So, I'm sitting in Glomdoring empowering guards and my mind starts to wander, as often is the case with me while influencing. I ponder to myself "If in 100, 500, or even 1000 OOC years Lusternia is still up and running, in the same condition that it is now, what will have happened to my character?"

I know that characters that have purchased credits do not go "poof" at any point and well, I have purchased a great many credits.

So...I pondered on this for a while, at least until I was finished playing with the guards, then decided to ponder it here a bit more with all the other theologians, scholars, philosophers, etc that troll the forums in much the same manner as myself.

If Lusternia is running in a thousand OOC years, I will cry. MUDs are still awesome compared to the newer developments of the past 20 years or so, but 1k years? It took us a few hundred to go from no electricity to the internet. By then we'll either all be dead or our civilization will have fallen, or we'll have some truly awesome .

If Lusternia and I are both around when I'm 120, I'll pop on just so I can be like "Ha, my character is like, 2000 years old! I remember the good old days, during open beta! Stupid noobs."

EDIT: Watch your language. ~Shiri~
EDIT2: I hear Shiri eats puppies. Mean, evil Shiri.

If mankind still exists in 1000 ooc years I'd be very very surprised.

EDIT: In reply to Sylphas. I think in 1000 years we will have games working like the matrix, only (hopefully) you will be able to 'log out' again

woo Lusternian Matrix *drools*

Why would you want to log out?

Actually, if I wake up from stasis in 1k RL years and find that the Internet and Lusternia are still running, I hope to find the Walkers still going strong and to see Deepnight with more rooms than New Celest, and a nexus.

If you mean Lusternian years, then I hope that by then at least one of our better players will be raised to the status of god. Of course, if I have my way, I'll be the first modern Vernal God, showing up in village influences just to peace people and force them to influence instead of kill each other.

Then you'd remember that you're actually thinking of yesterday, and you'd have stop and think a minute about if Sylphas was your real name or you game name. Being that old would suck.

Still sitting in my box coding...

Ah, coffee fueled immortality

I don't mind lusternia existing. But keep ma forums alivee!!

In a thousand years, Shiro will have more posts than the Gods.

Don't you mean 1000 minutes?

Let's take a less extreme example...

Ten years from now, if/when Lusternia is still running (I mean, Achaea has been running for a long time, right?), I image I will own every artifact there is, considering I've bought a few within the first year, owning all of them within ten is not unreasonable.

I'll hopefully have a great house, and I'll have reached demigod (again, not unreasonable, as I got level 80 within a year, we can get demi within two or three, if I maintain my on again off again bashing). The Carthans will be a name that everyone recognizes, and the city will have gotten larger than any of the current organizations combined. I suspect with enough work and prodding, I could gain organization status within ten years.

And maybe, just maybe, they'll have finally accepted my application for guide/builder/Ephemeral.

...the last of which cancels out almost everything else, eh?

in 1000 years my char will have accomplished nothing

The Philosopher's Stone would hold the record for Longest Time A Shop Has Been Owned By A Single Player, Biznatch, because I will continue restocking it twice a year.

My desire to create and be involved with the inner workings of Lusternia is such that I'd give up my ability to play Richter, so... yes, it does pretty much cancel it out.

Richter for Ephemeral! Vote Richter!

If the human race still exists in 1,000 years, it will be completely unrecognizable, as the carbon-based mind will have been rendered obsolete centuries before.

The silicon minds we're creating now can completely outperform us in speed and efficiency. Once the accompanying AI reaches a certain point of development, it must inevitably supplant us.

We could always just stop researching AI, of course, only that would be something like trying to stop the momentum of a bullet train by stepping onto the tracks in front of it. AI is too useful for an entire planetful of 7 billion people to just all stop researching at once, or even wean itself off of before this particular train reaches its final destination. We couldn't have stopped it even if we'd started trying back before Yule Brenner began terrorizing West World.

No, barring the total annihilation of the human race through other means, I think it's quite safe to say you can count on the fingers of one hand how many centuries humanity has left before ( A ) our electronic descendants annihilate us, ( B ) our electronic descendants are completely in charge, and suffer our existence only as quaint little pets, or ( C ) humanity has mutated itself into some sort of cybernetic organism that bears less resemblance to us than we do to the average snail.

If you and Lusternia are both around in 1,000 years, rest assured, anything your character has gone through will pale in comparison to the events of your real life.

I will, of course, be contributing to this takeover by making an AI combat system to take over Serenwilde. It'll even troll the forums for me to mock Munsia and Narsrim every time they post.