I have to say, Fia (the German representative) had the song with the best message, and I liked her backstory a lot. The song she submitted is called “Ohne Worte” (translation: without words).
Time is a measurement of change, and is inextricably linked to space, so stopping time stops change of any kind. You wouldn’t be able to move even so little as a falling speck of dust from its (now) absolute position in space. You wouldn’t be able to move, and consequently even breathe, since your diaphragm has to change position for respiration to happen (nevermind the fact that matter can no longer be moved anyway, so air is now fixed in place.) Stopping time stops you, completely.
But since we’re talking about imaginary powers, if I could stop time, I wouldn’t even bother with anything in this multiverse, I’d just walk over to explore a different one a few trillion multiverses away. After all, I’d get there in no time.
I’m sorry, but you’re not taking this idea quite far enough. If all time stopped except for you, and you posit that everything else is rigidly fixed in place with no exceptions, you would instantly be turned into a fine mist as your body slams into the suddenly stationary earth or atmospheric molecules while your body is still traveling a couple million kilometers per hour relative to the rest of the universe.
If your scenario posits that you are excepted from the effects of time throughout the universe halting, then what you posit would seem to be true, relative to that scenario. And it is interesting. In mine, the time stopper is part of the universe they’re in, and the instant they stop time, they too are frozen along with the rest of the 10^80 particles.
I’m just going all in for the scenario of “I’m gonna stop time and do all kinds of shit, or maybe just take a nap. Here… we… go—“
I’m stealing within the first day, pulling off the most ridiculously elaborate pranks within the week, and suicidally bored once the dopamine kick is killed after a month of world-befuddling shenanigans that will hopefully destroy even the conceptual understanding of bureaucracy. Loathe me some bureaucracy.
I wouldn’t say they are too dumb to realize this necessarily, people are just misled by endless propaganda or don’t have the time and energy/skills to really contemplate things properly.
I mean, it probably depends on how happy you are with your life.
Depending on how it works i'd probably just use time stop to lose less time from sleeping. There's a lot of ways to improve your life with time stop before ever delving into morals.
What most people fail to realize, though, is that if you used time stop to sleep you would certainly have more productive hours “awake” – but at the cost of reducing your remaining life span in the time-wise world by one third. You’d still be aging while you sleep.
Though I don't think that's too big a loss when you're using it to sleep. If you used time stop for something that was both exhausting and wasting your time, that'd probably be worse honestly.
It would certainly become noticeable after awhile since as you said, it's one third of your life.
Power does not corrupt. It reveals. If you have the power to do whatever you want, it becomes apparent what you wanted to do. If having this power makes you do evil deeds, it means you already wanted to do evil deeds but lacked the power to.
I think the issue is that it’s impossible to have “perfect morals” and morals are subjective. Once you have absolute power there will no longer be someone or something to keep you in check when it comes to more questionable morals. Sure you might not think you are doing anything wrong, but you can still look like an evil villain to everyone else.
I’d just help people about to fall or get hit and not yell after my dog to come back anymore. Also do some woodwork while kids are sleeping unbreathing and Americans are patiently frozen waiting to get burgers.
I imagine a lot of people would end up like homelander. Only playing the superhero role to get likes or feel loved but being very evil when no one would know.
Personally, I think I would give the superhero thing a go as I do like helping people, but very likely I’d end up like Red Son or Injustice Superman. It would depend on the powers and if other supes exist, but it is very believable to end up going to extremes to just try and make the world a “better” place if no one could stop me. What’s a few lives here or there when you believe you are saving so many more?
These are fun things to speculate about, but ultimately I have no idea what I’d do if I suddenly had that kind of power. I might use it for good, or I might become a monster.
I think someone else in this thread said it best. The more power you have the more temptation there is to fulfill your whims. Why do you think billionaires live the way that they do?
At least, that’s how I see human nature. I made this post because I think there’s room for reasonable debate.
Why do you think billionaires become billionaires? They were already messed up before the money and had no morals to stop them from doing immoral things to get it.
If I knew I'd never be caught, I'd hope I would do things that billionaire brown-nosers think is immoral. But it's things I believe are moral. Like reclaiming stolen wealth from billionaires.
It’s easy to be cynical about human nature when the extreme negatives are so amplified and given so much publicity. You have to remember the vast majority of people do still possess empathy.
Reasonable debate about what? That most people would be evil if they had the power because the people who have power are often evil? That inference does not follow. That’s not a logical claim, it’s a self report at worst and a fallacy at best.
Not quite what I’m saying. It goes the other way around: people are morally questionable by nature and this comes out when people have the chance to act without facing consequences.
So the debate essentially boils down to whether you think people are essentially good/bad at heart. That’s something people can reasonably disagree on.
Your evidence for the claim that people are evil by nature is: billionaires are often evil and you would make immoral choices if you could stop time. That’s just a self report and a logical fallacy smashed together
Yeah but think about it: you could check someone's ass fully instead of stealing glances, put random dirt smudges on people's faces.. it's hard to resist such a power.
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