/lit/ - Literature

Sci-fi often fantasizes about a time traveling machine that lets you go forward and backward but I would much rather have a time pauser in which I can suspend myself indefinitely inside an enclosed bubble. Whatever happens inside this encapsulated time bubble happens according to intuitive clock time. Nevertheless your own biological processes are also paused so if you spent 100 years in the time bubble you would not age or die or starve as your actual physical manifestation is still synced to the moment you pressed the pause button. Meanwhile the rest of the world is frozen. There are many philosophical implications of the idea.

For example, one of the things that makes life hard is what Heidegger called "thrownness." We are thrown into time and are facing a constant onslaught of changes without ever having an oasis of stillness in which time truly stops and the future is suspended. But if you were able to pause time and observe the world in its present state from a fixed vantage point, you could take all the time you need to evaluate the current state description of the world, gather your thoughts, etc. If you devoted yourself and kept yourself from going insane, you could use this time cloister to effectively acquire and master godlike capabilities and knowlege. And if it ever became too much, you could unpause it and go back to your regular day to day.