The interesting question is “What would it be like if we lived for 700 years instead of 70 years?”. This is more interesting than contemplating immortality because it pries open the issue of scaling. What changes by a factor of 10? What changes by a factor of 100? What changes by a factor of 3.162?
Presumably acient towers get a straight ten times less impressive.
Speed limits would be set much lower. You lose ten times as much when you die in a car accident so you would be willing to spend more time on your journey to avoid that.
An academic could go into his subject ten times as deeply, or study ten different subjects. A longer life raised interesting questions about the depth versus breadth trade-off.
Proportional scaling suggests that we would study history ten times as long, but would we? We might no longer feel the need, because we would have so much more personal experience. Oppositely we might feel that we will have to live with the consequences of avoidable error for so much longer that we were willing to spend a greater proportion of our time learning the lessons of history.
The interesting question is “What would it be like if we lived for 700 years instead of 70 years?”. This is more interesting than contemplating immortality because it pries open the issue of scaling. What changes by a factor of 10? What changes by a factor of 100? What changes by a factor of 3.162?
Presumably acient towers get a straight ten times less impressive.
Speed limits would be set much lower. You lose ten times as much when you die in a car accident so you would be willing to spend more time on your journey to avoid that.
An academic could go into his subject ten times as deeply, or study ten different subjects. A longer life raised interesting questions about the depth versus breadth trade-off.
Proportional scaling suggests that we would study history ten times as long, but would we? We might no longer feel the need, because we would have so much more personal experience. Oppositely we might feel that we will have to live with the consequences of avoidable error for so much longer that we were willing to spend a greater proportion of our time learning the lessons of history.