You're Immortal - Must Travel Back in Time 1 Million Year - Would You?

[StayTuned]

Yea Id bring 50 ultra hot babes with me.

Haven't thought much further than this

[Dezerte]

50 people could be enough to sustain and grow a human population, and since I love playing grand strategy games it could be interesting to do it in a more realistic setting.

[muto]

Just bring a bunch of engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and doctors with you. Easy.

[ProphetFlume]

By the time you returned to modern times you'd be 10,000% crazier and almost certainly be a Final Fantasy villain with an emotionally-detached plan to kill everyone.

[Hellobolis]

i'd do it if it was 100k years orso.

but 1m years basically means you would go insane from boredom while waiting some 750k years for modern humans to evolve.


though on the other hand, if you can bring 50 humans with you it might be doable. if you can keep early deaths in those 50 to a minimum it should be barely enough to get a small community going without genetic side effects, and with some luck they can mate with w/e human ancestor was around by then.

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Just bring a bunch of engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and doctors with you. Easy.

those are useless if you can only bring back 50 people.

you want most of them to be farmers, with some basic level training in other general fields.
a blacksmith trained to make a furnace will be more useful than an engineer.
a medic with herb/survival remedies will be more useful than a doctor.

overly specialized people will not be able to transfer their knowledge to future generations due to the subsistence lifestyle you will be forced to adapt initially.

the really interesting question to me is: can you jump start a small community fast enough before any written down knowledge you bring with you becomes useless. (either because the storage medium decays, or because the language has become too different).

[Dakhath]

Sounds like the premise of the Emperor of Mankind with a bunch of years attached to it and a new origin story, and Chaos too I suppose.

[muto]

i'd do it if it was 100k years orso.

but 1m years basically means you would go insane from boredom while waiting some 750k years for modern humans to evolve.


though on the other hand, if you can bring 50 humans with you it might be doable. if you can keep early deaths in those 50 to a minimum it should be barely enough to get a small community going without genetic side effects, and with some luck they can mate with w/e human ancestor was around by then.

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those are useless if you can only bring back 50 people.

you want most of them to be farmers, with some basic level training in other general fields.
a blacksmith trained to make a furnace will be more useful than an engineer.
a medic with herb/survival remedies will be more useful than a doctor.

overly specialized people will not be able to transfer their knowledge to future generations due to the subsistence lifestyle you will be forced to adapt initially.

the really interesting question to me is: can you jump start a small community fast enough before any written down knowledge you bring with you becomes useless. (either because the storage medium decays, or because the language has become too different).

No I would still take the doctor, and the engineer. The more well educated people the better. I'm sure an engineer can build a furnace. Also you can just bring a book with you on survival remedies that's pretty basic stuff.

[NM 156]

God no, I didn't ask for the years I've already had and I sure as shit don't want more.

[Fincayra]

That makes it perfect, go back, jump into a glacier, wait to be thawed a million years later, get free immortality.

Yeah, I don't think the average human mind would do well with being trapped completely confined being unable to move in any way for a million years.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Yeah, I don't think the average human mind would do well with being trapped completely confined being unable to move in any way for a million years.

The average human mind doesn't work when frozen, neither does any other biological process in a living being.

[LilSaihah]

I must. I have a duty to mankind to become your immortal god-emperor. Remember to pray to me and worship me!

[Fincayra]

The average human mind doesn't work when frozen, neither does any other biological process in a living being.

You are completely immortal in this scenario. The process which would freeze a normal human wouldn't kill you in this one. You'd be just fine, just completely unable to move. Sound fun to you?

[Daedius]

Immortality would suck...

[Hellobolis]

No I would still take the doctor, and the engineer. The more well educated people the better. I'm sure an engineer can build a furnace. Also you can just bring a book with you on survival remedies that's pretty basic stuff.

i honestly don't think your average engineer would be able to forge iron from scratch. let alone be good at it or do it without injury long enough to train an apprentice. and you are going to run out of supplies like hammers and nails that you can bring with you fast.

same with a doctor. it's useless that he knows you have a fancy disease when he doesn't know how to make painkillers from scratch, and advanced medicine like surgery is pretty much a no go.

whatever supplies you bring with you is going to last maybe 1 or 2 generations. after that you have to be self sufficient.
so i'd rather have manual labour skills who took a course in building some more advanced tools. than specialists who took a course in the manual labour aspects of their field.

And yes, you can just bring a book with you. But even with a jump start, you are going to be spending the first few generations heavily focused on just getting by. There isn't going to much time and resources to educate people. So your book is going to be spending it's time in a anti-decay box until your population is back in the thousands. By which time it's usefulness will depend entirely on your skills as a language teacher, cause the language will have grown a part a lot.

