I have been corrected on this point myself before.
Time Dilation is not an illusion, or the consequence of a wonky clock;
it is real. the inescapable passage of time as experienced by the moving observer, and can’t be ignored or rationalised away like an illusion or a mistake.
To get back to QS- if there is an afterlife of any description, the instances of your consciousness that remain alive may turn out to be the unlucky ones.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Yes, I thought about this. But though it could be a possibility for people living around our time, what about people who were born, say, around 1050? Would you expect that they lived in an “universe” where suddenly medical science reached achievments we can now only dream of?
Though they could have been abducted by a very advanced alien civilization, of course…
Of course, you could always find some way to make sure you die if you aren’t in good health. I think a wild animal would have a good chance of having good health, since any animal that isn’t able to catch food and avoid being eaten tends to die.
If this theory were true, I’d love to see a Reservoir Dogs-like situation. Guy #1 and Guy #2 each pointing guns point blank at the others head. If you were to watch only the continuing universes, not the eliminated ones in which one dies, it would look like slapstick.
Guy #1 pulls the trigger, gun jams.
Guy #2, seeing his opportunity, fires, gun jams.
Both look at each other quizzically, then pull out back up guns
Guy #1 fires, bird flies into his hand, causing him to miss
Guy #2 fires, earthquake shakes his hand, causing him to miss
ad infinitum
The two gentlemen are intent on killing each other, but the events preventing either one from dying keep piling up. This would require you to be able to watch multiple universes as one continuous feed. I bet this is what God watches on TV, must be laughing his arse off.
The best evidence for this is the effect on the decay of subatomic particles. Such particles have very precise lifespans, but by accelerating particles to high speeds, we can cause the lifespan to increase, in much the same way a human being’s life span would appear to increase, and precisely in accordance to relativistic predictions. The universe is a funny place, any way you slice it. 
Jeff
mmm… lets see.
a) alien abduction
b) frozen in glacier and later revived in 2084
c) being hit by stray gamma ray that reconstitutes DNA to an immortal configuration. (highlander syndrome)
d) future ultrahightech civilization is able to travel back in time and “recue” people from remote past.
can’t think of any other, remotely plausible variants.
Getting back to the topic of time travel into the future.
It strikes me that at some point in the not too distant future we are seriously going to develop sufficient rocket power to actually try this experiment. I’m sure there will be plenty of volunteers to blast off into space and return 50 or 100 years from now.
Today’s astronauts get ridiculously excited at the prospect of just going into space at all, imagine what they would be like if they were chosen to travel into the future. It would all be very sad because they would never see their families again but I would think they would agree to it in the interests of scientific discovery.
At first, our rockets would probably only get them maybe 20 years into the future so they probably would see their families again. But then as rocket technology improves we could send them hundreds of years into the future.
On board this spaceship we could have a large library all on cd. We would have a science section, an engineering section, a history section, a philosphy section, a literature section, a music section etc. So that if the astronauts returned to find a world that had been devastated by nuclear war then they could help rebuild mankind at least to the point we are at now.
If they return to earth to find people have returned to the stone age, then they would have all the technology and knowledge on board to give humanity a second chance…
“Yeah, I know you think those stone axes are great but check out these iron ones. And look, if you just manipulate the iron in this way, you get a Ferrari. Oh and hey, you’re gonna love Doom III”
We could bring these people from the stone age to today’s level in about a year or so.
Even if mankind has managed to not destroy itself, all the information in the library would still be of interest to future archeologists and future historians etc.
The truly mad thing is that this experiment is a very real serious prospect. It is going to happen. In the not too distant future we are going to see astronauts blasting off into the future.
I think our rocket technology needs to improve quite a bit from what it is now but not by all that much. I think I would be willing to go, just to see what the future looks like.
Be careful… there’s a chance you would be captured by the ruling Simian overlords and put in the Zoo. In a cage marked “Talking Human”.
The fastest manned spacecraft was one of the Apollos traveling to the moon at 7 mi/s
That’s less than .0001% of the speed of light
To achieve a 2 : 1 ratio of time, that being, 1 week inside spacecraft = 2 weeks outside, you have to travel 90% the speed of light.
I’d say its going to be a hell of a lot farther than ‘soon’.
Ah, the cultural reboot! (link)(story)
This might be more difficult than you might think, for many reasons- there could be many cultural problems involved in raising populations from one level of civilisation to another- there are many examples in our current worldof tribal cultures ruined by contact with civilisation. Perhaps we could learn from these examples how not to do it.
We will need to advance rocket science by a very ngreat deal to make a rocket fast enough to produce large relativistic effects- you need to be moving in excess of 0.5c,
it would need as much energy as used by all the countries of the entire earth continuously for several months in order to accelerate a ridiculously small payload to this speed.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html