Well, I'm certainly glad that you have figured out the answer to the universal question.
I have spent many years pondering it myself, as I'm sure most of us have. I've even spent some time pondering it while not under the influence of mind altering substances (again, not unique, just wanted to throw that out there).
"The question" is, by design or by accident, unanswerable. At least not with any technology that we have yet contemplated.
Honestly, I could probably write for hours about the many possibilities I have pondered, and some of them are quite interesting (and some are just stupid), but I don't want to ramble and HN is not the place for it.
However, there is a good one that gives me some comfort from time to time. So I will at least share that particular thought:
Assume there was an entity with the characteristics one would normally ascribe to a god: the power of creation, omnipotence, all-knowing intelligence, and being eternal yet simultaneously timeless.
At the moment such a being were to come into existence, certainly in an instant, it would experience the "ultimate realization": it would be forever alone.
In my feeble human mind, that is indeed a twisted fate for such a powerful being. Something straight out of the Twilight Zone.
So then I pondered what I would do in that scenario. And the answer seemed fairly obvious: Everything, with a capital "E".
If it could be done, created, built, lived, experienced, dreamed, loved, hated, you name it.
Where would I do it? Everywhere.
For how long? As long as it took. Even if it required doing it all just a bit different 1000^1000^1000^10000000000 times over.
Why? Because then I would have memories. I would have friends.
You could imagine a God who is infinitely delightful. If he's the only thing in existence, he could delight in himself without end and would not be wrong in doing so, being actually delightful.
Having no limitation of knowledge or thought, he could think about himself. His thoughts would not be deficient in any detail, and thus would be an exact representation of himself. [1]
He could delight in that representation with his whole being, and that would be yet another full representation of himself. And thus he would not be alone or sad.
And he could have the propensity of emanating his delightfulness, expressing it outwards like light out of a star. And that emanation could be expressed as the creation of everything else. [2]
I have spent many years pondering it myself, as I'm sure most of us have. I've even spent some time pondering it while not under the influence of mind altering substances (again, not unique, just wanted to throw that out there).
"The question" is, by design or by accident, unanswerable. At least not with any technology that we have yet contemplated.
Honestly, I could probably write for hours about the many possibilities I have pondered, and some of them are quite interesting (and some are just stupid), but I don't want to ramble and HN is not the place for it.
However, there is a good one that gives me some comfort from time to time. So I will at least share that particular thought:
Assume there was an entity with the characteristics one would normally ascribe to a god: the power of creation, omnipotence, all-knowing intelligence, and being eternal yet simultaneously timeless.
At the moment such a being were to come into existence, certainly in an instant, it would experience the "ultimate realization": it would be forever alone.
In my feeble human mind, that is indeed a twisted fate for such a powerful being. Something straight out of the Twilight Zone.
So then I pondered what I would do in that scenario. And the answer seemed fairly obvious: Everything, with a capital "E".
If it could be done, created, built, lived, experienced, dreamed, loved, hated, you name it.
Where would I do it? Everywhere.
For how long? As long as it took. Even if it required doing it all just a bit different 1000^1000^1000^10000000000 times over.
Why? Because then I would have memories. I would have friends.