>>1388
>A person that is totally fluent in both Mandarin Chinese and English can walk into any Fortune 500 company and name their price.
I personally know someone with exactly that skillset. No, you cannot do this.
>There are hundreds of languages in rural parts of the world spoken by just a handful of people, in some cases just ONE person, and these are often elderly people who will not pass on their language to children, and who know little of other languages.
And your plan to find these people and get them to speak to you at length about a cultural heritage they have not bothered passing on to their own children is what exactly? We as a society already have the ability to speak, decipher, or at least record those dying languages. The reason we are not doing so is because the fluent speakers are uncooperative or difficult to locate and financial support for such endeavors is limited. The one part of the problem power C solves is the one part of the problem that is already solved.
>There are ancient languages, inscribed on stone artifacts or clay tablets, that have still yet to be deciphered.
And if you happen to be in a field where you can decipher those languages and deliver an explanation other than "genie magic," the utility of power C jumps up significantly. This is something I already mentioned. As it is, coming out with a complete translation of otherwise untranslated languages and no explanation whatsoever for how you arrived at it will not be at all credible until after other people have already translated those languages.
>So small you are; no wonder you jump at something as insipid and childish as immortality.
If you had half the wisdom you're pretending at, you'd recognize that the ability to lay plans on the scale of centuries and still be around to adapt them when the universe inevitably does not cooperate with your initial predictions is an incredibly useful thing to have. Learning a skill that takes decades is a serious impediment to someone who has a finite amount of time to spend, but for someone who is immortal (or even who will just live for an extraordinarily long time such that decades of practice are chump change to the overall lifespan) it is only a question of discipline, discipline that you can keep cultivating until you get good at it no matter how long that takes.