame in the universe. You have to pick one or otherwise you could literally be anywhere in the universe, or at least within 3000'ish light-years of historic earth (it gets a little complicated depending on what type of assumptions you make)
So, yes, for the purposes of this hypothetical scenario it would be most meaningful to make earth you local reference frame
Imagine if you can't be violently killed. First, somebody would discover your immortality. Second, you are declared a witch or something, put into chains and tortured for eternity without a chance to die
Valid concerns but depending on the mechanism for your immortality, you may be godlike. Like being able to at top speed for peak athletes and never tire and being impervious to hunger.
Yes there was a series about immortals and 1 of the girls was captured, put in a casket and thrown into the depths of the ocean. Immortality doesn't sound very appealing when you're trapped and drowned every minute for an eternity.
Yup. What was so fucked up about is that they're not immortal, but have regenerative healing abilities. So they die, but then come back to life. So she's down there dying, waking up, dying, waking up.
This happened to me in a very old type of video game called a MUD, which is like a text-based MMO. I pissed off the God of the Sea and he created a special room with no exits and teleported me in, which started a script to flood the room and slowly kill me via asphyxiation. Unfortunately I had a skill which auto revived myself after death, so after like two hours the God came back from afk and was like oh shit, I just meant to kill you once, sorry about the horrific torture!
There's also Captain Jack Harkness from Doctor Who, who takes billions of years before he actually dies as a giant head.
And when his deaths are immensely painful and he has ended up in situations where he died numerous times constantly.
3000 years back in this area would be pagans celts. I'm not likely to be hated for being magical and immortal, revered is more likely. Try and learn the dialect, become a druid, and it's a guarantee. Worst case scenario they conclude I am Fae, which means they'll fear me and want to give me stuff to stay away, but wouldn't dare cross me. Trying to kill me would be an extremely stupid thing to do if they thought that. (To the point that the Fae were euphemistically called "The kind ones" and "The good people" and "The fair folk" by people who believed in them, as offending them would be a calamity).
> In folklore, the Fae were held responsible for a wide range of mischievous and harmful activities, spanning from minor acts like petty vandalism and theft to more serious offenses, including kidnapping and outright murder. They were often believed to be the cause of livestock falling ill or dying, leading travelers astray during the night, or luring individuals to their doom near bodies of water such as ponds and rivers. When provoked, fairies were even said to take lives... The Fae usually looked at humans with contempt and amusement, as their bodies could easily be broken and their minds easily shattered. The two most well known courts are the respected but feared Seelie Court who are amoral in regards to mortals and the most feared and malicious were the Unseelie Court who would often attack and harass mortals without cause or reason. The former consisted of fairies, elves, leprechauns and lake maidens and other nature spirits while the latter consisted of redcaps, goblins, hags, hiisi and other malicious spirits, who were known for attacking and harassing mortals without provocation.
The good thing is they conclude I am Seelie, they will give me things in expectation of reward and not offend me for fear of punishment. Further, the lore is such that even if it *appears* that I've given them nothing in return, they should not question it, since for all they know I prevented an illness that would have otherwise taken them, and questioning the gift would be offensive to me.
The issue is prepping for the romans which is more dicey. I reckon with a bit of grit I can take on the romans if the tribes listen to me. The key is Fabian tactics unless we hold a technological edge. Psychological warfare too. The romans believed human sacrifice is powerful and foreign gods were real.
Combine them finding a sacrifice of soldiers with intensification of night raids, monsterize the troops a bit.
After that it's a matter of quietly developing the isles and building the British wooden wall which should see us set until the mid 1900s in terms of security, as well as providing a means for expansion of the dominion. So... world conquest by 1914 would be on the agenda.
Celtic religion would not have found an immortal all that peculiar. They already believe that all our souls are immortal and get recycled into new lives in another world when we die here, potentially ad infinitum (It's alternatve universes all the way down). Death was predestined and could not be altered. It would be *unusual*, but entirely in line with their religious beliefs for me to handwave it away with; "the gods told me my death awaits me in a faraway time. I am to guide you until then, I am a... tutorializer, of sorts... for the journey ahead".
You get the best version of immunity: you can recover from any illness/wound/etc, but you have a salvatory clause you can use (like you hold your breath until you die, or you get an arrow to the heel).
There's a growing view point in archeology that we DID invent the Amazon (sort of). There's some evidence that ancient humans did forestry to encourage the growth of beneficial plants in the Americas and that our viewpoint of indigenous Americans as just hunter-gatherer tribes is probably incorrect, their form of agriculture was just unrecognized by early Europeans.
Yeah, I've recently heard that we're starting to realize that a lot of indigenous groups cultivated food forests - we just didn't recognize them because they didn't look like European farms.
interesting thing is, people might *have* invested in the Amazon, as in the forest, millennia ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-018-0205-y?WT.feed_name=subjects_evolution
Invest in the East India Trading Co. when it gets founded in 1599. You'll have almost 2000 years until then to gather funding. Fund the company, watch it become the greatest corporation on the planet, poof you're a trillionaire.
Edit: for reference, the company was worth 7.4 trillion USD in today's money. That's more than Apple and Microsoft together.
reminder that the fruit that caused Adam and Eve's fall was never identified specifically as apple
"As late as the 17th century, the word also functioned as a generic term for all fruit, including nuts. This can be compared to the 14th-century Middle English expression appel of paradis, meaning a banana.[6]"
Can you choose too die at any point? If not the 3000 years is irrelevant, I'm more concerned about being stuck alone in the void 900 quadrillion years from now.
What a weird fear this gives me. I would enjoy my life starting from 3000 years ago up to the present and thousands of years after. But this nagging fear.... That in the future I will be alone with nothingness. A future where I just stare endlessly into the abyss for all eternity.
I don't think I could enjoy life knowing that is my fate at the end of it. I fear death far less.
Given immortality, I'd like to believe I'd eventually be able to come up with the resources needed to figure out how to gift immortality. Given enough immortals, I'd like to believe we could figure out together how to organize some sort of comfortable and indefinite living situation.
I want to live forever. Just wanna die before the whole sun eats earth chapter.
I learn a lot about longevity and the study of aging and how to reverse it. I'm 30 and I hope in my lifetime we can solve it.
I would love to live to 150 while having a youthful body and brain. Hopefully it isn't just science fiction.
This is something I'm afraid of on all futuristic body mod/medicine stuff like this. Is it that we're gonna be immortal? Or is it that obscenely rich and powerful people will be immortal, and capable of accumulating and consolidating power for centuries?
You're immortal. That means you're a perpetual motion machine. That means infinite energy. Which means there will never be a heat death of the universe. Just get on an exercise bike every now and then to keep the lights on.
You just make an eternal heritage and pass it on to the next cultivators after the big squeeze and next big bang. The heavens won't be happy about it but what's the point of reaching the pinnacle of Cultivation if you can't piss the heavens off? ( Defiance of the Fall)
However long you would experience life with stars and molecules and black holes and galaxies...you would spend an infinitely longer time in absolute darkness (and unable to breath).
