Would you watch the earth form from nothing to the current time for 500.000 $?
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
No way. Sitting around for 4.5 billion years doing nothing while nothing happens for most of the time? I'd go insane after a few months with billions of years still to go. The "with all your senses" part also sucks for the millions of years when earth was a ball of lava with a steady rain of asteroids and no atmosphere.
Kurzgesagt made a video about the entire history of earth, each second representing 1.5 million years. I'd suggest watching this to get a sense about the absolutely massive amount of time. Our monkey brains are not even slightly made to observe all of this.
Also funny that you mention money, as if someone who just witnessed the entire history of earth would care about a measly million dollars.
You keep asking this question, we keep saying no, and then you ask it again with LESS money on offer. You don't get how haggling works, and you definitely don't get how asklemmy questions work.
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
Like, in real time? That's an obvious no. It would be literally torture. Not being able to do anything other than just sitting in the same spot and watching a window for essentially eternity would make you literally insane. What a horror show experience
Even for a billion it’s such a shit deal. Billions of years of doing nothing experiencing the Big Bang and burning alive for centuries on end, to get pennies a year you ultimately will get to spend in the very last fractions of a percent of it all.
No amount of money would make me want to endure that torture. Most of earth’s history is just absolutely nothing. Apart from a few asteroid strikes, Cambrian explosion is about as exciting as things can get, and even that is just 100 million years of barely anything happening.
I don’t want to sit down and see how moss forms over millions of years.
500k or 1 million aren't enough. It would be a difficult transition from observing the world, to participating in it. I would basically need to receive enough to comfortably retire.
"You won't age, everything freezes" implies my body (and brain) won't change. That is, I won't be able to form memories. So even if I experience it all "with all my senses", it will only be for that exact moment and then it will be gone.
Like blinking and nothing has changed. You don't remember any of it. It's a bargain if you ask me.
I'm going to say no on this one! The Hadean Eon alone lasted for around 600,000 million years. A majority of Earth's life had nothing of interest happening so I can't imagine how bored I'd be 😭
I have given this a lot of thought, because at first I hadn’t taken from the question that you have to sit out the whole thing in real time, not in a minute… but then I also noticed that you are going to experience it with all your senses. Would there be boredom? I am not sure.