What Happens If You Press the 500 Million Year Button: Solitude, the Perception of Time, and Vanishing Memories

The 500 Million Year Button is an item that appears in a manga. On the surface, the mechanism is simple: press it, and 1 million yen appears immediately. However, the entire substance of this thought experiment lies in what happens between pressing the button and receiving the money.

When you press the button, your body is transported to a space separate from reality. That space stretches on endlessly, with no walls, no variation in the ground, and no exit. You are the only one there. On top of that, your body becomes invulnerable and needs no food, water, or sleep. Your life is never in danger, and you cannot take your own life either. In this state, you must spend 500 million years.

Once the 500 million years have passed, your memories are erased and you are returned to the real world at the moment just after pressing the button. To those around you, it looks as though you simply pressed a button and 1 million yen came out. For the person who pressed it, too, the fact remains that they pressed it and 1 million yen came out right away. The only difference is that they have no memory whatsoever of those 500 million years.

The video conveys the length of this period through comparisons. The Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago, so 500 million years is roughly one-ninth of the planet's history. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, are thought to have emerged around 300,000 years ago, so even repeating the whole of human history 1,000 times would still fall short. The narration states that you would spend a span far longer than the time since mammals first appeared on Earth completely alone in an empty space.

According to the video, the first ordeal in spending 500 million years may arrive sooner than you think. When people are placed in a space with almost no light or sound, they can experience hallucination-like perceptions, anxiety, and changes in their sense of reality within a short time. This is a state known as sensory deprivation.

Likewise, when the entire visual field is filled with uniform stimulation, the brain may try to fill in the missing information and perceive lights or patterns that are not there. This is known as the Ganzfeld effect. From this, the video speculates that the human brain may be incapable of processing an empty space simply as "nothing." If the space you are sent to had no light or sound at all, your mind might reach its limit long before 500 million years were up.

That said, the video adds that while the original work does not mention sound in this space, it does seem to depict light as being present. For that reason, you might not suffer a mental breakdown right away.

Even so, the video likens the situation to being locked in a prison's solitary confinement cell indefinitely. Many inmates placed in solitary confinement reportedly suffer from visual and auditory hallucinations, even with some degree of contact with other people. With the 500 Million Year Button, there is no human contact and no change from one day to the next. The video's assessment is that the mind would be subjected to an extremely heavy burden simply by existing.

Many people have speculated about the 500 Million Year Button, and the video introduces one of these theories. As people grow older, each year seems to pass more quickly. This is because a single year makes up a shrinking proportion of the life lived so far. Taking this into account, the theory goes, 500 million years may seem unfathomably long, but in terms of how it actually feels, it might not even amount to ten lifetimes.

The idea that a year feels shorter the older you get is known as Janet's law. For a 5-year-old, one year is 20% of their life, but for a 50-year-old, it is a mere 2%. When looking back on the past, the share of life that one year occupies is completely different. The video says that at 500 million years old, a single year might feel like less than a rounding error in your life.

On the other hand, the video brings up a feeling familiar to many people: time flies when you are having fun and drags when you are bored. According to one theory, dopaminergic neurons—the nerve cells that release dopamine, which is involved in pleasure and other emotions—influence the sense of time. In a space where nothing exists but yourself, these neurons would have no reason to become active, and the video speculates that each second would pass extremely slowly.

Putting these two together, the video points out, could produce the worst possible combination for someone who presses the 500 Million Year Button. Each of the 15.8 quadrillion seconds would be stretched out as if for eternity. Yet in hindsight, spans like a million or ten million years would be compressed as though nothing had happened at all. The suffering is always in the present tense, yet you can never grasp how much you have endured. The conclusion of this section is that even after living for 500 million years, you would not even be able to comprehend how long you had endured.

The video then shifts perspective, saying these 500 million years could also be seen as an enormous opportunity that no one else could replicate. In this space, there are no worries about food, clothing, shelter, or fatigue. So if you were to make good use of this time, what could you do?

The first things that come to mind are memorization and calculation, but modern computers can handle these easily without any need for the 500 Million Year Button. Suppose you could perform one calculation per second; even continuing without rest for 500 million years, you would perform 15.8 quadrillion calculations. By contrast, it is reportedly standard for modern computers to perform over a billion calculations per second. In other words, 500 million years' worth of calculations could be accomplished by a present-day computer in a few months. Against a supercomputer with performance orders of magnitude greater, a human's 500 million years doesn't even compare. As for creative work, the video says that with recent advances in AI technology, the advantage offered by the sheer length of 500 million years is fading.

What the video offers as a way forward is self-awareness through meditation. Even the person in the world who has meditated the longest and examined themselves most thoroughly is said to have a total of at most 62,000 hours of meditation. By contrast, 500 million years is about 4.4 trillion hours, and all of it could be devoted to meditation.

You could contemplate every emotion your brain is capable of producing. When do you feel anger? Under what conditions do you feel joy? Over tens of thousands, even millions of years, you would observe and come to understand all of your thought patterns and emotions from within. And the video says that this very practice would likely turn time—which had been moving so slowly that it seemed to have stopped—back toward flowing once again.

Furthermore, the video continues, there remains the possibility of reaching new states of consciousness that humanity has never yet experienced. The possibility the video describes is that you would become the person in human history who knows the most about what consciousness is—not through textbooks or papers, but through direct exploration spanning a period far longer than the history of humankind.

However, you would also have to part with that heightened consciousness. When the 500 million years end, you are returned to the moment you pressed the button, and every last memory up to that point is erased. The peace of mind you reached over such a long time and the self-awareness you honed vanish without a trace in an instant, and all you are left with is 1 million yen of worldly money.

The video asks what you would think when you receive the 1 million yen, and what you discovered during those 500 million years. It closes with the words that the answer has been lost forever.