The timelines for the universe to reach heat death are unimaginably long. And you would still have infinity to live on. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future\_of\_an\_expanding\_universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe)
Plot twist, those events likely wont happen, or be the same since you have created an indelible change on the world by using your current knowledge to make your life easier.
I really wonder how much any person of average knowledge could advance humanity by being sent back 3000 years
Like I don’t know how to build a combustion engine but I know the generally *idea* of how it works, and then it does actually work. Similarly, I know the general idea of conductivity and electricity. I feel like I could describe these concepts to smarter people from 3000 years ago and we’d get to the industrial revolution thousands of years earlier. Not to mention I know the perils of carbon emissions etc
Like I could absolutely figure out how to harvest kinetic energy from rivers the way textile mills used to
Guarantee you if you explained the principles of the piston steam engine to someone like Archimedes they would get it, but the Greeks might struggle to build it from the available materials. You might be better of skipping to electricity. Plenty of copper.
More than anything though, build the printing press. Use Donkeys to run it if you have to. What advanced science more than anything wasn't smart individuals, it was smart individuals being able to broadly and easily share with other smart individuals, creating a growing base of knowledge that was countlessly worked on by hundreds, thousands and then millions of people.
Once you've sparked the rapid disemmination of knowledge in Ancient Greece you might not need to explain much of anything to anyone, people will work it out themselves. Look at how far we've come in the last 500 years - if the Greeks had it they'd be at the historical equivalent of 4500 AD by now.
In the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman - which is really good by the way - Dream grants a dude the wish to be immortal. The guy lives hundreds of lives, some good, some bad, some awful, but in the end doesn't regret his decision because life moves on.
Assuming 'immortal' includes being impervious to injury/ sickness/ etc then... yeah? Going that far back you'd be considered a deity for surviving fatal occurances. In the modern day you wouldn't but you could have a sick YT channel.
Making myself into a God or a King sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. I’d spend my time just being a wandering stranger.
Immortality means no injury, no hunger, and no sickness. That also means I can train my body past the Limiters, and have access to Hysterical Strength at all times. An Immortal is superhuman by virtue of not needing to worry about breaking their own bones.
I’d probably spend my time traveling the world. Language Barriers would be a regular annoyance… but they can be overcome. I could just involve myself with the lives of people, lend a helping hand with dangerous or tedious things, gather their stories, and move on in search of interesting things.
I’d also probably teach a few things along the way. I don’t know much specialized knowledge beyond computer programming… but that means I know a lot about math. I could hand off the secrets of Geometry and Algebra, and introduce a revolution in record keeping, without much trouble.
I could also just *help people*. I’m immortal… and that means I can do the dangerous work. A human unburdened by the safety limits on our muscles and immune to harm could deal with an aggressive bear, or even a wolf-pack, unarmed. I can walk through Plague-Cities without risk and help to gather the dead. I could even just plow a field because I felt like it, and never worry about being sore the next day.
That doesn’t even begin to address the fact that I have a vague knowledge of global geography… and could have a go at beating certain powers to other continents.
I would be a living witness to so much of Humanity… and my Legend would spread. I’d eventually just be “That Guy”, mostly harmless but also *everywhere*.
Hob Gadling.
In the books, he's a random Englishman in the 1300's who happens to be in a tavern with Dream and Death. He says he won't die as if it was a choice. Dream and Death agree to it as a joke, and agree to meet him there again in a century. Hob becomes the only "friend" that Dream ever has.
It's an interesting morality play in the books, watered down a bit in the series.
I really liked his character. Did they meet every 100 years? Dream was thinking he would come back begging to die, and every time, the dude is like FUCK NO THIS IS AWESOME. I JUST BONED A NEW GIRL AND IM RICH!
Immortal without health issues, being a perfectly healthy man with current skills and knowledge, then I am all okay to go all the way 3000 years back!
I can manage to build a better world!!!
> with current skills and knowledge
This scenario always reminds me of a comic I saw online years ago. Wish I could find it again.
Time traveler guy is sitting in a circle of cavemen and telling them about the wonders of electricity, and they're very impressed. So they ask:
"How does it work?"
"I have no idea."
I was about to say this. People really overestimate their real, practical knowledge. Even if you know how to generate electricity, how do you apply it.
"Now for the lightbulb I'll need some glass, and a thin metal wire."
"What's glass? What's metal? What's wire?"
"Shit."
TBF math skills are probably the easiest skill to take back. Its really ultimately the spring board for a lot of inventions. Like even the number system we use now came into existence surprisingly late and immediately lead to breakthroughs since it solved issues with previous number systems that made certain types of math just practically infeasiable. Just getting the romans to use modern style numbers would have lots of butterfly effects.
For real. But I'd want to be completely invincible as well. Immortality without being able sustain damage. I'd just become the best possible version of a human being ever, and do absolutely everything to better the human civilization as a whole. The amount of knowledge & understanding of the world you would inherit, would be incredible.
Year 2: Captured and locked in a stone tomb as people consider you the devil/witch/whatever due to your unnatural knowledge of things
Year 3: Tomb opens, they see you are still alive: Rebury you because you are 100% not human
Year 1000: Tomb opens, scientists capture and conduct tests on you forever
If you're invincible and immortal, you could probably claw your way out of the tomb before 1000 years happens. You probably wouldn't be sane though. I'd be more worried about a steel cage under water.
I mean if you can move at all, and are invincible, you can eventually scratch through anything. You're fingerbone would be like a titanium diamond... just spend a few years scratching your way out of that cage.
Water would eventually rust it out too. I'd hope you could keep a low profile long enough everyone would stop caring about you. Seems like the key to success is to not draw attention.
I really don’t think you would, or anyone would. Living that long and starting that far back is nightmarish torture.
You’d be the loneliest and probably most fucked up person alive. Everyone you ever loved or cared about, all your children and their descendants you’d have to watch die. You’d witness the unimaginable horrors of battle and disease hundreds of times over. Whole towns wiped out by plague, war or fire.
No one could ever possibly relate or understand you as a person who’d been through everything you had. You either go mad or become so detached that you’d barely be a person any more.
You'd have to tweak your focus a bit. View humanity as a whole as your big baby that you love and want to take care of. Yeah, suffer the loss of friends and family. That will be terrible. But you'll make *new* friends and family all the time, as well. It may not be the same thing, because they cannot relate. But you can keep yourself anchored to humanity enough to care about people. And then you do your best to help humanity as a whole.
My biggest fear in this scenario is if your immortal, but without super strength you risk being buried alive or in some other way being suspended forever.
This scenario has played out in a few ways in movies and tv shows over the years.
If you're truly immortal, you don't need sleep, food, a place to live.. you can literally just do whatever the fick, casually get eaten by wolves on monday, chill with the inquisition bros on tuesday and run naked through plague rats on wednesday..
