I can guarantee you your individual contribution would stop mattering far earlier than that. Not saying that as a slight, but for realities sake. If what we do matters in 100 years after we die we're doing better than most of entire human history. It's the height of hubris to think that it's going to be heat death that finishes our accomplishments off. Better to realign expectations to something less grand than "have an effect that last forever".
Fair enough, but the reply you got is just as obvious.
Update: That may be a bit harsh, so here's something to balance it: there's a sense in which what has been achieved is timeless, regardless of what the future brings.
By "fair enough", I was mostly thinking of edgyquant's second sentence. With regard to "entirety of all earth life", I think the point here is that these are all subjective opinions - The universe either will or will not undergo heat death regardless of what any of us think about it. Obviousness is an opinion, and in my opinion, SketchySeaBeast's attitude to the possibility of heat death is just as obvious as edgyquant's, and there is no objective reason to adopt one over the other.
YOU are the consequence of individual contributions 10s or 100s of thousands of years ago.
Writings and works, almost certainly lose their effect (but not a guarantee). But kids go on to have more kids until they don’t. That impact stretches out until it doesn’t, maybe not forever but also not necessarily a narrow window.
> YOU are the consequence of individual contributions 10s or 100s of thousands of years ago.
I am the consequence of thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands of individual contributions (genetic and otherwise). Sure the sum ended up in me, but how changed would I be if one of those changed? Who can know. Yes, we are all the consequence of innumerable contributions and choices since the very beginning of time, but that means that as we stretch that time back each individual elements quickly loses meaning and becomes static.
But if you do believe that each contribution matters then great news - your little contribution to the universe's heat death will be there on display for all eternity and the fact that it can't actually be observed because of said heat death will also be due to your contribution, so no worries as you're still important at the end of the all things.
Without the contribution of every unique individual in your lineage it is safe to say YOU wouldn’t be here. Differences between identical twins should be enough to tell you that.
You might say ‘I would be here but with a different genetic makeup’ or some such. But that is basically nonsense. You are, at the very least, the sum of the PARTICULAR causal sequence that made you.
You claimed that essentially no individual contribution is there after 100 years. That isn’t true. I am not suggesting the contributions are clear, good, special, or even ‘matter’ in some grand sense. They don’t have to even be linked to the originator. But that doesn’t mean individual contributions aren’t there.
Scale matters. Plato contributed to humanity. Plato contributed to the heat death. One of those is infinitely more interesting than the other.
> You claimed that essentially no individual contributions is there after 100 years.
I didn't, I claimed they didn't matter, which you are agreeing with.
Sure, scale matters, and that's also my point. You aren't Plato, you probably aren't going to be the next Plato, and that's OK. Plato matters today, but he won't in a million years, and that's infinitesimally small compared to the time-span to heat death.
And again, if your individual contribution matters, you don't have to worry about your contribution not mattering as the heat death of the universe will be your legacy.
You want to say ‘nothing matters’ because there is some high entropy state of the universe way in the future. I don’t think that is reasonable.
I am saying things matter.
Individual contributions matter along the way and they easily and often last longer than many lifetimes. Not just like Plato. ‘Mundane’ reproduction of humans matters to all future individuals that result as a consequence.
This is true even if we all end up dead and the universe ‘ends’ in a perpetual entropic fog.
