{
  "abstract": "How much experienced life can a person fit into a fixed amount of clock time, and what would it take to raise that amount from one hour per hour to a lifetime, or a thousand years, between waking and breakfast? This paper defines the time-distortion ratio R as subjective time per unit of objective time and shows that it factors into three independent levers with different sciences and different ceilings: experiential density (how much experience a brain takes in per unit of its own processing), neural clock rate (how fast the biological brain runs), and substrate speed (how fast a mind runs once it is no longer made of neurons). A review of the timing literature finds that the brain computes duration rather than sensing it, that the computation can be dialled pharmacologically and optogenetically, and that no controlled condition in healthy humans exceeds a felt-duration multiplier of about 1.6; dreams run in real time and the brain sits within a small factor of its biological speed limit. The first two levers therefore deliver small multiples, and the third delivers the large ones, bounded only by physics some thirty orders of magnitude above a brain. A cost law, that a rendered reality costs what is observed in it rather than what it contains, prices immersive worlds and the minds in them. Calibrated on measured systems, an indistinguishable rendered hour for one person requires about 5 × 10^18 operations per second today (roughly $12,000 and about three megawatts) and about 1.7 × 10^15 after foveation and visible algorithmic gains, which on current cost curves arrives near 2030 at a dollar or two an hour. At the Landauer floor the sunlight on Earth supports about 6 × 10^17 human-equivalent minds at real time and one star about 10^27; a lifetime lived in one hour costs a national grid at today's efficiency, a few gigawatts at the limit of silicon, and 200 kilowatts at the Landauer floor. The paper gives a feasibility ladder for each lever, two trajectories for R through 2050, an extension of the cost law from personal realities to the founding and forking of whole civilisations, and a list of the thirteen open problems framed as the ventures they are.\n\nThe deposit includes the paper (PDF), the Python script that reproduces every calculation, table and chart in the paper (lifetimes_before_breakfast_calculations.py), and its output.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Ekram Alam"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/06s772vyhm9n6.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.5281/zenodo.23643951",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "06s772vyhm9n6",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://zenodo.org/records/23643951",
  "language": "eng",
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [],
  "openalex": null,
  "pdf_url": "https://zenodo.org/api/records/23643951/files/Lifetimes_Before_Breakfast_Alam_2026.pdf/content",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-25",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/06s772vyhm9n6.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-11-08T12:20:54Z",
      "native_id": "23643951",
      "source": "zenodo",
      "url": "https://zenodo.org/records/23643951"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [],
  "title": "Lifetimes Before Breakfast: A theoretical roadmap to subjective time expansion, immersive realities and substrate independence",
  "title_text": "Lifetimes Before Breakfast: A theoretical roadmap to subjective time expansion, immersive realities and substrate independence",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-08T12:20:54Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/06s772vyhm9n6",
  "venue": "Zenodo",
  "versions": []
}