Why life is absurd

This really isn't the relativity that the author alludes to, but I have something to say about this too. As physicists, we term this "relativity" the author deals with as "dealing with units." Having a concept of time is meaningless without a given scale. For example, for the ultraintense-plasma interactions that I am discussing in the paper I'm writing today, a picosecond is a long time given that the electro-magnetic dynamics I care about happen on the femtosecond scale. For the hydrodynamic simulations my groupmate will work on, picoseconds are the timescales of significance. Of course, when heating the coffee in the cup next to me, the barista measures timescales much larger than this, of the order of seconds, exponentially longer than both of the former scales.

Life is a complicated phenomenon which captures dynamics at many scales. Thinking about life can be just as complicated, if you let it. An issue I often see is equating parts of life with other parts and thus, using the same scales for both. This often leads us into trouble. Why does it take my friend an hour to shower while it only takes me ten minutes? If I can write a python script in one day, why the hell does it take this junior dev two weeks to make his? Of course, the same issue here is a novice physicist comparing the fs physics I deal with to the ps my friend does, the comparison isn't valid just because they are both "times."

This is why even though life seems short for some people it can seem long for others. Just because 80 years is a year and people are people, any given individual has their own experiences and opinions that shapes their vantage point, and it can be hard to really compare the two. Of course, just like the "real" relativity SR, there are certain constraints we can make on time in this context, many people might prefer longer lives even if we lived 1000 years if millennial* olds are as selfish as us 80-year-ers are. But the diversity in context must be taken into account as it should be for me when I model ultra-intense laser plasma interactions. Context always matters.

Thinking about the context for each person's scales makes our look on life a little less absurd. I think that more often than not, people's motivations (for desiring longevity, for instance) have good reasoning in them, especially when you consider their context.

[*] It's funny that millennial here means people who are 1000 years old as opposed to people in their late teens to early twenties.

Even less, many people choose family.

Also if longevity is achieved there will be plenty of disruption on the way, since there is no "magic pill", but rather a lot of breakthroughs combined.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "human intelligence", but in general we get deeper not by stretching vertically, but by moving vertically, if you follow the metaphor. Many software engineers today don't even have a passing familiarity with the deeper levels of the stack they're programming on, and that's all new stuff in the last ~50 years.

But what bugs me most is that a universe without an entity to perceive and observe it is just such a waste of ... energy? It's almost like the existence of the universe implies the existence of an observer. That the formation of intelligent life is an expected result of the universe existing.