Sometimes an idea grabs a hold of you so strongly it becomes like an experience. This has happened to me while contemplating the extent of eternity. Imagine existing as long as you can imagine and then starting again, existing again as long as you can imagine. After doing this several times, you start to realize that if you existed forever (and I believe we will), then there is no end to this. You just keep going and going. The problem is that the mind natural expects an end that never comes. At some point in this process, and it is hard to describe, one begins to sort of grasp the vastness of eternity, and, for me anyway, I have this experience of being overcome by a feeling that is hard to put into words. It's like something wraps around me, like a feeling of security in knowing my time will never end.
Maybe only sci-fi fans get excited about these kinds of things, but there was one similar idea, both fascinating and disturbing, and very well executed, in the movie Inception, which put the movie over the top for me. In the last season of Heroes, the same idea was suggested, but not executed nearly as well. The concept: imagine traveling somewhere and existing for decades, perhaps even centuries, and then returning to find out that, upon your return, only minutes or hours had passed since you left. It goes back to lessons from Einstein about traveling faster than light. It's a demonstrable fact that time slows down the faster we travel. So, if you were to travel close to the speed of light, time would move slower for you, but much faster for those you left behind. In the time it takes you to travel a light year, many years might have passed for those waiting for your return; and what a shocking reunion it would be!
Now, take this idea, and imagine existing for vast amounts of time so that the world as it was becomes nothing more than a memory so distant, it is like a half-remembered dream from long ago. It was this scene in the movie, the significance of which was pumped into the watcher through exceptional use of musical score (see the song: "Time" by Hans Zimmer) and dramatic pause that really made the whole movie worth it (and there is so much more to love in the movie besides this). The experience was like the director saying to the audience "do you really grasp what this would be like? But, do you really? Think about it! Can you possibly imagine what this must be like? But do you really?" The score just kept building and you as well as the main character are both in the same position: a sense of shock about what just happened!
Well done!
WPF
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