Knowledge or Experience...

It's basically getting to go thru an entire game with some sort of cheat code on that ensures you get to play all way thru no matter how badly you play thru, or getting the watch a fast forwarded playthru on how to do it but never get to apply it in any shape or form. I fail see how this is even a remotely close decision.

The first option is infinitely more interesting. Rather than just get the cliffnotes of all existance and take some beings word for it all you get to go out there and see as much of it as you can for yourself first hand then be wiped out(like having a super villain monologue to you and then get killed by them...Unless of course this supreme knowledge gave you a window to survive on which I imagine knowing everything you would. Only down side is may be existence has no purpose once you do so again I'd rather experienced it all firsthand that simply imput the I win code and vanish from reality.I got to do it all on my terms.). In which case you probably end up becoming the being who presented this question in the first place to yourself as thats usually how those things go. If you were immortal you likely could find all the answers you'd ever want to on your own making the second choice completely moot.

Granted I'd picture there would be very long periods of really boring stuff that happened between anything cool. Like oh look there's this awesome civilization...now there're all dead due to nuclear war....great now I need go find a new planet to hang out on till the human race shows up. Nope still dinosaurs..only the Jurassic era. I'll be back in a few million years.

I'd go with option number two myself.

Primarily because there's a question I'd want to know the answer to...which is what the being was that was powerful, godlike, or otherwise omniscient enough to give me these choices to begin with. A being that can make you immortal and invulnerable, plus to be able to fly faster than the speed of light and can make you omniscient at the end of time?

Chances are that being has already been there and done this...and I have an insatiable curiosity for such things. And who knows, I might learn some universal truth about myself, or humanity or something equally profound with all this knowledge. Which means in turn I'd understand something about creation itself before it ended or whatever happens when the universe ends. I figure also this being would know the final outcome of both choices (myself and one other end up at the end of the universe in this scenario), so there's no 'get out of jail free' card here.

Sure, there's an enormous temptation to go to billions of other worlds and have millions of lifetimes of experience, but I agree with others here in that I don't think we're built to live that way without some radical changes in both our mind and outloook.

What would I ask an immortal being who's had a chance to experience all of time and space? Hm.

'Would you like to stay and see what happens next and talk about what we've learned?'


S.

I see this problem simply as do I learn about a place by going on to the internet or do I learn about it by actually living there? The end result is the same, but how we get there is very different. With the person that chose knowledge, they have only an hour left, but the person that chose experience would have millions of lifetimes of experience and is able to gain the same knowledge that the other person gained with the added knowledge that they were actually able to use the knowledge for their own benefit.

As far as the mind not being able to handle to immortality, there are various technologies that would be able to increase brain capacity, but that won't help with the first few billion years. Although, there is not much to see for the first few billion years. There is only about a thousand years of civilization that has any real meaning.

However, both would still have no clue as to what would happen after the universe "ended." So they would end up the same as far as what the most important question of the moments before the end of the universe. Equally clueless.

I think one option to make the choice a little more difficult to answer if option two was left with one year instead of one hour. It's still a very short amount of time when compared to time itself, but it's a much longer amount of time for a person's perspective.

I'll have a coke.

Transport to the beginning. I would be able to grow and learn. Might not be fully human by the end of time, but I wouldn't care. I would take immortality laced with bouts of boredom and suicidal inclinations every few thousand years, over 'an hour', any day of the week.