Another long post, sorry it won’t all fit in the email and I do hope you read it all on the Substack
I've been using computers from a very early age. I started using them at age 4, in 1995. I got my own in 1997, age 6. By age 10, I had made my first mods for Zoo Tycoon by carefully drawing each animation slide in MS Paint, learning how to hard-code a gif because I was too poor for photoshop, and writing the code for the new animal itself too. I even recall buying my first game, sometime around 1999 in a store with my dad - he said I could pick one game - my first PC game ever. There were two games on the shelf: Sim Earth, or Age of Empires II. Even back then, at age 8 or so, I was conscious of the dangers of buying something that was just fun, or something that could produce compound benefits to my academic standing - I picked Sim Earth.
At the time, Sim Earth was already an incredibly old game, having first released before I was born. I didn't know, I just liked the description of the game. Sim Earth started my love of all things Will Wright, the main brain behind Sim Titles at Maxis. Most gamers have their favorite developer like GabeN or Colantonio. For me it was Mr Wright.
Wright had a habit of finding ways to shove complexity into the simplest of code. SimEarth was 915 KB, and it has yet to have been out-done as far as I know. It was insane the complexity he could fit into a floppy diskette, with space to spare.
Sim Earth is a game more so about time than life. The game follows several epochs of planetary history, but with a catch: every subsequent epoch goes slower than the last. The reason is simple: more things happen per million years as you move from the start of a planet to its end. Of course, the real reason is that it saves buttloads of memory and CPU ticks to scale it by powers of ten.
For the first epoch, you had the power to set tectonic faults, volcanos, meteors, and ask kinds of natural phenomena. But what you didn’t know - if you were playing for the first time - is that all your vigorous shake and bake activities were adding to a counter which, once triggered, the game would spawn a microbe and cut your clock rate to a tenth. All your fun artistry on the planet surface became impractical. You could still do it, but you wouldn't see an affect for several minutes rather than instantly.
The game featured a staggered spawner. You couldn't plop in a dinosaur when the first microbe spawned, but you could spawn in some more complex cells. Once fish evolved, you could plop in an amphibian, for example, but not a reptile. The game communicated to you, in this quiet way, that you could create within reason of what was available, but you would have to wait for new typologies. This quiet way of telling you the rules without stating them out loud was a stapple of Maxis games. You learned the rules by hitting into them, not reading a manual. Often times, this invited you to imagine a narrative behind the events. The game would tell you when something went extinct, for example, but never why. You had to figure that out.
Luckily, the game was incredibly autistic and provided very detailed data as to what happened. You will be watching a species become a civilization into the information age, when suddenly you start seeing mushroom clouds everywhere and the charts show peaks in radiation. You conclude: the species you were carefully guiding to the stars chose suicide and blew itself up. Other times you’ll see a sudden grey cloud covering your screen as species after species plummet to zero - extinction. You look closely and you see the grey blob is actually robots. Suddenly cities start flying into the sky as if fleeing them, and then comes the mushroom clouds. You don’t need a textbox to know what happened: The robots have rebelled.
The funniest parts are always these, when these kinds of retro-investigations occur and you attempt to construct a narrative of the events. In fact, at any point of one of these dead-ends, the game falls back into the earlier timescales. Time speeds up, the planet heals, and life once again begins. You can do this over and over again, developing rich lore for a world’s archeology.
But, one of the most curious things to my adolescent brain was what each sprite actually meant on that grid of sprites. Was this an individual? A tribe? A family? How should I interpret the occupied space? Once, a microbe stayed in the same square for thousands of years as history marched on. Was this an immortal individual watching the epochs? Or was it just a very stable species in that imaginary square grid latch. What was the world within each one of those squares? I could see the overall world, but what goes on in that little single sprite image? In terms of computer code, nothing. But my imagination loved it. Sim Earth sparked in me a deep interest in time, and how precious it is. How do you quantify occupation in space and time?
