Eternality: A Mega Blog on the Downsides of Human Evolution and the Consequences of Infinity

We like to think of ourselves as the best:

We build particle accelerators, chart distant galaxies, and write symphonies, all because our brains allowed us to live longer and pass down information. But we didn’t start as cosmic masters. We started as microscopic, brainless little goobers swimming around in a primordial soup, driven by a single, blind directive: don't die before you divide.

Evolution isn't a majestic ladder leading to ultimate intelligence. It’s a messy, chaotic bush. Random genetic mutations happened. Some of those mutations helped a goober survive a small while longer in its mud puddle, so those traits got passed down. Over eons, those branches split into fish, into reptiles, into mammals, and eventually, into us.

Because our brain was sculpted purely to help a medium-sized mammal dodge predators and find berries in a specific environment, humanity is effectively trapped in a cognitive sandbox. Our senses are calibrated only for what kept our ancestors alive. We don't see reality as it actually is; we see a heavily survival-optimized version simply to keep us alive.

Plato's Cave

More than two thousand years ago, Plato gave us the ultimate metaphor for this limitation with his Allegory of the Cave. He imagined prisoners chained inside a dark cave, forced to look at a blank wall. Behind them, a fire burns. Puppeteers carry objects across a walkway, casting jagged shadows onto the stone. To the prisoners, those two-dimensional shadows aren't just representations; they are reality. They name them, study them, and mistake a flickering silhouette for the absolute truth.

When we point our multi-billion-dollar telescopes into the dark ocean of space, we are still just those prisoners staring at shadow puppets.

Our most advanced technology is just a slightly sharper pair of glasses to look at the cave wall. We are trying to peer into a realm we were never built to comprehend. Our minds are hardwired for a world of boundaries, clear causality, and absolute endings.

This becomes painfully obvious when we try to look at the "beginning" of everything. We treat the laws of physics like they are a rulebook that the universe had to read and follow before it could exist. In truth, the laws of physics are just a byproduct of the universe. Trying to find the absolute "start" of the universe is a logical paradox. To find it, you have to look back to a state where our laws of physics completely break down. We are trying to use the arbitrary rules of our local sandbox to explain the infinite expanse outside of it. 

The Incomprehensible Weapon: Infinity

But the true, mind-shattering horror doesn't come from how small we are. It comes when the sandbox tries to process a concept that Earth never prepared us for: infinity.

From our experiences, everything has a shelf life. Stars burn out, oceans dry up, and lifespans end. Because infinity wasn't a physical threat to a caveman trying to outrun a saber-toothed cat, our brains never evolved the hardware to understand it.

To a human brain, numbers are sequential steps. We think of a long time as a very long line. But infinity isn't a very long line. It is a completely different beast.

Consider this: in the grand, uncaring scale of eternity, 1 planck-time is mathematically identical to the largest finite number ever theorised in years.

Let that sit in your stomach for a moment. You can take that unfathomably massive number of years, a number that would take an eternity just to write out, and subtract it from infinity. Do you know what you have left? Infinity. You haven't even dented it. You haven't moved a millimeter away from the starting line. No matter how monstrously large a finite number is, it constitutes exactly 0% of eternity.

The Mathematical Cruelty of Damnation

Because our brains cannot fathom the true weight of infinity, we are completely blind to the horror of eternal suffering. We throw the word "forever" around casually, using it to describe a long line at the grocery store or a boring meeting. But when applied to agony, the human mind cannot fathom it.

This is the fundamental flaw at the heart of most major religions. They construct an afterlife defined by eternity, explicitly using eternal damnation as the ultimate tool for compliance.

But if you actually pull back the religious conditioning and look at the math, the concept of Hell becomes incomprehensibly cruel. Think about the worst human crimes imaginable. Even if someone spent eighty full years inflicting pure evil upon the world, their actions are still fundamentally finite. They took place within a locked window of time.

To punish a finite action with an infinite consequence is madness. It means that after that person has screamed in agony for a trillion years, and then another quadrillion years after that, their punishment has essentially not even begun. They are still at 0% of their sentence. No finite crime, no matter how horrific, can ever justify an infinite consequence. Under the brutal mathematics of eternity, the concept of a just Hell evaporates. No soul could ever deserve it. I personally hope no one was right about eternal damnation, so no has to suffer through that fate.

But the dread doesn't stop at Hell. The psychological horror of eternity bleeds into the pearly gates too.

Most religions pitch Heaven as the ultimate reward: an eternal, unchanging paradise where suffering is erased. But human psychology is entirely built on contrast, progression, and boundaries. We experience joy because we know sadness. We value time because it is running out. Purpose is born from limitations.

In an eternal paradise, the clock is smashed. At first, it’s bliss. You see your loved ones, you explore every desire, you learn every instrument. But then a billion years pass. Then a trillion. You have had every conversation possible. You have created and destroyed a million universes in your mind. You have hit the wall of absolute, suffocating boredom.

Without an end, purpose completely evaporates. Eternity strips away meaning: the eternal reward turns into an eternal punishment. Eventually, a mind trapped in an infinite Heaven would scream for just one thing: an end.

Finite Hell

This is why, if forced to choose between the two traditional buckets of eternity, I would choose a different kind of nightmare.

In formal mathematics, there is a concept known as Rayo’s number. It is one of the largest named numbers in existence, a number so unimaginably massive that you could not write it down if every planck-length in the observable universe were a digit. It is a number that makes a googolplex look like a microscopic speck of dust.

If you gave me the choice between an eternity in a flawless, joyful Heaven, or enduring Rayo’s number of years in the deepest pits of Hell... I would choose Rayo’s number of years in Hell without a second thought.

Rayo’s number, as terrifyingly, agonizingly large as it is, has a ticking clock. It has a boundary. If I am burning for Rayo's number of years, I can still create a narrative. I can count down. I can know that every agonizing second brings me an microscopic fraction closer to the finish line. It allows for a goal, a countdown, and an ultimate release. It preserves purpose, and an end.

Heaven offers no such mercy. In the face of true infinity, paradise becomes the ultimate hell. It is the realization that you are trapped in a loop that will never, ever reach a final frame. And that is the truest horror of all: that in the grand design of the universe, the only thing worse than an eternity of pain is an eternity of anything at all.