It's probably fine to bring a few more educated peopple, a chemist being by far the most useful. but at the end of the day your people will be engaged in manual labour every day of their life for the rest of their lives, so you might as well bring people who are efficient at that.

[markos82]

Hm idk. If I don't have to go asap back into time then yeah. That was I could spend few 100 years learning today's stuff and future stuff. Everything except languages, psychology, philosophy, art in any form.... Just math, physics, architecture... Everything I would need to start building a new life with the thing I can bring in 100m2 ( also 100m x 100m is 10000m2).
I wouldn't take any people with me, fuck that shit in stranding them there.
For few some 950k years I would just travel the world, no need to have permanent settlement or so, then for the next 40k years I would build stuff. Assuming that I can spend few 100 years in present and future I would probably have good enough technology to keep the stuff I brought in some kind of suspension, that nothing can destroy it or make it unusable. I would build that would make those crazy conspiracy theorists even go nutter. Then at the down of the new age, let's say when modern man crawl from caves and burrows I would mingle with them and considering the lvl of my technology that I can't be killed and that I can't die I would subjugate them and try to jump start civilization and technology by some 10k years. I would ban all religions, unite all the nations in common goal to colonize space/universe.

[markos82]

After 950k years you wouldn't give a fuck about anyone or anything. Nobody would. If you want to jump start civilization, you need to bring back people with you and start right away.

1m years with 50 ppl that can die just by walking outside doesn't give me a proper chance in doing that. Chances of any of them surviving or their/our offspring surviving is slim to non. Christianity and other religions pushed us back ( technologically ) some 500 years. So i think 10k years with technology that is 300 years ahead of us is more than enough time to create new civilization that will surpass ours by 1000s of years.

[markos82]

That's not the point. If you muck around for 950k years on Earth before starting to build your Utopian civilization, you will be mentally so fucked up, that you will not be able to do it.

Hell, in just thousand years you will be bored to (un)death from walking the Earth alone.

After 10k years you've stuck your dick in every animal species there is just because you were curious.

After 100k years you've gone everywhere. Died every single imaginable death. You built a couple of pyramids just because you needed something to do. There is nothing new you could possibly think of doing. You spend every moment of your days doing absolutely nothing. You die of dehydration every couple of days because you are so numb to the pain already, and nothing matters because you will just respawn and start the tedium of just existing all over again.

And you're just 1/10th of the wait from starting to build your ideal civilization.

By the time modern humans emerge, your psyche has been completely destroyed. You are not even a consciousness anymore. You are a mindless corpse that sits somewhere and stares at the sky.

Or even worse, you are lucid, and you remember everything that has happened to you during those million years. All that accumulated PTSD from countless accidents and injuries and isolation. You will never be able to function with beings that live for paltry hundred years at most. You're sense of time is so messed up that any sort of planning is impossible.

Well if i'm immortal that means ( imo ) that my brain is also immortal and capable to adapting to every possible situation which means my mind from 1st day in my million year wait time will be the same after 1m years have passed.

[shadowmouse]

and capable to adapting to every possible situation

Based on what? It is unstated in the hypothetical, we only know we won't *die* We weren't promised happiness, or sanity.

[markos82]

Based on what? It is unstated in the hypothetical, we only know we won't *die* We weren't promised happiness, or sanity.

Well OP said nothing kills me, that implies that my brain wont suffer any consequence of me being put through any imaginable scenario. If i'm about to lose an arm i won't thus my situation will change and my body will adapt to it, that also implies my brain will do the same if im about to lose it due to me being "killed" 1m times or more....

Well it is certainly true that in this hypothetical scenario it might work like you said. But if it is just regular human you or me, with immortality where we'd just respawn immediately in non-stuck location if we died, there is zero chance that either of us would survive sane for more than couple of tens of millennia.

Well just read what i wrote above

[Cosmic Janitor]

You are completely immortal in this scenario. The process which would freeze a normal human wouldn't kill you in this one. You'd be just fine, just completely unable to move. Sound fun to you?

It wasn't stated how it would work down to the most minute details. Immortality doesn't mean you are invincible, it just means you won't die from something, usually natural causes. If you assume some kind of divine protection from any harm you might as well assume you get max. level mental fortitude as well, then it would be just boring for a couple hundretd thousand years.

This is a common problem with these kind of scenarios. The way it would actually work is crucial to the outcome yet it is never stated to that degree. Unless you know everything it is best to assume the least OP version though, which is usually the one that breaks reality the least. That usually means that your cells work perfectly and don't mess up when replicating, therefore stop aging, heal more and better, etc. All of that is somewhat realistic yet. Though I guess you could argue that the OP stated food wouldn't be an issue either, so that already goes beyond that. For that to happen you'd definitely get energy from some other source as well.