If immortality is scary, consider it on a cosmic scale for an entire race.
The concept of immortality may scare us not just for ethical reasons. If you can't die by any means, what then?
If you have all the time in the world, you may try to read every book, play every game, paint every painting, meet every person, make every machine. What then?
Earth may face some catastrophe in the future, but what if space travel is easy? You can explore every planet. What then
Perhaps you go into genetic engineering and make every human possible, and they'll relieve their boredom across the universe as well. What then?
If the universe is infinite and infinitely vast and varied, then every variant of a planet exists somewhere out there. (Not all variants is viable, but just entertain this.) This means that every variant of a civilization also exists. This means that there are infinite Infinite Civilizations, expanding in every direction, eventually meeting and converging with each other. What then?
At this point the only limit is the universal entropy and physical limits, but the Infinite Civilization could overcome those too. Now, even the heat death of the universe isn't a concern for them, they can travel faster than light, and now everything is immortal. What then?
One of the hard realities is that everything has an end, either in size or in time. But if life has no limit, then one may reconsider what life is in that case. In the Infinite Civilization there are infinite resources. Organisms no longer have to compete, they can freely evolve and spread out. At one point we may end up with life covering the entire cosmos. What then?
Write every book, develop every game. Keep going from planet to planet, making the exact culture you've envisioned, only to start the apocalypse out of curiosity. Start every apocalypse on every civilization and start over. Leave some planets alone and watch them become another Infinite Civilization. The entire spacetime is a canvas, but creation no longer serves any purpose. What then?
Laws and ethics have become deprecated. Or maybe there's a planet for every possible law. For every action, there is somewhere the very exact situation where the opposite action was taken. Art has no value, it's just creating new variants. Identity is obsolete, there is always a slightly different "you". People start grouping together based on similarities, but every personality cluster has already been formed. Living starts to lose its meaning, everything you wanted to do was already done somewhere else with every detail. There is no longer a need to preserve society, as there's every possible society. Good and evil are no longer the metrics, they are just directions the society can take, and everything is allowed. What then?
Spend millennia on a single monument. Build a spaceship. Build an artificial planet. Build a Dyson Sphere. Start connecting planets together. Start an interstellar network. Starts a highway between galaxies. Then bridge the gaps. Then build something in them. Cover the entire space in cities. What then?
Start a digital simulation. Construct a virtual replicate of the universe. Perfect the simulation so this and the artificial universe are not distinguishable. Discover that you're living in a simulation. Contact your creators. Your creators live in a simulation too. Search for the original creators, but every originator is not the original one. What then?
Implement the Library of Babel in real life. Try to read through all of it. Make a quantum computer instead to read countless books at the same time for you. Receive every variant of every content possible. Discover the Library of Babel inside the Library of Babel. Design a database to keep track of all variants of the Library of Babel. End up with the Library of Babel database that holds other databases. What then?
Invent time travel. Meet every variant of yourself from parallel universes. Start an intertemporal information exchange. Then travel back in time and do something differently. Explore all variations of what you could have done. Return to the beginning and make a different Infinite Civilization. Then make sure the Infinite Civilization never emerged, it doesn't matter because in the universe there's always another one. Discover that the Infinite Civilization has already anticipated this, in fact, this was another experiment. The Infinite Civilization has been recording all states of the universe in every point in time. What then?
All forces of nature have been manipulated, and some new ones were invented. All emotions have been experiences, and some new ones were created. The infinite encyclopedia can never be complete, but nothing new is added anymore. The artificial Akashic Records now contains the entry for every variant of the Infinite Civilization, along with every variant of the Akashic Records. What then?
The Infinite Civilization has overcome the entropy. But in doing so, it became the entropy itself. When everything has been achieved, nothing has more or less meaning than the other. When everything has been achieved, all experiences on any metric averages to zero. There is no boredom, but nothing ever gets done. They've played gods and run out of toys. Everything is perfectly balanced. After taking over all of the reality, life has achieved full homogeneity. What then?
Decide that you're tired of this. Do the only thing that the Infinite Civilization didn't want to do. Invent the end button and make it so nothing no longer exists.
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