Knowledge or Experience...

One day some random entity comes to you and gives you a choice...

Be transported to the beginning of time and live until the end of time. You have the ability to fly FTL with reduced relativistic effects by a lot and are immune to permanent damage.

Or

Be transported to 1 hour before the end of time and have all knowledge in the universe.

Which do you choose?

And at the end of time, you meet another person who chose the opposite choice, what do you think you'd say?

I'd choose the first option, and tell the other guy, "Sucks to be you, I lived a long fruitful life after my choice but you only got an hour."

Plus, I get to choose what I learn. There's some stuff I'd just rather not know about.






-k

Neither, the human mind is too limited to comprehend the near limitless amount of knowledge encompassed by eternity. To attempt it would destroy what little sanity I possess.
I'll take the Cliff Notes version instead.

First option; the journey for knowledge would be greater imo.


As far as the second question I would ask if it was worth it.

That final hour conversation would be rather boring I'd think.
You'd have one person who lived the events, learned the knowledge 1st hand and long ago grew tired of the cyclical pattern that emerges in life.

Talking to the other who just instantly downloaded the entire Akashic record of time in one nanosecond. They'd have the knowledge, but would lack the 1st hand experience. So they might be more willing to debate and dissect things the other had long ago mastered.

This is like a nifty way of asking what's better, book smarts or street smarts. I always go with street smarts in those questions, unless we're talking about something like quantum mechanics. Then I think having the book smarts might outweigh any 1st hand knowledge.


Personally, I'd choose to go back. Maybe not to the dawn of time, lord knows I wouldn't want to spend hundreds of millions of years without any humans around. But maybe to the dawn of civilization. It would be really cool to get to trace the origins of cultures and ethnic groups. Though the temptation to alter the timeline might prove overwhelming at times.
Then there is the whole immortality depression to deal with. But that would be the price you pay for gaining the knowledge 1st hand.
It's that or only have the answers for an hour before you die.

I've recently started to create a timeline notebook just for my own personal knowledge. I printed out 100 blank maps of the world and have started mapping out the 1st tribes and their migrations, leading to the 1st cities etc etc.
It's been an interesting hobby as of late, which is why your question appealled to me.

What was your choice Durakken?

What would be the point of knowing everything if you had no time to act on it? (Never mind that the concept of actually knowing everything there is to know is just a pipedream. It would be like being able to count to infinity.)

Doesn't really seem like much of a choice.

You're also trying to separate knowledge from experience. The older you get, the more you realize that experience IS knowledge.

Hey, wait, do ya mean to the actual final heat death f the universe, or just to the effective death, as in nothing much happens anymore but particles decaying.

Cos the leadup to the actual heat death is a few megatrillion years of not much going on.




-k

Actually the "heat death" is the big crush which could happen any time, if it does happen, without warning, where the universe collapses. The One that is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay in the future is referred to as the "cold death" and or the big rip.

But that is besides the point. We're talking end of time. The end of what we perceive of as linear time, which could be now or never.


I would choose to go back in time and be immortal for a number of reasons...
#1. While it might be boring I would have a lot of time to think, write, and learn how the things came to be...
#1a. Some might point out that you are at the beginning of time and thus have no reading and writing utensils, but that is not true, Your flesh and bone and blood could be used.
#1b. The argument that there is a lot of time to go through and you'd get bored is in my opinion nonsense and it bares out as such when one thinks about life in general that it is nonsense.

#2. The fact that an entity could offer me such a thing indicates that they must have some sort of way to travel back and forth, to impart such stuff, and be unaffected by the end of time anyways so there must be a way to get around it, however the length of time in the end of time, and the resources, may not be and most likely aren't available. However, even if the big rip happened before I figured it out, there is every bit of reason to think pocket universes and other such technology could be used to sustain resources to reach the end to ask about the work around from anyone that the entity offered the second choice to...or the entity itself.

#3. Even if I had all the knowledge in the universe and more time I would not find it at all worthwhile as even with more time you're missing other components to what makes life interesting and worthwhile. I would gladly give up quite a bit of my current knowledge to gain other things so I don't see how it's beneficial to me without a level of certainty that i could figure out a work around to continue on.

#4. Going back in time allows you to be helpful to others and not just satisfy your own curiosity. And comes with the added benefit of the possibility of reaching the point of having all knowledge anyways...

