PHIL 101: Time Edition

Just look at the future, and just imagine, when is somebody still alive that you will love?   Lately, Andri Snær Magnason has been asking people this question. He really wants us to calculate this. For instance, I am about to turn 34 this weekend (9/19/20). I don't have any children, but I do have little cousins whom I love. Here's Juliet, when she was just a very bald baby back in 2016. Let's suppose (ambitiously) that I live to be 100 years old. That's 66 years from now, so it will then be 2086. Juliet will be 70 years old (so perhaps she will live to 2126). Suppose Juliet herself has a child. If she does, I will hope to meet that baby too, and I'm sure I would love Juliet's baby just as I love her. For the sake of argument, suppose Juliet's baby is born when Juliet is 30 years old, in 2046. If that baby makes it to 100 years old also, they will live to see 2146. So it is plausible that I will love someone who will be alive in 2146.  What will the world b...

  In recent years the search for exoplanets has turned up a wealth of exciting results. The TRAPPIST project discovered a system of planets orbiting a dim red star, which with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope, ultimately revealed seven Earth-sized planets. Three of the seven are located in the star's "habitable zone"--the region around the star in which we could reasonably expect liquid water to exist on the surface of the planets. Future scientific investigation of these planets aims to detect the signatures of atmospheric chemistry relevant to the conditions for life on these alien worlds.  Why do we care if there is, or could be, life on other planets besides our own? Brute scientific curiosity, surely. But are there other reasons? In a 1997 Scientific American article "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" , Carl Sagan and Frank Drake (of the Drake equation ), posed a question that I have heard echoed in other contexts: "Is mankind alone...