Sim Earth was more than my first game. Sim Earth was one of my first world-building story games. It taught me about timescales, epochs, and the cycles of rising and falling eras. Though, to be fair, when I eventually did buy Age of Empires II a few months later many of those lessons were taught as well. Other games, like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, also sparked similar lessons and questions. SMAC is unique because, unlike his Civilization series, Sid didn’t allow you to play as a people group; you played as an ideology. This effectively made the game a political simulator akin to the Democracy series, but with the ability to shoot your opponent if you lose. The Libertarian faction was a fun meme: An African Hoppe-Libertarian seeking immortality to secure is land claims forever.
I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years.
Even five hundred would be pretty nice.
CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morganlink 3D-Vision Interview
Indeed, in AC nearly every faction is hunting down immortality and a way to preserve their identity and ideology. The plot of the game is that they abandoned Earth to its doom in order to preserve humanity on an alien world. Each and every faction is oriented towards self-preservation and immortality - even the human extinction anti-natalist types, who seek to preserve themselves as biological gods. One of my favorite meditations is by what’s left of the UN, whose commissioner writes:
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
How very prophetic.
In the early 2000s, my baba passed away. She was 89, born 1916 in the middle of WWI. She spoke Russian, English, Yiddish, and a few bits of other tongues. She went through the Great Depression in her teenage years, which left her with a permanent anorexic frame - she never gained weight for the rest of her life because she didn’t develop correctly during those years. That had other consequences such as having no cavities until her 40s, on account of how rarely ate. She smoked like everyone else and suffered from bouts of cancer as a result - all of which she survived. Cancer did not kill her but left her scarred with a double mastectomy. In her youth, my baba was abused by her unstable Slavic cousins, fraught from the chaos of the late 19th and early 20th century chaos of the Eastern world. I don’t know the story of how the family split up, only that they did. My baba and her sister saved up and bought an apartment in New York City for $9,000 dollars - that’s $120,000 in today money. They were secretaries and typists, and I can’t imagine how much work they did to get that kind of money in just a few years. She married a taxi driver World War Two vet, a big hairy Grecco-Italian man from Napoli. I still have his Luger, with armor piercing and high explosive bullets that the Italians made for whatever reason. My mother was the result. But, besides being a veteran, my grandfather had diabetes and passed away in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Between famine, abuse, and labor, my grandfather was the only happiness my baba had in this world. When he died, my baba’s soul died with him. She didn’t have much happiness to give to the world, and after that she had none at all. I don’t think she had much of a faith either. As a result of all of this, my baba was a very thin and frail women of great bitterness. She moved in with my parents when she grew too old to take care of herself. Thus when I - an obese child addicted to video games - started spending time around her, I gained a perspective that the world is not like the clean simulations in video games. Life gets very messy. Her little Apartment in the New York City grid never moved, much like those sprites in Sim Earth, but the events that happened in that part of the grid are full of love, hate, hurt, hope, and at least for my baba, the end of all things.
From that little sprite in New York’s grid, my baba bore witness to the rise and fall of the Russian Revolution, World War Two, the Korean War, Vietnam war, Gulf War, and many others. She had seen the start and end of the space race. The Moon landings, and the subsequent abandonment of the stars. When she was young, the last Civil War veterans would show up to parades on the street outside. When she left that building, the first drone strikes, and biomedical security apparatuses, were starting to echo on the TVs in that house. That house has points of connection stemming back to people born in the 18th century, and will continue to have connections to people who will live to see the year 2100. I have a certain fascination with these information overlaps.
In my professional life, I sometimes find myself placing my hand on a brick or stone and trying to imagine all the generations that also brisked that surface. Are their skin cell still there somewhere, fossilized? Where I live, there is a building that Thomas Jefferson once visited, and nearby you can also find the house of Giuseppe Garibaldi - one of the founders of Italy who briefly lived in New York before returning home to unify the peninsula. These strange overlaps of history aren’t unique to America, of course. They’re just so rare due to her youth that they stand out more when they occur. Travel to Europe and you can easily walk on surfaces that Legionnaires fought wars on.
You can make something of a graph about these overlaps if you want, tracking the average year of birth of the people around you and the things that overlap with you.
Generational overlap isn’t limited to human beings either, as there are wildly different life spans for a variety of species. Consider that the turtles Charles Darwin met in the Galapagos are still living today, and likely will continue to live - and outlive - you. When these turtles were born, most people believed the Earth was 6000 years old. Of course, I somewhat still think that’s true, and it would be funny if by the time they died, most people once again believed that.
