There’s a series of books called The Legend of Drizzt last time I checked (it’s changed over the years, and the first book wasn’t even supposed to be about him lmao) and in one of the books, our main character believes he has lost all his friends (not a spoiler, we already know who is okay and who isn’t when he thinks this) and so he goes off alone into the mountains to kill orcs and goblins and shit until he maybe dies. A couple of elves way older than him meet him at one point, and since this is really the first time he’s spent with elves long term since he left his underground homeland decades before, he doesn’t really know “how to be an elf”.
This is basically their philosophy.
Elves can live over a thousand years (one dark elf we know of is blessed by their evil deity and is over 5,000), but dwarves only about 2-400 years (I think?) and half lings about 100-150ish, humans standard 80.
Since you will lose 10 sets of “lifelong friends” at least, if they’re human, many elves choose to stick with other elves.
But those that mingle, tend to segment their lives into smaller chunks.
Don’t try to live your life all thousand years in one go, you will lose so much by doing so.
But if you think of your life as more “this is me now, I am very different from the person who wore this outfit 5 years ago, and this is who I will be for the next 100 years” then it becomes more manageable.
You never forget the friends and family you made in an old life, but you cannot carry your grief over losing them for the rest of your life.
Those that do end up sticking to their own kind, because it’s less painful. (and also superiority complexes)
Elves can live over a thousand years (one dark elf we know of is blessed by their evil deity and is over 5,000), but dwarves only about 2-400 years (I think?) and half lings about 100-150ish, humans standard 80.
After reading The Age of Em (2016) by Robin Hanson, I wish there were stories about races that went the other way, lifespan-wise: extremely small people who lived only 1 year, even smaller people who lived only 1 month, some very extremely small but very powerful ones that lived only a day, etc. The idea is that artificial people (emulated people, or Ems) could have subjectively similar characteristics and experiences to the larger physical entities (e.g. humans, but perhaps even dwarves, elves, and etc., since theyʼre just emulated minds), but their artificial emulated substrate allows their minds to develop and age orders of magnitude faster; they also could solve certain problems orders of magnitude faster but practical limitations on delays between thought and physical interactions (your mind would waste away if you had to wait a whole subjective hour between each physical step during a walk with a standard 1.5 meter body) require their bodies to be very small.
To ems that are smaller and faster, sunlight seems dimmer and shows more noticeable diffraction patterns. Magnets, waveguides, and electrostatic motors are less useful. Surface tension makes it harder to escape from water. Friction is more often an obstacle, lubrication is harder to achieve, and random thermal disruptions to the speed of objects become more noticeable. It becomes easier to dissipate excess body heat, but harder to insulate against nearby heat or cold (Haldane 1926; Drexler 1992).
A crude calculation using a simple conservative nano-computer design suggests that a matching faster-em brain might plausibly fit inside an android body 256 times smaller and faster than an ordinary human body (Hanson 1995).
Compared with ordinary humans, to a fast em with a small body the Earth seems much larger, and takes much longer to travel around. To a kilo-em, for example, the Earth’s surface area seems a million times larger, a subway ride that takes 15 minutes in real time takes 10 subjective days, an 8-hour plane ride takes a subjective year, and a 1-month flight to Mars takes a subjective century. Sending a radio signal to the planet Saturn and back takes a subjective 4 months. Even super-sonic missiles seem slow. However, over modest distances lasers and directed energy weapons continue to seem very fast to a kilo-em.
Call them speedlings, or some variant of sprite, but I think its an interesting world-building concept.
There’s a series of books called The Legend of Drizzt last time I checked (it’s changed over the years, and the first book wasn’t even supposed to be about him lmao) and in one of the books, our main character believes he has lost all his friends (not a spoiler, we already know who is okay and who isn’t when he thinks this) and so he goes off alone into the mountains to kill orcs and goblins and shit until he maybe dies. A couple of elves way older than him meet him at one point, and since this is really the first time he’s spent with elves long term since he left his underground homeland decades before, he doesn’t really know “how to be an elf”.
This is basically their philosophy.
Elves can live over a thousand years (one dark elf we know of is blessed by their evil deity and is over 5,000), but dwarves only about 2-400 years (I think?) and half lings about 100-150ish, humans standard 80.
Since you will lose 10 sets of “lifelong friends” at least, if they’re human, many elves choose to stick with other elves.
But those that mingle, tend to segment their lives into smaller chunks.
Don’t try to live your life all thousand years in one go, you will lose so much by doing so.
But if you think of your life as more “this is me now, I am very different from the person who wore this outfit 5 years ago, and this is who I will be for the next 100 years” then it becomes more manageable.
You never forget the friends and family you made in an old life, but you cannot carry your grief over losing them for the rest of your life.
Those that do end up sticking to their own kind, because it’s less painful. (and also superiority complexes)
After reading The Age of Em (2016) by Robin Hanson, I wish there were stories about races that went the other way, lifespan-wise: extremely small people who lived only 1 year, even smaller people who lived only 1 month, some very extremely small but very powerful ones that lived only a day, etc. The idea is that artificial people (emulated people, or Ems) could have subjectively similar characteristics and experiences to the larger physical entities (e.g. humans, but perhaps even dwarves, elves, and etc., since theyʼre just emulated minds), but their artificial emulated substrate allows their minds to develop and age orders of magnitude faster; they also could solve certain problems orders of magnitude faster but practical limitations on delays between thought and physical interactions (your mind would waste away if you had to wait a whole subjective hour between each physical step during a walk with a standard 1.5 meter body) require their bodies to be very small.
Call them speedlings, or some variant of sprite, but I think its an interesting world-building concept.