The Pub Discussion Board

Update for 7/17/17:

(Sorry, couldn't resist the date thing...)

The Woodward Academy, Year 7, Chapter 6: November is finished, and with the reviewers.  This is probably the longest chapter in the book, at nearly 22,000 words.

WAY7-7 is already plotted out on the calendar, and so writing will begin on that either tonight or tomorrow.  I may spend a night with Agent of Change, since I have worked out the next scenes for that story.

Obviously, this means that WAY7-6 will be posted on August 1st.

Also, as of yesterday, I have finally written over 100,000 words for the year.

Eric Storm

Oh Eric, you and your palindromes!

Update for July 20, 2017:

The Woodward Academy, Year 7, Chapter 7: December has been started.

Eric Storm

Update for August 1, 2017:

The Woodward Academy, Year 6, Chapter 12: May has been made public.  This completes this novel.
The Woodward Academy, Year 7, Chapter 6: November has been posted to PRM.

WAY7-7 has about 6,100 words written so far, so I'm feeling pretty good about it being ready for next month.
AoC-6 will probably not be ready for posting on the 15th, however.

Eric Storm

Sad to see you are giving up Dvorak but completely understand. I would be upset if we had to wait the 3 months for you to finish a chapter, I however would understand.

I'm apparently at 53 wpm, after 2 tests that resulted in the same value.
But that is only if I am copying from something else. when writing and crafting for example an email, or this post. I have to think about what I am writing, and I'm sure that I'm going much slower. likely closer to 35-45 wpm.

so if you are matching your copying WPM when creating, I am officially jealous.

Real Life again? That bitch. Find out where it lives and kick its ass. You cannot allow someone else to run your life, no matter how real that is. Real Life interferes with everything you do time and time again. After being fucked by it over the years Death comes finally around and puts an end to it, permanently. Unfortunately that won't increase your writing output.

The way of the world is you kick ass or you die, and I'm always going to kick!

I do hope that the infamous RL gives you a tad bit of slack so you can enjoy YL, your life,  for awhile

Thank for the update and thank you in advance for the chapter!~

I think you'll find, if you think about that long enough, the concept of living 'forever', or even for a thousand years, is a truly horrific notion.

Eric Storm

Unfortunately, I think there would have to be a trade off for eternal life... Impotence, or at least the lack of the ability to procreate.  If you kept on having children, immortal children, then eventually all the molecules in the earth, then solar system, and finally the galaxy would be used up by those immortal beings.  Oh, let's not forget about eternal hunger, eventually.  Your hunger would eventually kill all the non-immortal beings just to slack your hunger.  And then what would you eat?  Also, let's not forget that most scientists agree that the universe will itself end up dying.  So, you end up floating in a cold vacuum of empty space unable to end it all because your immortal.  I'd be careful what you wished for... you just might get it.

Barbarian? As who would you be to decide? Do you even have idea of the scope of the Universe? Also the personal investment of time that children represent? It certainly wouldn´t be a permanent baby making business. Your idea about banning procreation has some grounds, but upon closer inspection lacks enough merit. Also why would the hunger of an immortal being (or just a long living one) be any larger than of a regular mortal one? This argument of yours is even more lacking. You seem full of some strange ideas. I´m talking immortality as in having a long life without a specific end. Also you simply can´t imagine the endeavours that humanity, or even one particular person may undertake in the future with the advancement of science and understanding of the universe, or even multiverse if such exists. On the one hand right now it seems there won´t actually be a big crunch, but being as we don´t understand gravity, dark energy or dark matter enough and there are plenty of difficult to explain phenomena even at a galaxy level, we simply don´t actually know what will happen. If in the billions of years left to a big crunch or big freeze it´s impossible to predict what my consciousness (or the cumulative consciousness of humanity and all the other transcended races) could become by then. At the moment it´s purely speculative and philosophical, but may be, just may I/we could engineer a restart of our universe, or influence the laws of physics and creation of the next. May be each of us would be able to create our own personal universes by then. Or if we can´t actually improve much farther beyond our current level of awareness, well, It would still be billions of years of experiences, discovery, relationships. friendships, etc. Still that´s too much to hope at the moment. Let´s get clinical or cyber immortality first (which is just a regular human being getting rejuvenation treatments, or a human mind uploading to the cloud or its equivalent). Then if we don´t end in a technological singularity via increasing mind and linking capacity (there are a few signs that we are heading in that direction), well, the possibilities and the universe are unimaginably huge. Just the observable universe is over  93 billion light years, or 8,8 x 10exp23 kilometers across. It´s so much things to discover than even those billions of years wouldn´t be quite enough to visit everything. Besides stars explode and are born all the time, star systems too. Even if exploring just our own galaxy you wouldn´t have the time to visit all the stars before some stars are gone, and some others have been born. New life, new civilizations, etc. It´s actually unending. And if I/we ever became bored with that, there will be other goals. May be the ultimate one could be the creation of the next universe, or universes. May be there are something more. The multiverse, or universes above, or bellow our level of existence. Still this is so far away and so speculative, that we will just have to wait and see. Because of that and countless other reasons I think that living as long as you actually wanted (without an arbitrary set dying age), meaning having the actual possibility to wait and see, would be incredibly exciting and wonderful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Eh5BpSnBBw

Last edited by Augur (2017-09-01 22:53:41)

Here's a circumstance you apparently haven't thought of:

EVERYONE chooses to live forever.