Lonesome George, a local turtle thought to be over a century old, died only 10 years ago.
Unlike humans, some species can become “biologically immortal”. This can mean a few different things:
Individuals do not age.
Individuals can age backwards.
Individuals ages ridiculously slowly.
In other words, if we were to construct a graph like before, it would become asymptotic. There really isn’t an upper limit, and it begins to become a game of probability rather than certainty. We both know that you will very likely never meet someone over 120 years old. But the lobster you see on someone’s dinner plate may be older than your country.
Imagine that as one of those Sime Earth sprites. A sprite just sitting by while the clock runs on. This can gets mind-boggling very quickly. Let me show you:
Methuselah
This tree is 4,853 years old. Methuselah is a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, which is a plant that lives in America’s south-west. They are likely leftovers form the ancient pines of North America’s west coast, from a wetter time.
If you believe in a literal flood, this tree was already about 500 years old when it hit - and survived. It was about 300 years old when the Pyramids were built. This tree was already multiple thousands of years old when Jesus walked the Earth, and it’s seen more or less the entirety of humanity’s recorded history from cave to moon landing. If trees could talk, this tree could tell you more or less every story ever told.
Gran Abuelo
This Chilean tree may be over 5,000 years old. It is so old, and its outer bark so rotted, that at some point it began to bodily migrate what was still alive inside, producing a wall-like appearance. Every couple decades the tree’s oldest bark fossilizes, and the living material is forced to scoot along to make space for new bark.
If this tree could write a memoir, the entirety of the Aztec empire would only constitute 10% of the book.
Pando
In Utah, there is a clonal colony of Poplars that goes by the name Pando. Thanks to a mutation, this forest’s members are all linked by the roots - meaning that every one of these trees is considered a single organism, with a root system that connects them all. Every few years, the roots sprout a new trunk and a new limb is added.
Although each individual trunk ranges between 10-100 years old, Pando’s root system may be upwards of 80,000 years old. A constantly rejuvenating system that perpetually replaces itself, it is likely Pando will go on living indefinitely
When Pando’s first trunk sprouted, there were no humans in Utah - there were non in all the Americas! Europe was still ruled by Neanderthals and most of humanity was limited to Africa and perhaps some parts of the Indian Ocean.
The Milky Way is said to be 100,000 light years wide, meaning that most of the light Pando baths in every night is younger than he is!
Pando is the yellow trees.
Ibiza’s Forest
Just briefly, off the coast of Ibiza is an undersee clonal colony of sea grass with the same mutation as Pando. It’s thought to be 100,000 years old.
When Pando first sprouted, this guy was already older than every known civilization!
Endoliths
Did you know that some stones are alive? Or, more accurately, some forms of life have managed to make a home out of the pores of stones. You can imagine these critters as akin to cellular hermit crabs that can hide in their shells for very long periods. Initial tests of some species at the bottom of the sea floor hint that their only reproduce once every 10,000 years… Imagine that for a moment. A cell that has been waiting in a stone for the entirety of human civilization just to split into two,
I have a fascination with Endoliths, not only because of their under-studied chemistry as to how they enliven solid rock but also because they simply are so old. In addition to splitting once every 10,000 years, they appear to be able to hibernate indefinitely. Some estimates place individual cells as having gone on living for 100 million years. That means that when that cell first formed from mitosis, the dinosaurs hadn’t even evolved yet, and by the time it split again, they had gone extinct for millions of years.
If such cells could record in their DNA some memory of all that they’ve witnessed, it would constitute nearly the entirety of multicellular life. Such things are mindboggling.
Occasionally, you can find Enhydro Agates - hollow rocks with water stuck in them - which contain such organisms. These are enclosed ecosystems which have gone one in isolation for entire epochs of Earth’s geological history!
Enhydro Agates with Ancient Water Inside - YouTube
Humans
I am only 30, but I have noticed a curious sway too and fro about human immortality. Back in the 90s I recall people saying it was a good thing, then in the 2000s the new atheists would always say how it’s a bad thing and you’ll get bored. These days it seems to be a popular idea again.
