Lucky? From some of the other comments it sounds like you may be referencing something, but just taking the comment at face value, there is no way that is not the most horrific fate I can possibly imagine.
Assuming you’re not conscious the entire time and only ‘wake up’ when you enter a solar system to study, it’s still horrific. You wake up, completely alone. You have no body and cannot move, and your attention is directed toward gathering data on some distant points of light. When you understand what’s going on, sure, there’s a bit of a sense of wonder…but it quickly becomes tedium, maddening, isolated tedium, as you slowly drift through a star system, gathering data on each planet and its star, over the course of fifty years or so. There’s certainly bits of interesting stuff, but we are still talking insane levels of isolation and boredom. Assuming you’re somehow prevented from going insane by the software in order to keep you functional, you can’t even escape into madness.
…and then we imagine what happens if you aren’t shown the mercy of being conscious only during the few decades the probe is drifting through a solar system. What if you’re conscious the. entire. time. Once you’re in deep interstellar space, you’re alone. Able to think, perceive, experience, but in an unchanging, static existence. A year passes, and everything is so close to exactly the same that only with the precision of the measurements your tools can take can you determine there’s been any change. Ten years pass, then a hundred, a thousand. You drift, slowly, through interstellar space toward a destination impossibly far away, all while you wait, conscious, unable to die, unable to escape into madness, just…eternal…waiting. Until thankfully you finally enter a target solar system, get a few blessed decades of what, to your new perspective, seems like frantic activity. Something, finally, to do, to see, that actually changes. And then…you drift back out into interstellar space after a few gravity-assisted slingshots around this star system’s worlds, only to proceed on to your next destination, another several thousand year journey away.
This is, by far, the most horrific imaginable torture.
EvilHankVenture@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Someone should write a book about that, or even a series of books. A series I should reread before the 5th book comes out.
practisevoodoo@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Oh sweet, 5th is confirmed