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When will you really die?
“Huh, really?” “Yes. Seriously, when will you really die?” Till 23rd April 2015, the website http://www.death-clock.org/ has registered 42,94,822 people who have used it to calculate their last day of life. That’s merely 0.61% of the world’s total population but considering that only 42.5% of the world’s population can access the internet (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) and out of them 27% are below 15 years (http://www.gapminder.org/news/world-peak-number-of-children-is-now/) it’s about 20% of the world’s total population who are mentally mature enough and can access internet. So Yah, people do like to know about their death. But, coming back to the question, when will you actually die? The above mentioned site uses data provided by WHO and also your habits to predict when will you die so to a great extent, yes it does give a fair idea about your lifetime but then again, it doesn’t take into account things like- accidents and fatal diseases. Exact time of death is extremely unpredictable, and we may never actually know “when will any of us die”, although, ironically enough, ‘death’ itself is perhaps the most absolute thing for us. We all will someday, for sure, die even though we don’t know when. Knowing that someday, we will for sure die, makes the value of knowing ‘when’ less important none the less it still remains important. Why do so much hard work then if we will have to die and that also uncertainly? Well, David Eagleman says in Forty Tales from the Afterlives- ” There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave and the third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” So you can either choose to mourn your upcoming death or you can work so that even after you physically die, people may never stop taking your name, may never let you fade into oblivion, may never let you, “actually die”. And as always, thanks for reading !
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After two weeks of thinking, I finally found a good question - are you REAL?
“Are you stupid?” that must be the first thought in your mind once you take the pain of reading the first line but hear me out. Right now, what can you do or think of- anything that will prove that you are real and not some character in a virtual game of some weird alien? “Huh, really?” – “yes!” Everything you see around you, from the buildings to the gravity you feel, the feeling of touch and your emotions everything can be programmed into a game given enough memory buffer to work with. Wondering how can you program emotions? Well there are basically two types of emotions a) The predictable, and b) The unpredictable. Under the predictable falls those emotions which you know you would feel every single time a certain incident occurs. For example, if you touch an object which is say 100 times hotter than you, you will absolutely feel pain. You don’t need to touch it again and again to see does it pains every time because it’s a predictable emotion. Such emotions can easily be programmed and exists inside games since 20th century. But what about the unpredictable one? Well the website https://www.random.org/ uses atmospheric noise to generate a random number. Considering a game which is connected to internet, which can use this site to generate a random number and use it to generate predefined emotions in a random fashion, we will pretty much get what we call unpredictable emotions. But how can you say that atmospheric noise is fully random? Actually the second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of the universe is increasing so it’s safe to say that we will never run out of randomness in air. So coming back to my point, so far, there is nothing we can think about to prove that we are real. Are we then truly just a part of a virtual game? Well there is one thing. The irrational numbers. These are numbers with non-recurring decimal part that means, they basically go on for ever. For example, the value of pi is 3.141592653589793238462643…. (Head over to http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5337/groupe/digits.html for the value of pi up to 100,000 digits of pi) so my point is that irrational numbers are the only non-programmable entity known to humans. They cannot be programmed. If some day we prove all irrational number to be rational, it will be pretty safe to assume that you and I are part of someone else’s video game. So next time you study number theory, give thanks to irrational numbers for proving us real. |
THIS BLOG IS A PART OF OLD ARCHIVE SINCE- 30/04/15
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