Those who follow my occasional posting know that I do biohacking on the side. I’ve written DNA sequences and paid labs to modify cell lined with those sequences. This is all part time hobby, part time PhD I may never finish. The technology became very cheap thanks to all the covid investing money. Truth be told, I actually do know how one would go about making a human immortal. This would involve using a virus that can quickly spread throughout your body without detection, such as the Lentivirus. You would give it a chemical trigger so that once it spread, you could turn it on manually with an ingestible pill and it would swarm and overrun your immune system. The virus would carry the protein sequence for Telomerase, and in such a way as to be integrating into the human chromosome. Telomerase adds junk DNA to the ends of Chromosomes, allowing it to undo the effects of natural aging which eventually break down your DNA and cause you to die. Your immune system would eventually win and wipe out the virus, but by the time it did it would already have spread Telomerase integrating sequences to most of your body’s cells. You could add in other things, such as an anti-toxin, then use a toxin to kill off the rest of your cells that were not modified. It would also have to add in an entirely separate chemical activator along with the integrating Telomerase sequence, as leaving it always on would result in your death from cellular overload and apoptosis. Let’s give it the chemical activator that turns on when you have Lactose. Simply drink some milk, and Telomerase would activate and add junk sequences to your DNA, undoing the natural trimming your chromosomes experience from age. The end result: a biologically immortal human being.
It’s easy to imagine a perfect simulation where you would live forever, like one of those Sprites I mentioned in SimEarth. You’d get to sit on your grid of the planet and watch the ages go by. Would you do it? Would you guide a tribe over the centuries and through the chaotic times to come to ensure your patricianship produces a strong and stable society? Would you be able to wade off the endless stream of assassins, deceivers, and terrors out to end your immortal rule? Maybe you’d only make it 300 years before a blade ended you. That’s still pretty nice, right?
See that’s the thing. you wouldn’t really be living forever. You’d live forever, so long you don’t get shot, poisoned, or any other number of horrors. Statistically, you would eventually die from one of these things. Rather than imagining it as immortality, it’s best to imagine what you did is remove “natural causes” from the things that can kill you. That’s the scary part about it: You are more or less preventing a peaceful death for yourself. You are still going to die, but all the nice and peaceful ways are now off the table. You can only die from something horribly painful. Fun times, eh?
Life isn’t like SimEarth. It’s more like my baba’s life: Fully of loves and pains, losses and gains. And the odd thing is, you never expect the day comes where you’re still alive, but your spirit broke. Then you’re stuck, bitter and broke, with nothing to do than curse the oaks.
A Syrian Elder I knew had a saying: It’s better to light a candle than to curse the dark. I’m told Eleanor Rosevelt said that too, probably while FDR was off sleeping around before he got stuck in a wheelchair.
Would I undergo the procedure? Probably not. Life is hard. I’m also Christian and have this stinking suspicion that you actually have to die in order to be resurrected with Christ. When I was young, I would pray that I’d live forever. Now a days I find myself praying “Jesus, please come back the second I die so I don’t rot”. I don’t know when I accepted the reality that I would die, but I have a hunch.
The day my baba died was also the day I graduated from grammar school (That’s a K through 8th grade school system if you don’t know). The day of my graduation ceremony, I woke up about 5 am to fetch my robes from the basement. My baba was coughing fairly badly and in great pain. I did not talk to her. I arrived at my school at 7 am. Shortly after, my teacher pulled me to the side and told me my parents had called: When they woke up, they found my baba had passed away. That means I was the last one to see her alive. I had never seen anyone die before, but I also had never been the last living witness. This hit me very hard. For the next few weeks I heard footsteps from her room when no one was home. I would sometimes hear a groany cough or moan of pain from the room in the wee hours of the morning. My mother was one of those mystics who would watch Sylvia Brown on Montel Williams back in the days when he was dating the current Vice President. But I knew better - I had often pondered while playing Sim Earth all those years back, what lies behind the sprite. How would I know it’s the only sprite? An animal sprite can occupy a plant sprite, but how can I tell what’s behind? I knew there in that time of grief, if I was a demon who had stalked a person through all their pains for decades, I would be very good at pretending to be them in order to gain the trust of a 12 year old boy. At a late hour in the night when I heard the noises again, I took my bible and I bravely walked down the steps into my grandmother’s room in the dark. There was certainly a chill and all the usual nonsense you hear about. Perhaps I even heard a slight whisper, but I can’t remember fully. But, rather than try to talk to ghosts, I prayed to Yahweh in the name of Jesus that he would remove the demon pretending to be my grandmother. I did not believe this trickster was my grandmother at all.