So in my opinion the second option has no merits for anyone other than the greedy, stupid, and huge gamblers. The end of time guy could take that choice betting the entity might give someone else that choice and they might gather resources and such to figure out a work around...Of course if their wrong, they know it instantly and they have an hour to deal with that fact and just how bad or good their decision was ultimately.


And what would I ask? Well if I was there it means I hadn't figured out the work around yet and so I'd ask what it was and quickly build it.

Omniscient for only one hour is not that useful unless it gives a way to get to the next big bang. Immortality is not all that great unless you have the right type of mindset. After a few million years, you will have done all you can think of. Humans don't work that well with immortality. There has to be some physical and mental changes involved for it to work.

First option. Hopefully I could somehow hibernate until something actually interesting starts to happen... I don't fancy several billion years floating in an empty void.

I would choose the last hour. With the cumulative knowledge of the universe, I can surely figure out how to exist past it's end.

I think the first option would be worth it to see protostars fusing hydrogen for the first time. It's one thing to know the intricacies of the process, but it's another thing entirely to watch a star being born.

I'd choose 1. First off, I don't think there ever will be an end of time. So the second choice would be impossible.

Now assuming an end of time is possible, I'd make out so much more with choice 1!

As for what I'd say, truthfully, I think the first question would be why would they want to basically have just 1 hour left to live.

My mistake, though after looking at the wiki article, only partly so. Heat death is the universe is getting hotter, but because of a different reason...and it's no longer possible end.

Big Crunch also ends in "fire", and since the above is also not valid any longer, my brain must have associated the two together.

I'd actually choose neither, personally. But that doesn't help.

So I'd choose the second option. Why?

Because eternal life is pointless. It's an option for infinite procrastination. After all, you'll always have the rest of existence left to do stuff. I frankly can't see myself being all that happy halfways through eternity. I'd be able to spend a couple thousand years committing various crimes on my contemporaries, and a couple hundred figuring out the extent of pain an immortal can handle. But humanity itself would probably become trite to me sooner or later. Rinse and repeat the thing with another civilization elsewhere, but actual immortality would IMO detach you so far from any other living being after a period of time to the point where it'd be pointless to exist.

Hence I'd pick the other one. One implication of the Big Crunch is that everything will be condensed to the point where a chain reaction occurs which triggers another Big Bang. With all the combined knowledge in the universe at my disposal, I'd use it to first kill the guy who lived his way there because I know he's a complete sociopath by now and I need to cover my ***. Then I'd go about trying to find a way to play God and 'program' the pattern the next Big Bang will occur along. Fix what I'd perceive as mistakes in the prior iteration.

If I had time left after that I'd spend it insulting the corpse of the other guy cause he had eternal life and did jack all with it in the end.

One downside to option 1 is the temptation to change history but not being able to as it may result in a change that is worse then what you remember history to be and also that such a change may effect your existence if not erase you as the timeline alters. Example: let's say I'm a citizen of Germany in 2010 and I choose choice #1. So I go all the way back and then live through events watching as they unfold and then I start getting to the point in time where a certain future dictator by the name of Adolph would be born.

Do I prevent his birth, thus hopefully sparing millions of lives? But what if someone worse takes his place? (not to mention that Joe Stalin's existence must be considered as well). Or, let's say my actions prevent WW2 from happening at all but the life I had by the year 2010 was affected by the events of WW2 and now WW2 doesn't happen......did I just negate myself from existing, thus never being around to be given this offer by the entity and thus never being able to negate WW2 in the first place? Paradox.

Regardless, if I chose the first choice I'd have to force myself to remain an observer and not take actions to change things up to the point where I was sent back. So if I was sent back on say Jan 1, 2010 once I relive through history, once the date changes to Jan 2, 2010 THEN I can take actions that I hope would better humanity thanks to all the knowledge I would have accumulated by that point.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Okay dumb question, but in your first option what does being able to fly FTL(faster than light I assume) have to do with the question? Bascially I'm Superman?

And this is why I asked I guess. Even Superman is not privy to all knowledge everywhere. Granted he wasn't around at the beginning of time. Even if he was does that mean he'd be more inclined to learn more? I think more than anything hindsight would take a major role in the life of someone living forever. Lots of "I wish I'd have done this," or "I wish I would have made use of that bit of knowledge."

The second choice is not any better because what is the use of having unlimited knowledge with no practical, or even useful at this point, way of using it. Just to have a conversation with an old guy? I have to say I'd pass on both.