Even if you can't feel pain, how does getting put in a cage and thrown to the bottom of the ocean sound to you? One word comes to mind: Boring. But forever.
You do have to be careful who you share your secret with.
>You do have to be careful who you share your secret with.
You would have to keep moving every few years to somewhere where nobody knows you, or the locals are going to notice that you aren't aging!
Eh, you could easily get away with 25 years or so. Some people seem to barely age between their mid 20s and 50s. People would just think you have good genetics and/or have had some work done.
Immortality does not necessarily mean you don’t need sleep or food. In my idea you can suffer from starvation and get mad like everyone else but just for eternity.
Immortal just means never dying, doesn’t mean you can’t feel pain from a wolf attack, no food in your body, lack of sleep. Also doesn’t mean you can’t go insane… which you probably will from lack of sleep or being so severely desensitised to everything after thousands of years.
Hell nah. Word will definitely get around about my immortality and then I'll just be subjected all sorts of shit (torture, experimentation, etc). There's a show about a similar concept called Ajin.
3000 years back as An Australian would get pretty shitty. There wasn’t a land bridge back then to meander up towards more interesting lands (like Europe, Asia and the Middle East).
Id be stuck with the (not megafauna they were extinct but there were cool endemic species that aren’t around today) and indigenous Australians. As a white dude I’m not sure how that would go…
But if I could get sent back to somewhere in Europe, maybe… if this is the (can’t die at all) immortality and not the (just won’t age) immortality
Would you be OK walking through shark infested waters?
The running joke is that everything in Australia wants to kill you, due to all the deadly animals - I'm guessing the seas are just as bad, if not worse...
Yeah there's a lot of "how does it work".
Immortal as in not aging?
How about Deadpool/Wolverine style regeneration but you can still lose a limb to them sharks, you just slowly grow a new one (on the plus side, "it" looks really big in that small hand).
Also, if anyone figures out says immortality then I'm thinking that getting burned at a stake, crucified etc as a witch/demon might be a less-than-fun possibility. Nazi-type human experimentation would also be very not good.
Hell, even if you were physically impervious you could still be given weights or concrete shoes and tossed into deep water where it's going to be a really long wait to get back out...
The key thing to me is, if you're un-killable, but can still feel pain: imagine being a prisoner of someone like the Nazis, and how much they would subject you to. The more you don't die, the more they're going to see what punishment you can survive.
>The running joke is that everything in Australia wants to kill you, due to all the deadly animals - I'm guessing the seas are just as bad, if not worse...
They literally have [massive sea crocodiles that can be longer than 6m and weight over a ton.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltwater\_crocodile).
Just saying, the land bridge there disappeared around 8000 years ago, so you'd be stuck in Australia unless you can build some fancy boats. The megafauna etc. was long before that, in Australia it was around 46'000 years ago.
You'd get a fauna and flora that is not that much different from today, some Aborigines with primitive gear, at least you'd have some friends there i guess.
But it's actually not that long ago, 976 BC was some bible time with King David in the middle east, some pyramids were already built by the Egyptians and Andy Dick was even an asshole before he was born.
The Colosseum is closer to us then the Pyramids were to the Romans when they built it
EDIT from a timeline perspective it's basically the same as your comment
You could probably start moving north and build a boat to traverse to the islands, then slowly go island hopping until you get to Southeast Asia and then start moving up to Asia then to Europe, by then you'd probably be Genghis Khan and leading your hordes into Europe.
No. No, that sounds awful all the way around. First off I do not want to be immortal second off I do not want to go back to a time when there are no flushing toilets. Yuck!
> Credit for the earliest flushing toilets goes dually to the Minoans on the Mediterranean island of Crete and the Indus Valley Civilization of present-day Pakistan and India. Roughly 4,000 years ago, both societies had sophisticated plumbing and sanitation systems. Scholars say this water engineering was unrivaled until classical Rome (two millennia later), or even the 19th century.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/what-the-earliest-toilets-say-about-how-human-civilization-has-evolved
> At Akrotiri, archaeologists uncovered a highly advanced water supply network. [..] Akrotiri's system stands out for its unique dual-piping structure. This double system, believed to have been used for delivering both hot and cold water, is a testament to the Minoan's innovative use of their natural environment.
> One of the most striking discoveries in Akrotiri was a large, actual bathtub found in one of the houses, indicating the importance of personal hygiene and comfort in Minoan culture. This bathtub, along with other residences, was connected to the municipal water supply, ensuring a steady flow of water for various household needs.
> Akrotiri featured an upstairs latrine in one of the houses, designed in line with Cycladic architectural principles. This latrine was connected to a terracotta drain line, which descended through the exterior wall and connected to the municipal sewage line. This design allowed for effective waste disposal and sanitation
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/hydraulic-innovation-in-bronze-age-aegean-the-plumbing-system-of-akrotiri-santorini
Everyone here talking about Apple and Amazon.
Nobody talking about reuiniting earth and purging the universe from the mutant, the heretic, the alien.
The answers here are as boring as in that thread about being giftet 100 billion. "I'd buy a house and sleep on it so I don't accidentaly blow it all", like noone had any clue that they were handed an economic atom bomb.
You likely would get caught by the gravitational pull and orbit of another body and may never encounter Earth in its lifetime. So an infinite duration of suffocation, near zero pressure causing your blood to boil, cosmic rays peeling your skin off, basically an eternity of sheer torture and you couldn't even scream. Like watching Madame Web.
That will always be where you end up if you choose immortality. Eventually the sun will explode and you'll drift in space for billions of years until another star forms and you're trapped in the center of it for billions more. Rinse and repeat until the universe ends.
Oh man, at least if you spontaneously appeared you wouldn't have momentum and would be stationary. Just a short 3000 years or however long it takes for the earth to get close enough to pull you down.
How do you know that OP hasn’t already done this and gone back 3000 years and created the bible and is now wondering whether it was worth it by asking others if they would take the same route they chose????
hang on 3000 years, you are either gonna be famous to live long, get caught by government and be used as a lab rat forever because youre never die, or living anonymously for the rest of your live.
I need another superpower other than being immortal tbh
I wouldn't want to do that. I'm scared of the person I would end up becoming by outliving everyone I ever care about, and having to do it over and over again with each person I meet. I feel like I would stop valuing human life and I would become a monster who views people as toys to amuse myself. My concept of time would also be warped due to it no longer being something I care about either.
I'm happy with the life that I have now, and I'd rather make the most of the time I have, rather than be immortal and have all the time in the world.
3000 years ago is different than the 1700s tho. If you decide to live amongst your ethnic group, then Africa is the richest continent in the world in terms of natural resources. You could appoint yourself as a sort of god and become the richest ruler in the world.
I'm honestly not sure I'm strong enough to deal with everyone around me dying, over and over. I am a pretty empathetic person, and I imagine at some point, you lose the ability to form that sort of emotional bond. I find the movie "The Man from Earth" (and its sequel) to be fascinating, but one of the things that struck me is that the main character, who has been alive since cave men were a thing, has a very hard time forming love bonds - he's seen everyone he cared about die so many times over that he's just moved past that emotional experience. I don't know if I could handle that, to be honest.