Sure enough, I never heard a footstep or groan from that room again. It was the first time I had conducted an exorcism. Not on a person, but on a place. Nonetheless, the fear of death - the realization that I, like my grandmother, would one day die - latched onto my soul thereafter, and would not let go. I began having panic attacks thinking about it, and I began to pray an interesting prayer: “Lord, show me what death is like so I will not fear it.”. I began to have very vivid dreams every night, falling asleep to these prayers. The hunch I mentioned was one such drea:
It was nothing. That’s the best I can explain it. I found myself in nothing. Is in even the right word? How can you be in nothing? I found myself of nothing? I can’t really grasp the right words. It was an empty place. I can’t even say dark, just empty. I could sense nothing - neither sight, smell, touch, taste, or hearing. It was a void. It is difficult to describe a void with words, as by definition no word can describe it. How do you tell someone how nothing fells or smells or tastes? All I had were my thoughts, and in the absence of any tangible reality to center myself, I begam to think only one thing: Panic.
But in my thoughts, I could sense something. A presence, I suppose. The thought seemed foreign, as if it was not from me. Somehow I knew what the thought was, even though I had no mouth to speak it nor hears to hear it. It was I Am. And the moment I could perceive the thought clearly, something like an explosion occurred and that nothing burst into vivid something. I could feel my body come back. I can’t really describe what that’s like, but I think it’s what being resurrected is going to be like. All of the sudden I found myself with my body again, only I was something like two feet above my bed, falling.
I don’t know how I got up there so as to fall. I’ve spent good long and hard thinking about it. Perhaps I kicked myself into the air while I was dreaming of the nothing, and awoke at the exact moment I started falling back down? Or perhaps I only thought I was falling, and what I felt like hitting my bed was merely a body-wide twitch you can sometimes get while sleeping. I can’t really say. I know I felt like I was falling and, unlike falling dreams in where you awake the moment you hit the ground, this was one where I awoke with the falling part.
This place of nothing, whatever it was, is how I now imagine what being dead will be like. I’m not 100% sold on the idea of soul sleep, mind you, but whatever that experience was feels like what death will be. Or, rather, lack thereof, of feeling. For all my life, I feel like I’ve been trying to find something that is akin to that experience, and I have never found it. It wasn’t a pleasant experience that I should want to experience it again. It was an altogether other experience, of which I desperately desire anything to compare it to. I’ve seldom found myself some nights navel-gazing, thoughts emptied, and emotions dulled, trying to place my mind back into that state. It is impossible to do so. Reality is just too loud and quiet, too bright and dark, to be akin to true nothingness.
It is hard for me to fear death as a result of that childhood experience. It is hard for me to fear anything at all. I do feel the Lord answered my prayers, and I will likely never fear death again. But what exactly that experience was continues to illude me.
Some part of me still wishes to live forever - to watch the epochs come and go like those Sprites in SimEarth. But there is within me some part that fears that kind of forever. That kind of forever may be a red herring for an altogether other kind of forever. There are two forevers. One kind is time without end, the other kind if outside of time entirely.
There is the forever of endless cycles of birth and death, rise and fall, stability and chaos.
There is the forever entirely outside of cycle itself.
In his Genesis commentary, Martin Luther writes something about this:
For with God there is no before nor afterwards; no swift nor slow; but all things to his eyes are at once present. For God is simply absolutely independent of and alone, and separate from all time!
Elsewhere, he terms this “Naked Deity”. I like that.
I think I experienced the kind of forever that is outside of time when I was a boy, experiencing that nothing. I think that incomprehensible I Am that, with a word, can usher me back into my body made me feel like nothing because of how infinite it is. It was truly “naked deity”.
Or, maybe it was really bad sleep paralysis.
