Time Stop

[Alorael at Large]

There's a question that I've mulled over and come to no real conclusions about. Inspired b the Superheroes thread, I'll ask it here.

 

Let's suppose you can pick an amount of time that will be added in your sleep. Essentially, the universe will freeze, except for you. You're asleep, so you're not aware of anything, but you keep going. You age, you breathe somehow), you get all the murky physiological benefits of sleep. If you had to pick an amount of extra time you'd get daily, what would you pick? 0? Many hours, so that you'd get all the sleep you wanted in roughly the blink of an eye at the cost of aging about a third faster than everyone else?

 

What if you could instead have time in an implausible room frozen in time? You'd have your small area (bedroom, or study, or whatever), with computers (with physically impossible internet access), books, whatever else you can plausibly put in a room. Even exercise equipment, for all that working out you've been meaning to do. Every day, at some point (let's even say you can pick when, so it's not a terrible disturbance), time will freeze for everything outside the room, and you can relax, or work, or do whatever it is you want. How much extra time of that would you want?

 

To clarify, you pick the daily time once, and you're stuck with it forever. Sick of aging fast? Tired of having an extra two hours to kill sitting around every day? Too bad.

 

Would your answers change if you didn't age during frozen time?

 

—Alorael, who has some answers of his own he'll get into later. He's also considered what he'd do if he could have variable time added, at will, on a daily basis. He's pretty sure there'd be a couple of extra hours of sleep tossed in often, and like everyone else he'd love to get some extra hours during crunch times.

[Student of Trinity]

Before signing on to the second one, I'd finally give polyphasic sleep a try. Supposedly it's something quite like that. You get an extra four to six hours per day of activity. I don't know whether it ages you faster, because nobody seems to have kept it up for more than a few months.

 

For the first one, I dunno about the real physiological exchange rate, but I definitely feel as though getting more sleep would extend my life, not shorten it.

[Dintiradan]

If you were able to choose if and when, of course we'd all want it. It's the fixed part that makes it difficult. An extra N hours a day of work or sleep might be nice at this point in my life, but I don't want to be stuck with my decision in my seventies. I don't want to mess with something that works as is, and there's only so much work you can do alone before you have to stop to collaborate and listen to your coworkers, so my first instinct is to say "No extra time, please." The funny thing is when that when I think of the opposite scenario of daily cryogenics, I still want to keep things as is. Surely there must be some point on this spectrum that's better suited for me.

 

But yeah, I'd like not worrying about deadlines ever again. The question gets really interesting once you contemplate what would happen to society if everyone had this choice.

 

Ultimately, though, if I had a room that distorted time, I wouldn't spend any time in it. I'd just buy a lot of servers and sell the CPU time. :-)

[Alorael at Large]

I think I'd take a couple of extra hours of sleep with reasoning like SoT's. My hunch is that my poor sleep is already shortening my life expectancy, and I'd be giving up not very much to feel better most of the time. Or I'd effectively get those extra two hours for work and remain equally sleepless, but only by choice, and with the option of working with other people.

 

—Alorael, who would take extra sleep time without hesitation if he didn't age. He'd be a little more wary of adding isolated hours to his day, but he could see one or two extras being nice. Weird at first, probably, but ultimately a good thing.

[Aran]

If I age and have to pick once, no. With either one on their own, I'd go for it. There are plenty of occasions where I'd gladly put in eight hours of sleep while time stops, regardless of aging - and if I didn't age, I'd have no problem doing that every night.

 

If you take away both, and add the option of actually doing stuff during the time stop, I'd go nuts with it. Even if we go the hard scifi route and say I can't use the internet or anything during it (mh... maybe if we slowed time instead of freezing it, computers would still be fast enough to keep up?) I'd put years into each night. Implement a hundred programming ideas I never had time for. Write the novels I always meant to. Catch up on watching all seasons of every popular science-fiction series of the last few decades, and read every book ever written (even the boring ones). Learn every language and every field of science or art in existence. I'd end up insane, but I'm sure it'd be fun.

 

Edit: If you also defy the laws of physics and give me internet access, the results wouldn't be pretty. I'd try to start small by simply reading through every news site and blog there is, but pretty soon I'd be responding as well. I wouldn't know when to stop. You'd wake up to find my rambling comments making up most of the web's content. which is totally not a thing that happens already

[Dintiradan]

You can still get 'net access. Instead of being in a 'bubble', be in a region that distorts time (this solves the interaction problem in the Superheroes thread -- just asymptotically distort time around you). For every minute that passes inside the region, a second passes outside. Or whatever. So if you're fine with dial-up speeds...

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Arancaytar

Edit: If you also defy the laws of physics and give me internet access, the results wouldn't be pretty. I'd try to start small by simply reading through every news site and blog there is, but pretty soon I'd be responding as well. I wouldn't know when to stop. You'd wake up to find my rambling comments making up most of the web's content.

If you did most of your work and chores during the time stop, you could simply use your regular time to browse the Internet.

Dikiyoba.

[Blue Summer Sky]

For the time freezing while I age, I'd probably take two hours a day out of my sleeping schedule, it would give me some extra time to catch up on work/school, abut wouldn't kill me that much sooner.

 

For being trapped in my room, assuming I dont age, I'd add a few years every day, that would be a fantastic opportunity and I'd be a fool not to take it up. Although I can imagine it getting boring and lonely fast, just a few years isn't that bad. As long as I can find sufficient entertainment. And I'd love to be able to spend weeks at a time doing nothing in particular other then sleeping and staring at the ceiling. Not to mention being able to read through entire libraries in a week, or learn an instrument a day.

 

My only worry would be how little time I'd spend in real life compared to fantasy life, it would be like the rest of the world would no longer exist other then brief visits every once in a while. Maybe if I could freeze time for a few years once a month, then be able to spend extended amounts of time around my family and reality.

[Necris Omega]

The problem I have with the extra sleep scenario is I'd be the type to readily abuse it.

 

Say I get an extra 2 hours of free(ish) sleep. Instead of taking them as an EXTRA two hours, I'd just stay up two extra hours. In the end, I don't think I'd really be buying myself much more than an increased rate of age and maybe a couple more hours of dinking around the internet.

 

Plus, how would insomnia filter in? If you can't sleep, does it just skip over those hours, or does it add to the time you're lying there, mentally screaming in maddened protest of your own consciousness for a lot longer?

 

Honestly, I think I'd inevitably go insane with this arrangement, as nice as an extra couple of hours a sleep a night would be...

 

 

[Goldengirl]

I'm not one to say no to a good sleep when I need it. However, some nature of my character rejects that need for as long as I can. I'd rather be doing something productive directly than sleeping, even though that helps maintain productivity.

 

Ew. I never want to describe my life in terms of productivity again.

 

Anyway, though, I don't think I'd take the extra sleep. I don't want to die earlier than I otherwise would have. That besides the point, any health benefits extra sleep would give me would be negated by my habitual insomnia.

 

As for the room? I think not. I think there would be enough times that I'd resent its use to make it unworthy of being used.

 

Now, if we take aging out of the equation, I'd give myself a day for each day I had outside of the room, though it'd be broken up more. I could not sleep, and thus interact with people more. Not to mention all of the work and reading and just those sorts of things that I could catch up on.

 

Sleep is a necessary evil, in my mind. Too bad my body doesn't agree with me.