Would you be wiser or smarter if you lived 300 years?

I was watching Star Trek Resurrection (Lol! I meant Insurrection) last night and I had a thought: if people end up on a planet where some kind of radiation makes them live 300 years instead of the average human lifespan, it doesn’t mean that in 300 years they would be wiser/better people. Brain development stops after a certain time. It’s much more likely that instead of getting wiser, you’d forget what happened to you 200 years ago.

Let’s look at Sisyphus. He has to roll a large rock up a hill to the top, but the rock keeps rolling down so he has to repeat this task over and over again, forever. Well, why doesn’t he at some point – let’s say after 100 years – learn to do something else? If he did, today we wouldn’t have things like pointless or fruitless jobs that people have to do day in and day out, but instead you’d have people who do jobs that have a point and bear fruit.

But let’s not just blame Sisyphus for being mentally stagnant and for the unfortunate expression “Sisyphean toil”. How about Zeus? It was Zeus who punished Sisyphus to roll the rock up the hill. Zeus, apparently, was jealous that Sisyphus was cleverer than him. Zeus, mind you, must be at this point some hundreds years old, at least. But what does Zeus show by punishing Sisyphus? That he – Zeus – is an utter moron of average human age. If he was wise, having already lived hundreds of years and accumulated much knowledge of the world, shouldn’t he have thought: ok, if I’m not as clever as this guy, maybe I should do some studying and become smarter? But no, what Zeus does is something that anyone with a little power would do: something not very wise.

So no, I don’t think it’s possible that people would be wiser/better people if some kind of radiation made them live longer.

See you,

Misty