[ExI] Eternity for Atheists

[Olie Lamb]

Why worry about eternity?

The experience of 1000 years is mostly beyond our evolved brains.  Heck, I
don't even have  much of a grasp of what a decade feels like, and I've lived
several of them.

When looking at the daytime moon, the lit side points directly at the sun.
Although I'm more familiar with this than I actually am with looking at the
moon and sun in the same sky quadrant.  Nevertheless, it still sorta looks
like the sun, moon and most distant mountains are roughly the same distance
away.  Our brains just aren't evolved to deal with scales much bigger than a
few kilometres.

I'm not fussed with living forever.  A physical millennium of life will
probably feel a lot longer than most people's grasp of 'ever' anyhoo, and
that's not counting the effects of up-shifting mental processing speeds.
When I plan to have a succession of medium-term relationships of about 100
years each, I'm still thinking way longer than many when they wed, promising
"for ever and ever!"  =P

Forever is a really, really, really long time.  Let's try dealing with
giga-days, before we start worrying about running out of descriptors

-- Olie

On 7/26/07, Olga Bourlin <fauxever at sprynet.com> wrote:
>
>  *Eternity for Atheists *
>
> *By**Jim Holt is a contributing writer for the magazine.*
>
>
>
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