There are currently 7 billion people on this planet.  What it means if everyone chooses to live forever is that, every day, over 150,000 people who would have died, don't.  That's 55 million + people per year.  That means, in 20 years, we add over a billion new people... and this process accelerates, because there are more people.

At what point do you realize you can't even turn around without bumping into someone?  How long before Montana looks like central Tokyo?

And then there's this:  All those people you can't stand?  They never go away, either.  They will live just as long as you do.  That ex that you're wishing death and destruction upon?  Ain't gonna happen.  You're going to be paying her alimony for centuries.

So.  You're going to live forever.  And so is everybody you hate.  No hope of getting that abusive parent or ex-spouse out of your life for good.  Your only hope would be that they get hit by a bus... except, of course, that people will be riding the Hyperloops by then, and you can't really get hit by one of those.

Those fucking politicians in Congress (Parliament/whatever)?  They're not going to leave willingly, either.  The same people will be in office for thousands and thousands of years.  Don't believe me?  We have people who have spent decades in Congress.  How do they manage that?  Political inertia and public apathy.  Imagine what happens when people can say, "That guy's been in office since my great-great-grandfather was born.  No point in kicking him out now..."

And let's not bullshit:  As far as anyone can figure out, you really can't go faster than the speed of light.  That means that interstellar travel is out of the question.  Oh, sure, you might be able to live long enough to make the trip, technically, but you would have starved to death long before you got there, because carrying enough resources to even grow your own food would be more than a ship could carry for that long.  And even if you did survive, chances are you'd be completely batty from the isolation of the trip.  Plan on taking a thousand of your closest friends to fight the isolation?  You've just compounded the whole logistical nightmare.  So all your talk of meeting alien races and terraforming anything beyond our own solar system is just fantasy: there's literally no scientific basis on which this could happen, according to current knowledge.

Imagine what it looks like when people 25 and younger make up less than 1% of the population.  Or less than 0.001% of the population.  Imagine what happens when they start passing amendments that say you can't vote until you're 100.  (Why would they do that?  Because they think you don't know what the fuck you're talking about for the first 100 years of life.  Oh, sure, it'd take a couple millennia to get to this point, but when 90%+ of the populace can't even remember what being a teenager was like...)

You also talk about all the exploring and stuff that would be so interesting to see and do... how many people actually do that now?  How many would be able to do it then?  Scientific research has always been an extremely limited field.  With a population explosion, it would only become more so.  There isn't going to be a proportionately larger amount of money available for scientific research now that there's a huge new population.  Most of the money's gonna go to keeping people alive.  (Oh, sure, you've taken care of medical immortality.  People still have to eat, have water to drink, and be sheltered from the weather.)  When the population of the planet reaches 12 billion, just 100 years from now, how are those people going to be fed?  Housed?  Where are we going to get the water from?  Oh, sure, the ocean, you say.  There is STILL no economically viable way to desalinate water on the scale needed to supply the entire US.  Imagine when the entire current population of the US lives in the state of Oregon!

Would I want to live forever, even with all my health problems removed?  HELL NO.  I'm already sick of this world and the shit that goes on within it.  I try not to watch or read the news, because it just disgusts me.  Why the hell would I want to sign on for a million more years of the human race?  I'm not looking forward to death, don't get me wrong.  As an Agnostic, I have absolutely no clue about what's going to happen at the point of death, so there is no comfort to be had in that thought.  Having said that, I have no real desire to make my misery on this abominable little rock significantly longer.

Okay, you say, there are probably a lot of people like me, so the problems aren't as bad as I think.  Wrong.  In the beginning, sure, there are going to be people who forego the treatment and die a natural(ish) death.  But it wouldn't take all that long before the treatment - whatever it is - would be given to infants at the time of birth, parents giving their new little one the "gift of life".  And then, poof.  No one gets a choice anymore.  Sooner or later, it's not even something that gets discussed.  People who go against it are treated like the anti-vaccine crackpots (who really are crackpots, don't get me wrong).  So, yeah, at some point, you lose the ability to make this choice for yourself.  (Depending on how said immortality is achieved.  If it's an ongoing process, then things just go weird in a whole different direction.)

Yeah... there is no good that comes from this kind of thing.  Much like political office, life itself needs term limits.  Without them, things just go bad.

Eric Storm

Augur wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Eh5BpSnBBw

Man, you should really warn a guy before you put him into the Total Perspective Vortex.



Eric Storm

(For those unfamiliar: The Total Perspective Vortex)