When I first saw Groundhog Day, I thought it didn’t take long for Bill Murray’s character to decide to start killing himself. Granted, he was stuck in small-town Punxsutawney due to a blizzard, but I still thought he got tired of that day pretty quick.
Later I found out that he had probably been in that loop a lot longer than was shown. But I still always wonder, if I woke up in a similar loop, how long could I find ways to entertain myself.
So what if you woke up tomorrow and it was today again, over and over again. Or any day, for that matter. Go ahead and pick the best day of your life and you can repeat that one. How long do you think you could endure before you had enough?
From the outside, we have the advantage of knowing that the loop can end if the right circumstances are met. When you’re not aware of that, I can see it getting to you quicker than might be expected.
But dunno…I’d say that once I’d exhausted the Wikipedia, the local library (fortunately, I live in a major city, so there’s several local libraries and they’re all huge), and watched every TV show and movie worth watching, and taught myself all of physics, chemistry, welding, painting techniques, electronics, every language, and so on, I might start to get bored. It would be a bit frustrating to have all that knowledge and no way to functionally do anything with it, since there’s not much you can build in a day. But I would still be glad for the chance to have learned all that. I wish I could just stop time and do that, though I’d want to think I could start time up again afterwards.
Since I wouldn’t be going to work, just spending all day learning stuff, I would imagine that it wouldn’t take more than 50-100 years to become familiar with most of human knowledge. And over that time you’d presumably forget some things and need refreshers, or feel like going back and rewatching all of Dr Who again for the 20th time, so let’s go with the higher number.
100 years, then I’d need to come up with something else.
Actually, I’d probably also take it upon myself to meet everyone within a couple hours travel distance and spend at least a day getting to know them. That should be several million people, which would take another several thousand years.
Odd that, by any measure, it takes much longer just to meet every human on the planet than to learn all of human knowledge. I’m not sure what that says.
What would bother me is the inability to record anything or make anything that lasts. I could find enough people to meet and things to do for a while. I don’t think I’d be as miserable as Bill was right at the start, but eventually I might get that way.
Well he *was *stuck forever in the dark days before the Internet. shudder
And one day is not long enough to order any book (esp. w/ the blizzard) - he’s stuck with what’s in a town which doesn’t include a major university so… yeah. That’s like death as far as I’m concerned :).
Which makes it kinda weird that he would somehow learn to (horribly) recite French poetry, come to think of it. I doubt the Punxsatawney Municipal Library carries the poem he recites to his paramour* dans sa langue d’origine*. In fact I know so, because it’s not a classic 19th century poem at all, but rather a 1960s B-side song he’s schmoozing her with (admittedly from a rather famous guy, but I still somehow doubt there are overly many Brel fans in rural Pennsylvania).
The other deadly thing about the loop is that you can’t do or build anything lasting. No writing novels, no lasting art, no scientific experimentation possible, no jotting down anything… OMG no saved games, either. Forget about finishing a game with a 40 or 60h shelf life. Ludicus interruptus !
That’s worse than what Tantalus had to deal with.
You think you can master every art, science and language known to man in a mere century ? And that’s including time spent watching porn ? Somebody’s got hubris :).
Presuming that there are some subjects and books that I’m not interested in (biodiversity, romance novels, etc.) and that some books are redundant (there’s no reason to read five different Beginning Algebra books, if the first one did it for you), I think that < 100 years should be sufficient to become proficient in the fields that interest me, and have made pretty good headway in the ones that don’t.
For language, there’s probably a dropoff in value after learning 6-8 of them (assuming you avoid learning related languages). If you spend 2-4 years learning each of these, in a decade or two, you’ll be pretty well set in the language department. But yes, technically, if you wanted to learn every language, it would take a lot longer. (Practically speaking, you’d be limited to whatever you could find teachers for, within reasonable travel distance).
It’s really not odd at all and merely says there’s 6 billion people. Also, I am not even sure it’s true. Most people can get to know another person. You’d have to be a bit of a wonder to actually sit down and get a handle on all of human knowledge, regardless of how much time you give yourself.
I’m looking at it this way : it takes ~5 years to get a Master’s degree in anything. An MA is the “eh, good enough to work as a generalist in the field” diploma. A PhD is more focused and takes more time (it varies by place and field, but on average let’s say it’s 5 years to have rounder math) and makes you a specialist in ONE aspect of your chosen field. So that’s 10 years just to learn one aspect of one discipline.
Now, obviously there’s a lot of wasted time in a college course and you can probably prune away the basic stuff+redundancies and compress the learning (though I’d opine that undirected reading for 12 hours straight, day in, day out is a very poor way to learn anything) but considering that each field of knowledge has multiple specialties, I’d still think ~10 years to master the entire breadth of a field in any kind of depth is a decent yardstick to go by.
There are a few more areas of human knowledge and skills than 10 :).
AND you’re including entertainment time in your century when, Christ, just watching one modern year’s output of good television & cinema in bulk would probably eat away a month at least - not counting re-watches and reading theories about it on the interwebs. One season of one show is ~12 episodes of 40 minutes, that’s a day’s work if you factor the steps required to procure it.
And of course, learning just one language would open up a whole new world of TV, cinema and literature !
Yes, but less so if you’re in a small town, pre-Internet.
So after reading these posts, I’m seeing how much the answer to the thread-question would depend on where-and-when one enters the loop. New York City or London in 1993 (the movie’s release year) would lead to a much longer period before depression would set in. Or 2014, many places with a good Internet connection, would also be pretty good.
Punxsutawney is less than two hours from Pittsburgh. I know we saw Phil get caught in a blizzard trying to escape, but I wonder if he tried getting up right away and high tailing it to an airport before the blizzard hits.
I know I’d be hitting the airport and travelling all over the place. Even with a 14 hour flight, you’d still have 10 hours to enjoy the destination, and then wake up back home.
The writers stacked the deck against the character by having him trapped by weather in Punxsutawney. Otherwise, he was 30 minutes from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, which is the largest of the state-owned schools. He was 90 minutes from PennState’s main campus. He was 90 minutes from Pittsburgh and everything there, as well. The movie doesn’t pre-date the internet, anyway. The web wasn’t A Thing as we now have it, yet, but the character could have gone on-line from Punxsutawney, even then. The Punxsy campus of IUP had computers, as did many businesses, as did many of the people he could have got to know. People there were already on line.
Yes, true enough that the Internet was around in 1993. But you can’t deny that it wasn’t quite as fulfilling and comprehensive as it is now.
Phil might have enjoyed getting into some text-based gaming (assuming he could find an appropriate URL somewhere and typed it in carefully enough!) But there would have been substantial limits on what he could learn; he couldn’t realistically have immersed himself in foreign languages to the point of being able to become fluent in them, for example.
February 1993… I was in Groton; I’d been released from medical hold and was waiting for orders to my next boat. Not too bad. June 1993, though - I was on deployment and being trapped on a submarine for years would have really sucked…
Wouldn’t you always sort of have in the back of your head, “Well, maybe this is the day it doesn’t happen, so maybe I shouldn’t do anything too crazy?”
(admittedly from a rather famous guy, but I still somehow doubt there are overly many Brel fans in rural Pennsylvania).