Maybe you have a cancer that would kill you in three months.
So, get a powerful rocket.
Accelerate close to the speed of light, and make a one light-year round-trip journey that from your reference frame takes about a month, but takes slightly over a year from the point of view of the earth. If your speed during the first journey was v1, now repeat the same trip with a speed of v2 = (3c2+v12)1/2/2. Then repeat with a speed of v3 = (3c2+v22)1/2/2. And so on, forever.
Fact: Each journey will take a bit more than a year of earth-time but only half of the you-time of the previous. So the total you-time of your journeying will be 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... = 2 months. You’ll never die. At every future time, you will be alive.
But this is pointless. You might as well stay on earth, and then you’ll have three months of you-time. Three months of you-time followed by death is better than two months of you-time with no death.
1 comment:
I tried to explain this plan to a friend of mine when I was in junior high school a long time ago, but my plan involved a black hole (and wasn’t worked out mathematically) and my friend couldn’t get over the fact that the black hole would actually kill me. Only by consulting my memory, though, I cannot tell you for sure whether I thought up this plan because I considered it to be genuinely desirable or just because playing around with relativistic thought experiments is fun. So I’m not sure whether my junior-high self shares your intuition about preferences.
Post a Comment