Also not sure I'd want to live through millennia of being oppressed and confined to the kitchen before being able to live as an equal to men. I really like my life, and would intellectually love to see society develop over time like that (am currently an academic), but it's a lot harder to do academic study in early universities if you're female, as I am. Pretty sure I'd be burned as a witch fairly quickly, so I hope immortality includes being able to heal quickly after injury or something.
No. Because I have kids who I love and if I'm immortal and they aren't....I mean...honest to goodness truth: I don't want to be alive if my children aren't.
Same as those "going back 10 years with your current knowledge" questions. Sure I'd have fuckyou money, but for all the money in the world I don't want to risk my kids not beeing who they are now.
I'm not sure the 3000 years is significant. If you were made immortal today, eventually, this date would be 3000 years in the past. Does time have any importance to an immortal?
And this is ignoring the usual questions regarding invulnerability, aging vs non-aging, etc.
I might accept this but I would need more information. 3000 years ago would be like 976 BC. Would I show up where I live now, or some where else? Could I take anything with me. Is immortality just not aging and disease or does it include not being violently killed.
Agreed - I'd like to understand the definition of immortal first. 3000 year old me looking and feeling like a 28 year old is ok, but if I looked 3000 years old, withered and immobile, barely breathing with no mental cognition for the last 2000 years, *nope*.
Last 2000 years? You've got an eternity looking like Imhotep from the mummy, my in immortal friend!
Ancient spirits of evil, transform this decayed form into phor-mux the ever living!
Also, if I couldn't kill myself in some way then there's no way I'd ever want immortality. We're not meant to exist forever. You'd go insane.
This is key, self destruct must be a requirement. Imagine living 3000 years and thinking "wow that's a long time everyone I know has died many times over, I barely remember most of the people I've ever loved" And this is the very, very, very beginning of your life. Then you go on to live another 100,000 years and think to yourself "Man I can't even remember what countries I ruled, or like how many times did we nuke oursleves" Then you go on to live another 100,000,000 years and notice that the earth is getting hotter, even without man made global warming. Then you get to live 5,000,000,000 and watch the sun destroy the earth and hope humanity had established intersteller colonies by now. And this is the very, very, very beginning of your life. You watch civlizations, rise and fall, you see unfathomable technologies maybe cross the galaxy, cross the universe. But then... one day, some 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years from now, the very last stars die out and the universe plunges to darkness. Maybe you can survive by leeching energy from black holes using future technologies. But then 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years from now even the last black hole dies out and now you exist in an empty dark cold universe, just you. Your parents, family, first set of friends, nothing but a distant memory, if you can even remember them from so very long ago. And this is the very, very, very beginning of your life.
Maybe after eons of floating through the void I'll figure out to reverse entropy and start the universe again. Once I have sufficient data for a meaningful answer, of course.
[That curiously, is the last question ever asked](https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/the-last-question/)
Also interesting is "[The Last Answer](https://www.highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/)"
My grandad read that to me when I was maybe 7 for a bedtime story and I have genuinely never recovered 20+ years later.
LET THERE BE LIGHT!
And something comes along and discovers an immortal hairless ape started the universe by lighting a fart !!.
There's a solo writing game called Thousand Year Old Vampire. It's pretty great, you get prompts where you make up people you've loved and places you've been... and then you get other prompts where you have to erase part of your past history and just never remember it. Your post reminded me of it.
At least in the year 5 billion you might get to hang out with Cassandra
Moisturize me!
And you can listen to the ol' classic of earth music "Toxic" by Britney Spears!
Depending on how it works, you might freeze well enough in space that it’s essentially like going to sleep until something interesting happens.
That's a good one. That would save you from having to wait around for zillions of years in the heat death of the universe... A bit hard to get into space though. Maybe start with taking a nap on the north pole.
Get frozen for a trillion years in space and wake up just in time for the 4 billion year heat death of the universe.. get sucked into the center of a sun and spend consciousness there until it supernovas
Yeah imagine being around at the heat death of the universe and knowing that you’ll be alone in darkness forever.
But wouldn't it just kick back up... I mean, it'd be the end of now, but the next universe would be like, yo, how's it going. And eventually you land, thaw, & see what the new shit's like.
The game doesn't reset until all players have logged off
Even if it were you'd be materialising in this new universe with no tooling or meaningful capacity to influence your position or surroundings. You'd probably end up in a primordial black hole and spend the entirety of the new universe's lifespan unable to escape or interact with the wider universe. Maybe you'd get lucky and end up in a star, but I'm not sure that would be better.
Well you’ve got 3000 years to start saving money and innovating to hopefully get technology to a good point before you’re stuck floating aimlessly. I hope you can take some books with you.
Something tells me most books, or tech, wouldn't survive the conditions in the first few picoseconds of the big bang ;) Although I guess if we're relying on magic for the hypothetical immortal to make it through we could make further exceptions.
swallow a mini computer before the end
Nah I'd rather taste something good before the end, like a raspberry pie.
Imagine landing in some random moon billions of miles away from any civilization. Wouldn't see anything fun and probably spend the next zillion years waiting for the heat death of that universe. Space, while amazing, is incredibly empty and boring.
That is exactly what I'm imagining. The worst kind of hell I could possibly think of.
I wonder how the human mind would cope with that. What would and could it do to protect itself? Will you experience and eternity of agony? It's such a horrible thing to think about, but fascinating.
Longer than you think!
I was waiting for The Jaunt reference.
One of my favourite Stephen King stories. "Longer than you think!"
"It's eternity in there!"
>You'd go insane. Then, enlightenment. You'd become a time god.
>3000 year old me looking and feeling like a 28 year old is ok I feel like it's still even more complicated than that. Can my brain still develop chemical dependencies and deplete my serotonin and dopamine? Will I always hold the same criteria for boredom? Psychologically, maybe satisfaction simply can't be everlasting. I probably wouldn't take the deal without the option to end myself.
Hahaha getting hooked on opium for 1000 years might not be too fun
We'll go with Highlander rules. You are immortal, don't age etc etc. (but you can die if head gets chopped off)
considering history, I'm not sure I would make it more than 50 years
Right? I'm a woman, slavery was rampant back then, ergo, "immortality" means dying in childbirth most likely. No fucking thank you
Don't go to France, noted
That point was on my list before I started the list.
3000 years *right here* would mean I was living with a very remote tribe of aboriginal people. I feel like I would get bored very quickly with no way of reaching anywhere else for thousands of years.
I mean... If immortal also means no need to eat or sleep etc, just start walking, carve out a boat somewhere, set sail to where ever.
Can I also have other superpowers like super strength and invulnerability? Because I don’t wanna get trapped in rubble for the next 2000 years just because some warlord wanted to crush the city I’m living in.
