Well, this time it isn't about programming or computers, but this was bothering me for a while. Warning: this text might be depressing, because I have no answer for that question.
Have you ever thought about this: everything you see around you eventually will disappear. Think about it. Many human-made object will be broken within 100 years. People last less than 200 years, so in a 200 years there probably will be no you (well unless you are lucky enough to find or invent immortality cure). Buildings last longer, but most of them won't survive even a few hundreds of years. In a few billions of years sun will explode and destroy the planet. And in a few more billions of years universe will collapse back to the single point it appeared from. So there will be nothing left at all.
"Daisy Owl" nicely illustrates the problem(here).
This makes me wonder - what is the point of everything? Every single thing that exists will eventually disappear. And in the end there will be no one left to tell the tale or remember anything. As if nothing ever existed at all.
I guess happiest people never run into that question.
The problem here is not that all matter will disappear. Some of the theories about the end of universe suggests that matter will remain (but temperature will drop to absolute zero). The problem is that every object or person (including yourself) around you already doesn't exist anymore - at some point in the future (or there is no longer any observer for this object), which is hard to accept simply because it doesn't feel "right".
Another problem is that human mind wants a meaning for everything (well, at least mine does). The most logical answer is that life has no meaning and is an accident. However, this idea is incredibly hard to accept. I guess that it is easier for religious people to face this question - after all, at least in some religions you are immortal (your soul, which is basically you), or you are reborn, and at the "end of times" you will meet all other people and you will live happily ever after. On other hand that eternal life in heaven/hell might not be that different from "end of time" in one of scientific theories - everything kind of "stops" and remains same forever.
If you think more about all of this, you can notice one interesting thing: the more advanced technology becomes, the less chances it has to exist for long time and less chances it has to be comprehensible for next civilization should humanity disappear. Think about it. As far as I know, writings on the stone can exist for a lot of time. Paper is more convenient, but requires extra care in order to persist for many years. And in order to make all information in your computer inaccessible, all you need is to cut the power. Also, the way information is stored is incredibly complicated, which means that should humanity disappear, the next civilization won't be able to get much from remains of our computers. Digital info is incredibly fragile itself, this article illustrates some problems. If you think about this, our civilization suddenly looks incredibly fragile, like a card house - just lose a few key technologies, and you are back in the medieval times.
This returns me to original problem:
- Our world is fragile, and should something serious happen, many things we know will be lost forever.
- In fact, nearly everything (on earth, at least) is going to disappear eventually hardly leaving the trace. Organic creatures die. Machinery rusts. Buildings are being destroyed by the elements. Eventually, Sun itself will "blow up" and burn the earth down, or it will eventually stop producing light.
- Most of those events cannot be avoided.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but for me all this combined together doesn't make any sense.
So, what is the point of all this? What is the meaning of everything? The purpose?
Ideas, anyone?
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