24 thoughts on “The Big Nap”

  3. Unless you can a) play guitar well enough, b) play chess well enough, or c) or wait for an unlikely singularity where your brain lives in quantum states of a computer for as long as the AC is payed for.

  4. It’s interesting. The simple announcement seems to dance between uninformative banality and ominous threat.

    It’s a …. deepity.

    1. Terry Pratchett did that trope in the mid-1980s. Piers Anthony too, at around the same time. And there’s a bit of ancient Greek mythology that hints at the same trope from the really distant past. I forget the protagonist’s name, but the story boils down to : mortal does something good ; gods grant hime one wish ; he wishes for immortality ; they grant immortality, but not eternal youth ; drum-roll, cymbal crash.

  10. That reminds me of the Farside comic with a mayfly reading the day’s newspaper. On the left side page was the heading Births. The right side page was headed Obituaries, and underneath were the words See preceding page.

  11. Second reference to the “big nap”. Is there a bit of melancholy in the air today? I certainly do feel like napping, rather than dealing with all the tasks I have before me.

    1. That would actually be an interesting theoretical challenge, likely requiring a bit of computer programming. Could you design an evolutionary system without death? I think so, but it would look much different from Darwin’s. Things would also get especially interesting once you started hitting resource limits — both in terms of how you avoid death in such situations, as well as whether or not the system would continue to evolve.

      Of course, it would require, at the very least, en environment radically different from what we’re familiar with, if not wholesale changes to physics itself…at which point it might not make sense to worry about resource exhaustion.

      There could well be some potentially useful insights lurking in there, if anybody’s interested….

      b&

        1. Well, most bacteria do die of age. Seems they get rid of accumulated chemical/genetic damage by keeping it in an “old” pole side at division. Eventually (~ 200 divisions) that part will be non-functional.

          But, and this is interesting for prolonging life, there was a recent result that eukaryotes (a yest species) can repair damage 100 %, given enough resources. I.e. _such_ cells should be eternal if the result is good, but only if they have a good enough environment all the time. Seems we have one up on bacteria!

          At such times, the main evolution mechanism ought to be near neutral drift, at a guess.

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