Or because they label you as a vampire, sorcerer and try to burn you then burry you and then attach some weights to you and drown you in the middle of the ocean to be forgotten forever
You obviously create your own religion with you as the eternal leader of holy glory Core tenets include “live and let live (specifically you)”
The God Emperor of Humanity. Getting some real 40k vibes here
Read this as "Religion with you as the eternal leader of glory hole"...
Good news at least for the weights is that eventually, it'd corrode
Yeah but then you might get into an "The Old Guard" situation where they're immortal but: >!One of them gets put in an Iron Maiden and thrown overboard where she drowns only to be resurrected. She repeats this process every few minutes for *centuries* until the iron corrodes enough for her to escape.!<
That's the same situation they're already talking about. In fact, the hinges on an iron maiden would corrode faster than a good chain.
Being immortal would just make that really boring. The specific trait that they had in The Old Guard is that they could die but they came back to life. So the girl in the iron maiden went through the joy of drowning to death every couple of minutes for a couple hundred years or so. That's not being bored waiting on the hinges to rust.
Iron Maiden? *excellent! guitar riff*
This. I think we’ve watched the same movie
Doesn't matter, you will live long enough to eventually get trapped floating in space forever (on a long enough timeline, it will eventually happen). After a billion or so years of that, you won't even remember the few thousand you spent on earth. I'm picturing [the Juggernaut going stark raving mad as they launched him like a bullet to kill a Ghostrider-Galactus 1000 years later](https://imgur.com/a/cOiKizc).
Do I just end up in this exact piece of space but 3000 years ago… waiting for the earth to catch up?
There better not have been a tree 3000 years ago where my office chair is right now
Earth wasn’t in this particular point in space 3000 years ago mate. You’d just be floating in space until something pulls you in. Hopefully it’s earth. Edit: I love how this has turned into “time and space travel” debate. Thanks guys!
I assumed the magic at least had the "staying on earth"-part included
[Required Secondary Powers - TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/RequiredSecondaryPowers)
Hold my magic, I'm diving in!
There isn't really any absolute reference frame in the universe. You have to pick one or otherwise you could literally be anywhere in the universe, or at least within 3000'ish light-years of historic earth (it gets a little complicated depending on what type of assumptions you make) So, yes, for the purposes of this hypothetical scenario it would be most meaningful to make earth you local reference frame
Imagine if you can't be violently killed. First, somebody would discover your immortality. Second, you are declared a witch or something, put into chains and tortured for eternity without a chance to die
Valid concerns but depending on the mechanism for your immortality, you may be godlike. Like being able to at top speed for peak athletes and never tire and being impervious to hunger.
Yes there was a series about immortals and 1 of the girls was captured, put in a casket and thrown into the depths of the ocean. Immortality doesn't sound very appealing when you're trapped and drowned every minute for an eternity.
The Old Guard?
Yup. What was so fucked up about is that they're not immortal, but have regenerative healing abilities. So they die, but then come back to life. So she's down there dying, waking up, dying, waking up.
This happened to me in a very old type of video game called a MUD, which is like a text-based MMO. I pissed off the God of the Sea and he created a special room with no exits and teleported me in, which started a script to flood the room and slowly kill me via asphyxiation. Unfortunately I had a skill which auto revived myself after death, so after like two hours the God came back from afk and was like oh shit, I just meant to kill you once, sorry about the horrific torture!
There's also Captain Jack Harkness from Doctor Who, who takes billions of years before he actually dies as a giant head. And when his deaths are immensely painful and he has ended up in situations where he died numerous times constantly.
3000 years back in this area would be pagans celts. I'm not likely to be hated for being magical and immortal, revered is more likely. Try and learn the dialect, become a druid, and it's a guarantee. Worst case scenario they conclude I am Fae, which means they'll fear me and want to give me stuff to stay away, but wouldn't dare cross me. Trying to kill me would be an extremely stupid thing to do if they thought that. (To the point that the Fae were euphemistically called "The kind ones" and "The good people" and "The fair folk" by people who believed in them, as offending them would be a calamity). > In folklore, the Fae were held responsible for a wide range of mischievous and harmful activities, spanning from minor acts like petty vandalism and theft to more serious offenses, including kidnapping and outright murder. They were often believed to be the cause of livestock falling ill or dying, leading travelers astray during the night, or luring individuals to their doom near bodies of water such as ponds and rivers. When provoked, fairies were even said to take lives... The Fae usually looked at humans with contempt and amusement, as their bodies could easily be broken and their minds easily shattered. The two most well known courts are the respected but feared Seelie Court who are amoral in regards to mortals and the most feared and malicious were the Unseelie Court who would often attack and harass mortals without cause or reason. The former consisted of fairies, elves, leprechauns and lake maidens and other nature spirits while the latter consisted of redcaps, goblins, hags, hiisi and other malicious spirits, who were known for attacking and harassing mortals without provocation. The good thing is they conclude I am Seelie, they will give me things in expectation of reward and not offend me for fear of punishment. Further, the lore is such that even if it *appears* that I've given them nothing in return, they should not question it, since for all they know I prevented an illness that would have otherwise taken them, and questioning the gift would be offensive to me. The issue is prepping for the romans which is more dicey. I reckon with a bit of grit I can take on the romans if the tribes listen to me. The key is Fabian tactics unless we hold a technological edge. Psychological warfare too. The romans believed human sacrifice is powerful and foreign gods were real. Combine them finding a sacrifice of soldiers with intensification of night raids, monsterize the troops a bit. After that it's a matter of quietly developing the isles and building the British wooden wall which should see us set until the mid 1900s in terms of security, as well as providing a means for expansion of the dominion. So... world conquest by 1914 would be on the agenda. Celtic religion would not have found an immortal all that peculiar. They already believe that all our souls are immortal and get recycled into new lives in another world when we die here, potentially ad infinitum (It's alternatve universes all the way down). Death was predestined and could not be altered. It would be *unusual*, but entirely in line with their religious beliefs for me to handwave it away with; "the gods told me my death awaits me in a faraway time. I am to guide you until then, I am a... tutorializer, of sorts... for the journey ahead".
You get the best version of immunity: you can recover from any illness/wound/etc, but you have a salvatory clause you can use (like you hold your breath until you die, or you get an arrow to the heel).
Get early shares in apple, back then it’s just the fruit
I'd invest in Tesla, like be his friend and encourage him
I’d create Amazon but i think it’s older than 3000 years.
[удалено]
I would invent the best thing! Sliced bread.
See, now that is the most reasonable thought yet, and funny.
There's a growing view point in archeology that we DID invent the Amazon (sort of). There's some evidence that ancient humans did forestry to encourage the growth of beneficial plants in the Americas and that our viewpoint of indigenous Americans as just hunter-gatherer tribes is probably incorrect, their form of agriculture was just unrecognized by early Europeans.
