No. HELL NO. Are you kidding me? Like a hammer hanging over my head.
Of course.
Hmm, maybe it depends. If it’s close, I might not want to since it’d likely just ruin the rest of my days leading to my death. If it’s far away (dying of old age), I might go for it since I’d expect to die then anyway.
I’d do it. If my date of death were in the next year or two, I’d quit my job NOW, and spend as much time as possible doing fun things with my son.
I’d get the prediction, but probably wouldn’t read it immediately. It goes in an envelope in a safety deposit box.
Later, after a certain point in my life, when I’m really & truly old and very nearly “done” (whatever that means), I’d pull it out get the date, and make the financial plans to run out of money at the right time and travel plans to run out of life in the right place, and then, with my affairs in order, go about enjoying the remainder of my years.
No way. Suppose I find out that I’ve got 6 months left. I my desire to get in as many experiences as possible in my remaining time, I might do something to incapacitate myself for the remaining time. For example, go on a safari and get trampled by an elephant so I’m paralyzed from the neck down until finally succumbing to infections. Gee, sounds like fun.
Or I find I’ve got 50 years. And then I find out that my wife has only a couple years. I don’t want to live without her but now I know that will be the case. Our remaining time together would be spent with the Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, ready to sever our happiness.
Or I find out that we both will live 50 years but our kids have only a couple years.
No thanks. I’d rather enjoy the time I have, living each moment unaware of what fate has in store.
I don’t recall reading Heinlein’s version, but I’d probably not choose to, but only because it’d be essentially meaningless.
See, if I wrote a short story like that, the time and date would be accurate, but the place? It’d end up being a hospital, where the sucker only died after being 30 years in a coma.
I’d rather know about the coma!
It is impossible to know both the exact velocity and exact position of an electron at the same moment.
But there’s already a hammer hanging over your head. This is just like looking up.
I’d do it. Right now I’m planning my life (to the extent that one can really do so) based on vague assumptions of how long I’m going to live. I try to save a lot for the future, for one, and I make trade-offs to do so, like traveling less than I’d like. If I knew that I wasn’t going to live as long, I’d do things differently.
Yeah, there’s still the risk of something like a coma derailing my plans, but that risk always existed along with the unknown of death, so it’s not a reason not to consider it.
Hey, that sounds like a great Idea for a TV show. Let me Call up ABC and see if I can pitch …
Oh.
Oh, right. And I was enjoying it too.
I wouldn’t do it.
Most likely it would ruin the last part of my life, because I would be sad that I’m going to die soon.
But on the other side of the coin, if I knew that it said I was going to live to 120, I think I would enjoy the time I had left a lot more, knowing I don’t have to worry about dying soon (not that I worry now, but I think knowing would give me some additional comfort).
I’m not sure how well I’d deal with this knowledge, but it is tempting. My father died young, and there are probably things he would have done differently if he’d known how little time he had. On the other hand, if he’d known before having children then he might well have decided it was best not to have them, in which case I never would have been born.
I do have some potentially very serious health issues and it would be nice to know how worried I should be about this. And if I don’t have much time left, I could take all that money I’ve been saving for a rainy day and do some traveling. Although as others have mentioned, the machine wouldn’t tell me how many years of good health I have left – I might become an invalid tomorrow but linger for ages.
To all the people who said no: would it matter if the Prognosticator’s was not limited by the Schrodinger’s cat thing? That is, what if the date it forecast, in addition to always being accurate, was not the result of the varous quantum possibilities collapsing, but was going to be true no matter what?
For about 99% of the people the answer will be December 21, 2012, so its not like it would be telling us something we don’t already know.
I’m nearly 70 now, so I probably will not last that much longer anyway; I would read it with no hesitation. IF I were in my twenties or thirties, I wouldn’t read it at all.
Great Story BTW.
Absolutely! Talk about useful. Think of it. According to the OP, this machine doesn’t change when you die, it just measures the time. Your estate planning is way simplified, you now know when you WON’T die so you can try all those crazy ideas that would be too dangerous otherwise, lots of reasons. I would hope I was single because it would really suck to have to tell anyone else about the time. I would be very careful to not tell anyone else. Tell them I let the paper destruct. But my wife would have to know and that would be a burden on her.