I've been caught in the gravity well! + some questions!!!

[ProxCenBound]

I don't know exactly. I don't really see anything wrong about that, in fact I think it is improvement over our current lives. When I see the Terragen Sphere, I think "why isn't society like this, it makes more sense." Sometimes I wish that I lived in the Terragen Sphere. And ever since I discovered OA, I have been way more scared of death. I don't want to die. I know that I will never get to experience anything even remotely close to life in the Terragen Sphere in my lifetime, but I can dream, can't I? So I want to live as long as possible just in case. Death is so unfair, so I would love to live in a world where there is no death. Life is just so unfair, so the world in OA, to me is like a paradise. And I don't know, the idea of such a diverse place with infinite places and beings is so appealing to me. Modern society just feels all samey, don't you think. Normal life is sooo boring compared to the Terragen Sphere. It makes all of our everyday activities seem meaningless. We should try to advance technology as much as possible instead of wasting all our time and money on fighting about useless things.

Remember that the Terragen Sphere is much bigger than the Sephirotics - most of it is dominated by misaligned AI that don't care about humanlike beings at all. They may exist in the ahuman cybercosms, but they don't have the access to information, travel, rights, and so on that the Sephirotics do.

And it's possible that no one will ever experience life like we portray in the Sephirotics. We don't really know in the real world if space colonization is viable and benevolent superintelligent AI is stable and workable. Perhaps a complex civilization can never be that harmonious and prosperous, just like how our world has deep flaws despite also being unbelievably advanced compared to how our ancestors lived. The Fermi Paradox might be telling us that interstellar energy-hungry civilizations cannot exist and sophont creatures are still bound to the planets they evolved on (or, maybe they just haven't evolved before us, or, as is the case in OA, none of them expand to cover the entire galaxy and they limit their expansion for whatever reasons).

Predictions of the future have a poor track record, usually getting way more wrong than right. Whether something is truly possible, or too complex to develop or disadvantageous to its intended users to be viable, is very difficult to predict.

I do very much sympathize with the line of thought that, since technology and general quality of life continues to advance, one missed out on living in better times by having to live now rather than in the future. But such a future is not guaranteed. We can do what we can now to help good trends continue, but it does help to really appreciate that it is still so much better to live now than as a peasant (or even royalty, but most everyone was not that) in the pre-industrial era, or as a hunter-gatherer. The number of medical treatments, potential social connections, forms of entertainment, varieties of food, and so on that exist today are much better than in the past.

I wonder if I'm alone in the feeling that the stuff that tries to be the hardest science fiction ends up being the most strange, exotic, and absurd. Like even more so than Star Wars or anything like that. 

A case in point is the Queen of Pain hell world that exists. Apparently, that's a thing in OA. And it's explained via godtech level nanotech stuff, and relativity isn't broken, and yet... there it is... something equivalent to the worst hell imaginable. 

And so I find myself wondering if the old Hindus weren't incorrect. With all these hell worlds, utopia spheres, etc. running around in OA... it really seems like given the inexorable procession of time, the Milky Way becomes the strangest of places... Millions, maybe billions of worlds, quadrillions (or orders of magnitudes higher) numbers of beings, expressing infinite diversity. 

Such a thought is fascinating, if not a little terrifying, don't you think?

I think you'll find a fair number of people here who will agree with you on the above to one degree or another. At least the fascinating part. I'm less sure about the terrifying part - but then again I've been here a long time and have been drinking the OA Kool Aid for all that time. 

Hope this helps and once again - Welcome to OA!!

Todd

IMO any world where godlike AI and/or gigantic alien civilizations exist has an undercurrent of cosmic horror. In the OA setting, you could have a life more enjoyable than that of anyone from our time, yet you also know that S6 archai exist, many of whom are explicitly ahuman, as do entities like the Leviathan. And that likely other universes exist which could have beings of their own that could affect ours.

You could also edit your mind to not care about any of that, or even to like it, but even the existence of such a capacity is also a little unsettling, at least to my 1st century AT mind. For people nowadays, the self isn't supposed to be editable, with all the questions of personal identity that brings into being.