The longer the wait, the more crazy I would become. Like, if someone told me I had a week to live, I’d stop going to work, fill my credit cards with plane ticket purchases and hotel reservations, and I’d do it up royal. Same if I had a month or two months. I’d have the happiest days of my life.
But what about 3 years? I still gotta work, right? 'Cuz I only have a year’s worth of savings. I could still go traveling and have fun, but I would’t be able to go real crazy. I still gotta show up to work on Monday, after all. So I might as well just stay home and just eat a bag of Cheetos! And then I’d be worried that I had been lied to and that I wasn’t really going to die. I’d be scared of burning through my savings only to look like Boo Boo the Fool.
(I guess I would still blow through my credit cards, though. I’m a responsible person, but I think I would be all “fuck it” and still try to do it up royal.)
In the 80s and 90s, a lot of people who were diagnosed with AIDS went through this. They thought they were going to die and so they didn’t plan for the future and maximized fun and good times as much as they could. Then protease inhibitors arrived, and HIV no longer become a guaranteed death sentence. I imagine it felt like, at least initially, a mixed blessing.
This part of the hypothetical goes so much against human nature that I can’t take it seriously. If you said we only had 10 years warning then I believe you but even then people would be trying to find a solution to the end. Human nature is to be optimistic in terms of overwhelming odds, thats our basic survival instinct.
100 years is a LONG time and with global science resources chucked at the problem we would figure out a way to get some small percentage of our population elsewhere.
BTW check out the Greg Egan book Sci-Fi Diaspora for a similar scenario. A Gamma ray burst destroys all biological life on earth, only “uploaded” personalities survive and then send their minds out to colonize the universe.
