this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
-13 points (38.6% liked)

Asklemmy

43963 readers
1183 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I give you a cozy chair and you are now going to watch the beginning of earth til today with all your senses. You won’t age, everything freezes. But once you reach this minute you will get a million dollars.

All you have to do is watch earth form from nothing to how it is now in this minute and then you will come down to earth with a million dollars and nothing changed.

Yes or no? You will see things nobody has ever seen and you can watch the dinos if you get to that point after a few million years. I will give you a chair and binoculars

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Would you sit in a chair in an empty, featureless room and not move out of it for a year? I'd give you a million dollars.

If you had to think about that, now consider multiplying that by a billion, for the same reward.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

We can also change your thought experiment to help people conceptualise the “billion” part. Instead of a lump sum after a billion years, let’s just take the original million and divide it so you receive the same amount for every year you complete. Does receiving a hundredth of a cent ($0.001) for every year you sit in said room sound like a very good deal?

Even with hundreds of billions of dollars, it sounds like an insanely bad deal. It doesn’t even cover a yearly salary, and money would be completely unusable for 99.99% of that time lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

~~the same~~ half that reward. this is like fae tempting kids in the forest, when they need someone to suicide from boredom for some reason.