I wrote this script some time last year. With the goal of encoraging people to not want to die because they’ll “get bored”.

I rewrote it a few days ago with a Claude Mind Building Project I’ve been working on.

I don’t think this post will ever see the light of day. It just doesn’t make for a good youtube video. But something you can skim read… Maybe.

What I would do with Forever

How long do you want to live for? 80 years? 90 years? 200?

How about forever?

[Pause - let the weight settle]

I know what you’re thinking. “Forever? That sounds awful. I’d get bored. I’d want to die eventually.”

But stay with me for a moment. Because this video isn’t just about immortality - it’s about expanding your conception of what’s possible. And maybe, just maybe, dramatically increasing your lifespan in the process.

Here’s the first mistake people make when thinking about living forever: they imagine their current life, just… endless. The same routine, stretching into infinity. The same job. The same walls. The same screens asking if you’re still watching.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Now look, I can’t speak for everyone, but I know what I would do. And it’d start with what I’m already doing… but then it would get a lot weirder.

I’d keep making YouTube videos. There’s only a set amount I can make - we still do have a time limit. We’ll get to that later.

I’d teach people about witch trials and poisons and sleep and octopus psychology and how to build nukes and why you shouldn’t build nukes and why after curing death we Sapiens didn’t build a machine to replace it.

I’d keep teaching my art classes.

I’d visit my Grandma more often. Sit with her, really listen to her stories. Not just the ones she tells, but the ones hidden in the wrinkles around her eyes.

I’d travel to every country, then help establish the first countries on Mars, then become the first person to illegally immigrate to Europa.

I’d map each neuron in my brain, draw constellations of axons and give them names like ancient stars. Then I’d switch my pain and pleasure sensors, take a rocket into space and ride a shooting star through the atmosphere. Feeling the pleasure of my skin being simultaneously burnt and ripped off my body. I’d resist passing out from the G-Force and scream as loud as I could until I did succumb. Then I’d crash into the Mexican desert and walk to get tacos made of cultured lab grown human meat.

I’d discover what consciousness actually is, then download a copy of myself into a quantum computer just to argue with me about whether it’s really me or not.

I’d invade other planets with my god-like powers of technology. Build henges and pyramids and have a little laboratory on one of their moons to watch their civilization argue about where these things came from.

Then I’d abduct a few of them and show them my moon base and blow their minds before returning them to bed to get ready for their job as an alien accountant. Which really, is more of a job about sorting pebbles.

Then one day I’d reveal who I was and when they were ready I would guide my civilization to eternity.

I’d write poetry in base-16 mathematics and teach octopi to paint self-portraits.

[Softer tone]

I would walk on the beaches where I grew up. Press my heel into wet sand like my uncle taught me, watching it go white around the edges. Search for pipis when I see the bubbles, collecting them one by one, each small discovery a universe of its own.

I’d be friends with robots and they’d give me piggy backs through quantum tunnels.

I’d write in a journal about every animal I saw, and I’d have loads of time to practice drawing them really well.

I’d master magic, levitate over black oceans to reach the coast and turn back around to do it once more.

I’d spend a year walking backwards to see what it would do to my mind.

I’d search for the “I” in my brain and find out exactly what the hell I am.

I’d create new colors and teach my eyes to see them.

[Building emotional depth]

I’d celebrate my great great great great great great grandchild’s birthday at the water park on Tethys. Wrap my arm over my daughter’s shoulder and we would cry watching over the family we have. Knowing we do not yet have a way to bring back those we lost before death was cured.

And I would still be angry at the people who suggested death was natural when my gran died, or my grandad, or my dad, or my dogs, or my hermit crab, or fish. Because disease is natural until it isn’t. Tuberculosis also used to be romanticized before it was eliminated in the western world.

[Picking up pace]

I’d learn to speak fluently in mathematics. I’d understand the fundamental laws of how the universe works from its largest to its smallest components.

I would play all the video games.

Become a chess grandmaster.

And kiss your mum (it’s statistically probable).

Perform at the globe theatre and have all the bard’s plays memorized.

I’d keep the scarring on my kidneys that forces me to have to pee at least once an hour. But I’d cure my chronic joint and muscle pain. And I’d finally be able to sit still for a few minutes without descending into a dreaded ache.

Celebrate Petrov Day until the end of time, toasting the man who chose not to end it all.

I’d invent new types of music using quantum harmonics and gravitational waves.

I’d save my memories of my favourite TV shows in bottles. Then I’d watch the shows all over again. Then drink my old memory bottles and compare my thoughts on the different fresh viewings.

I’d have a big collection of rocks and my own museum to display them. And yes, some of those rocks would be from other galaxies, and others would be my collection of rocks that look like the rock from that “The Wrong Stone” kids book.

