Screenshot of a Mastodon post - A picture of the bridge of the Enterprise-D from Star Trek The Next Generation’s first season. In it are Captain Picard, Doctor Crusher, and Wesley Crusher in the Captain’s chair.
The text reads:
“Wil Wheaton is now five years older than Patrick Stewart was in the pilot of Star Trek the next generation. Have your bones demineralized and fallen apart yet?”
Original post @ Mastodon
Patrick Stewart: At least I have talent and the love of the community, rather than being a controversial Gary Stu shoved in for a kid-relatable character that wasn’t.
Wil Wheaton had/has talent. His role as Wesley wasn’t written very well, but watch his other work, like Stand By Me. That said, Patrick Stewart is one of the most talented actors of our generation and The Next Generation.
Every 20 year old is going to be a 90 year old someday (if they are lucky). Complaining about age is unnecessary, because all those young people you see running around and envy…
You can be content in knowing they’ll pine after youth the same way in a few decades. You can feel smug in knowing that they too will despair in a midlife crisis and look in horror upon the wrinkles in the mirror. That they too will feel the fathomless sadness of knowing that all the things they dreamed about and never achieved will weigh them down deep into murky depth.
That they too will live in the future as old people and not get to fully enjoy its marvels.
You may rejoice, for you have already climbed that mountain. You stand on its peak or near enough, and soon you will jump off into everlasting oblivion…
To be fair, there is someday going to be a generation where that doesn’t happen (assuming humans don’t obliterate themselves first). Eventually it’s practically a certainty that we will develop the means to preserve humans indefinitely.
It’s not a certainty. It makes sense to the “monkey chatter” in your head, but it doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary psychology point of view. The individual has no real value to the genetic processes that drive us. Individuals that hang around too long are detrimental to those genetic processes. There are biological reasons that suicide and “going off to die” is so common not only among humans, but many other animals. Outside of our ego, which contributes so strongly to our monkey chatter but less strongly to our actual behaviours, we don’t really want to live forever.
Even from a technical point of view, it flies in the face of every assumption life is built upon. Death is essential to every biological process that spans organisms. We would have to create an inhuman thing outside of biology that is neither alive nor dead. It is debatable whether that is an extension of life rather than a transformation into something else, still destroying the old thing.
You may achieve biologic immortality, but you will still age mentally, get jaded and bored. Unless someone also invents being mind wiped after so many centuries. But then you might as well just die normally again right? What is the difference between a person who has no memory of their past and a new person.
I wonder if we do ever create some form of immortality, if we discover that the human psyche has some kind of ‘wall’ where a person just doesn’t want to live anymore. Not due to health or personal life issues, just that there is a time limit on sanity that we don’t know about.
Edit: Oops misread the name! Thought this was about Joss 😬
Wil Wheaton is a stand up bloke.
Many years ago I emailed him a horrible email calling him all kinds of names and he replied, in a nice but also boing flip kind of way that really put me in my place. I was a dumb kid at the time, he either figured that out or was just pure class.
I apologised to him on Reddit a few years ago and he replied saying it was all cool. Wish more people in the world were like that.
imagine how many similar emails he must have gotten, too.
here’s the kind of consideration that probably went into his response: https://youtu.be/04WJEEb33CY
Gracious in the face of your rude behavior?
Or just willing to give you enough time to recognize your own errors?
“When others kid me about being bald, I simply tell them that the way I figure it, the good Lord only gave men so many hormones, and if others want to waste theirs on growing hair, that’s up to them.”
-John Glenn