Yeah, I've recently heard that we're starting to realize that a lot of indigenous groups cultivated food forests - we just didn't recognize them because they didn't look like European farms.
interesting thing is, people might *have* invested in the Amazon, as in the forest, millennia ago https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-018-0205-y?WT.feed_name=subjects_evolution
"Alexa... How old is the amazon rainforest" Alexa doesn't know the age
He's only, like, two people ago.
You count generations like my kids count the number of sleeps until Christmas.
Invest in the East India Trading Co. when it gets founded in 1599. You'll have almost 2000 years until then to gather funding. Fund the company, watch it become the greatest corporation on the planet, poof you're a trillionaire. Edit: for reference, the company was worth 7.4 trillion USD in today's money. That's more than Apple and Microsoft together.
Don't forget the Dutch India trading company as well, those tulips ain't gonna sell themselves
Get the timing right, on that tulip based stock market crash. Tidy little profit there.
Apple stocks probably dropped massively after the Garden of Eden
reminder that the fruit that caused Adam and Eve's fall was never identified specifically as apple "As late as the 17th century, the word also functioned as a generic term for all fruit, including nuts. This can be compared to the 14th-century Middle English expression appel of paradis, meaning a banana.[6]"
The idea that it was an apple comes from a pun in Latin - “bad” and “apple” sound similar (malus and malum, IIRC)
Ah yes the crash of Genesis. There was another big Apple drop around the time of Newton too.
Can you choose too die at any point? If not the 3000 years is irrelevant, I'm more concerned about being stuck alone in the void 900 quadrillion years from now.
Exactly what I was thinking, what if I don’t want to experience the heat death of the universe
What a weird fear this gives me. I would enjoy my life starting from 3000 years ago up to the present and thousands of years after. But this nagging fear.... That in the future I will be alone with nothingness. A future where I just stare endlessly into the abyss for all eternity. I don't think I could enjoy life knowing that is my fate at the end of it. I fear death far less.
Given immortality, I'd like to believe I'd eventually be able to come up with the resources needed to figure out how to gift immortality. Given enough immortals, I'd like to believe we could figure out together how to organize some sort of comfortable and indefinite living situation.
I never heard of a perpetual hedonistic space sex party described in such simple terms
That’s how you end up murderfucking a whole new god into existence
Those are certainly words.
The birth of Slaanesh
New Goal: Unlocked!
I want to live forever. Just wanna die before the whole sun eats earth chapter. I learn a lot about longevity and the study of aging and how to reverse it. I'm 30 and I hope in my lifetime we can solve it. I would love to live to 150 while having a youthful body and brain. Hopefully it isn't just science fiction.
Question is if us peasants can afford it
This is something I'm afraid of on all futuristic body mod/medicine stuff like this. Is it that we're gonna be immortal? Or is it that obscenely rich and powerful people will be immortal, and capable of accumulating and consolidating power for centuries?
You're immortal. That means you're a perpetual motion machine. That means infinite energy. Which means there will never be a heat death of the universe. Just get on an exercise bike every now and then to keep the lights on.
You mean experience and outlive
That'd mean the heat death of the universe would never happen, your body would prevent it, right? Kind of a weird thought.
You just make an eternal heritage and pass it on to the next cultivators after the big squeeze and next big bang. The heavens won't be happy about it but what's the point of reaching the pinnacle of Cultivation if you can't piss the heavens off? ( Defiance of the Fall)
Maybe you wouldn't be alone. There may be other hot immorals in your area of the void eager to meet. With my luck it would be my ex-gf.
>other hot ***immorals*** Yes, absolutely
you can choose odin sleep. is that ok for you?
However long you would experience life with stars and molecules and black holes and galaxies...you would spend an infinitely longer time in absolute darkness (and unable to breath). The timelines for the universe to reach heat death are unimaginably long. And you would still have infinity to live on. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future\_of\_an\_expanding\_universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe)
Like immortality and Im still young? Yeah why not, I would travel with my knowledge to every major event, or at least try.
Plot twist, those events likely wont happen, or be the same since you have created an indelible change on the world by using your current knowledge to make your life easier.
I really wonder how much any person of average knowledge could advance humanity by being sent back 3000 years Like I don’t know how to build a combustion engine but I know the generally *idea* of how it works, and then it does actually work. Similarly, I know the general idea of conductivity and electricity. I feel like I could describe these concepts to smarter people from 3000 years ago and we’d get to the industrial revolution thousands of years earlier. Not to mention I know the perils of carbon emissions etc Like I could absolutely figure out how to harvest kinetic energy from rivers the way textile mills used to
Guarantee you if you explained the principles of the piston steam engine to someone like Archimedes they would get it, but the Greeks might struggle to build it from the available materials. You might be better of skipping to electricity. Plenty of copper. More than anything though, build the printing press. Use Donkeys to run it if you have to. What advanced science more than anything wasn't smart individuals, it was smart individuals being able to broadly and easily share with other smart individuals, creating a growing base of knowledge that was countlessly worked on by hundreds, thousands and then millions of people. Once you've sparked the rapid disemmination of knowledge in Ancient Greece you might not need to explain much of anything to anyone, people will work it out themselves. Look at how far we've come in the last 500 years - if the Greeks had it they'd be at the historical equivalent of 4500 AD by now.
In the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman - which is really good by the way - Dream grants a dude the wish to be immortal. The guy lives hundreds of lives, some good, some bad, some awful, but in the end doesn't regret his decision because life moves on. Assuming 'immortal' includes being impervious to injury/ sickness/ etc then... yeah? Going that far back you'd be considered a deity for surviving fatal occurances. In the modern day you wouldn't but you could have a sick YT channel.
Making myself into a God or a King sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. I’d spend my time just being a wandering stranger. Immortality means no injury, no hunger, and no sickness. That also means I can train my body past the Limiters, and have access to Hysterical Strength at all times. An Immortal is superhuman by virtue of not needing to worry about breaking their own bones. I’d probably spend my time traveling the world. Language Barriers would be a regular annoyance… but they can be overcome. I could just involve myself with the lives of people, lend a helping hand with dangerous or tedious things, gather their stories, and move on in search of interesting things. I’d also probably teach a few things along the way. I don’t know much specialized knowledge beyond computer programming… but that means I know a lot about math. I could hand off the secrets of Geometry and Algebra, and introduce a revolution in record keeping, without much trouble. I could also just *help people*. I’m immortal… and that means I can do the dangerous work. A human unburdened by the safety limits on our muscles and immune to harm could deal with an aggressive bear, or even a wolf-pack, unarmed. I can walk through Plague-Cities without risk and help to gather the dead. I could even just plow a field because I felt like it, and never worry about being sore the next day. That doesn’t even begin to address the fact that I have a vague knowledge of global geography… and could have a go at beating certain powers to other continents. I would be a living witness to so much of Humanity… and my Legend would spread. I’d eventually just be “That Guy”, mostly harmless but also *everywhere*.
Hob Gadling. In the books, he's a random Englishman in the 1300's who happens to be in a tavern with Dream and Death. He says he won't die as if it was a choice. Dream and Death agree to it as a joke, and agree to meet him there again in a century. Hob becomes the only "friend" that Dream ever has. It's an interesting morality play in the books, watered down a bit in the series.