I would watch as Andromeda slowly collided with the Milky Way.

Fly through asteroid belts while playing chicken with other immortals.

Play mouse trap, and I’d probably just set up the trap (it’s statistically probable).

Build a domino tower that spells out “We did it!” when viewed from orbit.

Give my sister’s dog a whole pizza.

And I’d fuck a lot, loads of sodomy, like the stuff I’m going to do with aliens is probably going to be illegal when it’s first discovered and then everyone is going to chill out and realize no one was getting hurt and they’ll get rid of the law. So, yeah, pretty much the exact same historical trajectory as sodomy but I’m fucking aliens and not other homo sapiens.

I’d create new forms of matter just to see what they taste like.

I’d build a library of dreams and let people check them out for a night.

[Final movement]

And at the end of it all, as humanity orbits the final black hole, draining the last of the energy it holds, creating our own sun to light our final planets, I would have dinner at the restaurant at the end of the universe. And I’d eat a cow who was genetically bred to want to be eaten. And I’d be looking over at another table occupied by a man with two heads, another eating a salad in his pajamas, the next using a towel as a bib and flicking through some book, and Zoe Deschanel. And I’d have a feeling of some distant story I was once told.

Then with stomach full we would go and sit down on the big hill to watch. Since the first sparks lit up the dark in the savannah long ago, this entire time, all along, without realizing we had been working towards a machine that would be turned on for the first time in this very moment. And we would hope with each heart still beating, that it goes off without a hitch.

We’d hear the countdown. We’d feel the heat of thrusters. Watch now as our planets and our satellites and our space stations and our restaurants fly toward the black hole. Toward the monster of death itself. We hold hands and close our eyes and wonder what will happen to the spaghetti in our stomachs when it spaghettifies. And as we cross the event horizon we fall upwards with the boulders that break away from the ground. And as time slows you will whisper to yourself, “let there be light.”

And you hope, what we built works. That our universe-creation machine succeeds in its one and only task - to spark the birth of a new cosmos, one where maybe this time we’ll get it even more right.

[Final pause]

So… how long do you want to live for?

Bonus

I also came up with a bunch of things I’d want to add. But havn’t put them in. These were responses to that Claude itteration. So, it reads like I’m talking to Claude.

  • Oh, record the sound of every clock tower to preserve it’s chime before it’s inevitably destroyed.
  • Upload my mind into a whole colony of Bees and see the world like Claude Monet
  • I’d do escape rooms, but every 10 minutes you’re in there you get a random mental illness added to you. Which all get removed after your time is up, or you escape the room.
  • Study alien anatomy and swap organs with my alien friend
  • Unfortunately, I’d probably fight in some terrible wars
  • I’d go into a simulation of my old highschool and I’d relive it all with the memories I have now. And I’d protect people instead of being horrible
  • Live in a whale and search for candy Island
  • Find my arch nemesis
  • I’d screw over the Philosopher Thomas Nagle and write my brand new paper “I lived as a bat for a year, here’s what it’s like exactly”
  • Steal the last remaining dodo egg from the british museum and rebuild it’s DNA to create a clone
  • Design a sanctuary for the animals that we hunted to extinction
  • Shampoo a mamoth
  • See one of those elephants that we ate all of that were 3x bigger than the biggest elephants around today
  • And culture it’s meat and have a 300 person feast where we’re all naked, and in the dark, and disease still doesn’t exist because we haven’t started farming animals.
  • Play hide and seek across the galaxy
  • and be hunted by bounty hunters (but preferably ones that don’t actually want me dead)
  • Align super-intellegent AI
  • “Build a telescope powerful enough to watch myself building the telescope” But I think that only works if the universe wraps around on itself like a balloon. Constantly expanding, but a confined shape.
  • Solve a 4D rubics cube. (You can download software to Do Online Now Guys (DONG))
  • Figure out how to travel to the other multiverses. BTW, our current best understanding of physics says they exits. That’s not at all a joke. I’ve tried to keep everything in this list scientifically possible because I loooove science!
  • Write a library worth of smutty fan fic
  • Position two empty planets to orbit eachother at a distance of 1m so I can touch both at once
  • Play 0 gravity trampoline dodge ball with the dodo
  • Preserve and relearn languages that are about to die. And teach them to LLMs so that they never go unknown
  • “Create a dating app for parallel universe versions of yourself” hehehehe that’s fun
  • Carve hundreds of Chair legs
  • “Start a conspiracy theory about yourself and watch it evolve over millennia” hehehehehehe
  • See my old friends and lockpick the computer lab door one last time for our final Halo Lan party when we’re meant to be in class
  • Have music that plays in other people’s heads when I enter a room or they look at me