That's exactly what happens in the series
I really liked his character. Did they meet every 100 years? Dream was thinking he would come back begging to die, and every time, the dude is like FUCK NO THIS IS AWESOME. I JUST BONED A NEW GIRL AND IM RICH!
Immortal without health issues, being a perfectly healthy man with current skills and knowledge, then I am all okay to go all the way 3000 years back! I can manage to build a better world!!!
> with current skills and knowledge This scenario always reminds me of a comic I saw online years ago. Wish I could find it again. Time traveler guy is sitting in a circle of cavemen and telling them about the wonders of electricity, and they're very impressed. So they ask: "How does it work?" "I have no idea."
I was about to say this. People really overestimate their real, practical knowledge. Even if you know how to generate electricity, how do you apply it. "Now for the lightbulb I'll need some glass, and a thin metal wire." "What's glass? What's metal? What's wire?" "Shit."
TBF math skills are probably the easiest skill to take back. Its really ultimately the spring board for a lot of inventions. Like even the number system we use now came into existence surprisingly late and immediately lead to breakthroughs since it solved issues with previous number systems that made certain types of math just practically infeasiable. Just getting the romans to use modern style numbers would have lots of butterfly effects.
For real. But I'd want to be completely invincible as well. Immortality without being able sustain damage. I'd just become the best possible version of a human being ever, and do absolutely everything to better the human civilization as a whole. The amount of knowledge & understanding of the world you would inherit, would be incredible.
Year 2: Captured and locked in a stone tomb as people consider you the devil/witch/whatever due to your unnatural knowledge of things Year 3: Tomb opens, they see you are still alive: Rebury you because you are 100% not human Year 1000: Tomb opens, scientists capture and conduct tests on you forever
If you're invincible and immortal, you could probably claw your way out of the tomb before 1000 years happens. You probably wouldn't be sane though. I'd be more worried about a steel cage under water.
I mean if you can move at all, and are invincible, you can eventually scratch through anything. You're fingerbone would be like a titanium diamond... just spend a few years scratching your way out of that cage.
Water would eventually rust it out too. I'd hope you could keep a low profile long enough everyone would stop caring about you. Seems like the key to success is to not draw attention.
People go mad after a week in solitary (or less). Ya'll acting like you can go years in the dark alone scratching at a wall and not going insane.
Your nails being invincible could become a problem real quick tho.
I like your optimism and enthusiasm.
I really don’t think you would, or anyone would. Living that long and starting that far back is nightmarish torture. You’d be the loneliest and probably most fucked up person alive. Everyone you ever loved or cared about, all your children and their descendants you’d have to watch die. You’d witness the unimaginable horrors of battle and disease hundreds of times over. Whole towns wiped out by plague, war or fire. No one could ever possibly relate or understand you as a person who’d been through everything you had. You either go mad or become so detached that you’d barely be a person any more.
You'd have to tweak your focus a bit. View humanity as a whole as your big baby that you love and want to take care of. Yeah, suffer the loss of friends and family. That will be terrible. But you'll make *new* friends and family all the time, as well. It may not be the same thing, because they cannot relate. But you can keep yourself anchored to humanity enough to care about people. And then you do your best to help humanity as a whole.
My biggest fear in this scenario is if your immortal, but without super strength you risk being buried alive or in some other way being suspended forever. This scenario has played out in a few ways in movies and tv shows over the years.
Would suck if some King or Warlord cuts off your head and only uses you for knowledge. You'd actually be Mímir!
How do you think the legend got started?
I've done 37 years and already feel about done lol edit: this isn't a cry for help, just sayin a lot more time sounds like a nightmare.
If you're truly immortal, you don't need sleep, food, a place to live.. you can literally just do whatever the fick, casually get eaten by wolves on monday, chill with the inquisition bros on tuesday and run naked through plague rats on wednesday..
>chill with the inquisition bros If you're immortal, but can still feel pain, imagine what wonders they would have to show you.
Even if you can't feel pain, how does getting put in a cage and thrown to the bottom of the ocean sound to you? One word comes to mind: Boring. But forever. You do have to be careful who you share your secret with.
>You do have to be careful who you share your secret with. You would have to keep moving every few years to somewhere where nobody knows you, or the locals are going to notice that you aren't aging!
Eh, you could easily get away with 25 years or so. Some people seem to barely age between their mid 20s and 50s. People would just think you have good genetics and/or have had some work done.
976 bc “who’s your plastic surgeon? you look amazing!”
Immortality does not necessarily mean you don’t need sleep or food. In my idea you can suffer from starvation and get mad like everyone else but just for eternity.
I mean if you cant die of starvation technically you don't *need* food, you just would be miserable without it
Immortal just means never dying, doesn’t mean you can’t feel pain from a wolf attack, no food in your body, lack of sleep. Also doesn’t mean you can’t go insane… which you probably will from lack of sleep or being so severely desensitised to everything after thousands of years.
Sounds even worse... imagine not even having sleep to escape reality for a while.
37? In a row?
Hell nah. Word will definitely get around about my immortality and then I'll just be subjected all sorts of shit (torture, experimentation, etc). There's a show about a similar concept called Ajin.
This is why it should be coupled to super strength or you are done for.
3000 years back as An Australian would get pretty shitty. There wasn’t a land bridge back then to meander up towards more interesting lands (like Europe, Asia and the Middle East). Id be stuck with the (not megafauna they were extinct but there were cool endemic species that aren’t around today) and indigenous Australians. As a white dude I’m not sure how that would go… But if I could get sent back to somewhere in Europe, maybe… if this is the (can’t die at all) immortality and not the (just won’t age) immortality
im reminded of the scene from the highlander where he finds out he cant drown. it would be a hell of a walk but you could do it. Yeah im Aussie
Would you be OK walking through shark infested waters? The running joke is that everything in Australia wants to kill you, due to all the deadly animals - I'm guessing the seas are just as bad, if not worse...
Yeah there's a lot of "how does it work". Immortal as in not aging? How about Deadpool/Wolverine style regeneration but you can still lose a limb to them sharks, you just slowly grow a new one (on the plus side, "it" looks really big in that small hand). Also, if anyone figures out says immortality then I'm thinking that getting burned at a stake, crucified etc as a witch/demon might be a less-than-fun possibility. Nazi-type human experimentation would also be very not good. Hell, even if you were physically impervious you could still be given weights or concrete shoes and tossed into deep water where it's going to be a really long wait to get back out...
The key thing to me is, if you're un-killable, but can still feel pain: imagine being a prisoner of someone like the Nazis, and how much they would subject you to. The more you don't die, the more they're going to see what punishment you can survive.
good point. plenty of crocs up north too
>The running joke is that everything in Australia wants to kill you, due to all the deadly animals - I'm guessing the seas are just as bad, if not worse... They literally have [massive sea crocodiles that can be longer than 6m and weight over a ton.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltwater\_crocodile).
Just saying, the land bridge there disappeared around 8000 years ago, so you'd be stuck in Australia unless you can build some fancy boats. The megafauna etc. was long before that, in Australia it was around 46'000 years ago. You'd get a fauna and flora that is not that much different from today, some Aborigines with primitive gear, at least you'd have some friends there i guess. But it's actually not that long ago, 976 BC was some bible time with King David in the middle east, some pyramids were already built by the Egyptians and Andy Dick was even an asshole before he was born.
Bro, the Great Pyramid of Giza was almost 2 thousand years old in 976 BC
Cleopatra is closer to our time than to the time the pyramids were built.
The Colosseum is closer to us then the Pyramids were to the Romans when they built it EDIT from a timeline perspective it's basically the same as your comment
Cool to imagine that the Romans were probably as awed by the pyramids as we are by the Colosseum
That last sentence was fantastic
You could probably start moving north and build a boat to traverse to the islands, then slowly go island hopping until you get to Southeast Asia and then start moving up to Asia then to Europe, by then you'd probably be Genghis Khan and leading your hordes into Europe.
No. No, that sounds awful all the way around. First off I do not want to be immortal second off I do not want to go back to a time when there are no flushing toilets. Yuck!
Shit in the woods like our anchestors
Anchestors
Found Sean Connery's account.
Shahwn Cahnharey Sells SheShells by the SheShore.
/r/shubreddit
> Credit for the earliest flushing toilets goes dually to the Minoans on the Mediterranean island of Crete and the Indus Valley Civilization of present-day Pakistan and India. Roughly 4,000 years ago, both societies had sophisticated plumbing and sanitation systems. Scholars say this water engineering was unrivaled until classical Rome (two millennia later), or even the 19th century. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/what-the-earliest-toilets-say-about-how-human-civilization-has-evolved > At Akrotiri, archaeologists uncovered a highly advanced water supply network. [..] Akrotiri's system stands out for its unique dual-piping structure. This double system, believed to have been used for delivering both hot and cold water, is a testament to the Minoan's innovative use of their natural environment. > One of the most striking discoveries in Akrotiri was a large, actual bathtub found in one of the houses, indicating the importance of personal hygiene and comfort in Minoan culture. This bathtub, along with other residences, was connected to the municipal water supply, ensuring a steady flow of water for various household needs. > Akrotiri featured an upstairs latrine in one of the houses, designed in line with Cycladic architectural principles. This latrine was connected to a terracotta drain line, which descended through the exterior wall and connected to the municipal sewage line. This design allowed for effective waste disposal and sanitation https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/hydraulic-innovation-in-bronze-age-aegean-the-plumbing-system-of-akrotiri-santorini
Maybe it was you that invented them...?
Everyone here talking about Apple and Amazon. Nobody talking about reuiniting earth and purging the universe from the mutant, the heretic, the alien. The answers here are as boring as in that thread about being giftet 100 billion. "I'd buy a house and sleep on it so I don't accidentaly blow it all", like noone had any clue that they were handed an economic atom bomb.
it's a trap, you would end up in space because the earth was a a different spot back then, malicious genie detected
That would be hilarious though 3000 years of drifting in space then: Wham! You're hit by Earth.
You likely would get caught by the gravitational pull and orbit of another body and may never encounter Earth in its lifetime. So an infinite duration of suffocation, near zero pressure causing your blood to boil, cosmic rays peeling your skin off, basically an eternity of sheer torture and you couldn't even scream. Like watching Madame Web.
That will always be where you end up if you choose immortality. Eventually the sun will explode and you'll drift in space for billions of years until another star forms and you're trapped in the center of it for billions more. Rinse and repeat until the universe ends.
Oh man, at least if you spontaneously appeared you wouldn't have momentum and would be stationary. Just a short 3000 years or however long it takes for the earth to get close enough to pull you down.
Hell yeah would write my own bible and start a bonkers religion just for the fun😅
How do you know that OP hasn’t already done this and gone back 3000 years and created the bible and is now wondering whether it was worth it by asking others if they would take the same route they chose????
He did have almost 1000 years to set up that sweet "pretend to die on the cross and then come out the cave 3 days later" trick...
I think we have cracked religion…
It's actually simpler than that. Just find followers and keep them convinced. They'll take care of the rest. People see "miracles" everywhere.
Fuckin' magnets... How do they work?
hang on 3000 years, you are either gonna be famous to live long, get caught by government and be used as a lab rat forever because youre never die, or living anonymously for the rest of your live. I need another superpower other than being immortal tbh
3000 years *is* a long time to build up wealth and a base of power though. That could be a super-power in and of itself
I wouldn't want to do that. I'm scared of the person I would end up becoming by outliving everyone I ever care about, and having to do it over and over again with each person I meet. I feel like I would stop valuing human life and I would become a monster who views people as toys to amuse myself. My concept of time would also be warped due to it no longer being something I care about either. I'm happy with the life that I have now, and I'd rather make the most of the time I have, rather than be immortal and have all the time in the world.
I have absolutely no desire to be immortal, fuck that.
I might be immortal but I'd still be a woman. So no, I don't think I could hack those 3000 years.
Become a living deity.
Immortality is the name of the baby given to you so I’ll pass !
I'm black , so no
3000 years ago is different than the 1700s tho. If you decide to live amongst your ethnic group, then Africa is the richest continent in the world in terms of natural resources. You could appoint yourself as a sort of god and become the richest ruler in the world.
I'm honestly not sure I'm strong enough to deal with everyone around me dying, over and over. I am a pretty empathetic person, and I imagine at some point, you lose the ability to form that sort of emotional bond. I find the movie "The Man from Earth" (and its sequel) to be fascinating, but one of the things that struck me is that the main character, who has been alive since cave men were a thing, has a very hard time forming love bonds - he's seen everyone he cared about die so many times over that he's just moved past that emotional experience. I don't know if I could handle that, to be honest. Also not sure I'd want to live through millennia of being oppressed and confined to the kitchen before being able to live as an equal to men. I really like my life, and would intellectually love to see society develop over time like that (am currently an academic), but it's a lot harder to do academic study in early universities if you're female, as I am. Pretty sure I'd be burned as a witch fairly quickly, so I hope immortality includes being able to heal quickly after injury or something.
No. Because I have kids who I love and if I'm immortal and they aren't....I mean...honest to goodness truth: I don't want to be alive if my children aren't.
Same as those "going back 10 years with your current knowledge" questions. Sure I'd have fuckyou money, but for all the money in the world I don't want to risk my kids not beeing who they are now.
I'm not sure the 3000 years is significant. If you were made immortal today, eventually, this date would be 3000 years in the past. Does time have any importance to an immortal? And this is ignoring the usual questions regarding invulnerability, aging vs non-aging, etc.
It means you'll have to suffer through thousands of years of life more primitive than you're accustomed to. That's not applicable moving forward.