How to Modify Humanity
Two posts in one week? Hallelujah indeed! Not only does he live, but he's been resurrected!! Whoa, now settle down. We don't want any accidents out there guys. I know it's unheard of, but I'm actually posting again this week!
I realized that I have a major problem to figure out with my comments section. Either (a) the comment link is broken and requires people to enable some weird java stuff or (b) the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated and I no longer have any readers. I think it might have been a combo of the two.
I've been having interesting thoughts about a movie I watched tonight called Equilibrium. The movie is definitely not for the weak at heart. This movie had more people getting shot, sliced, stabbed, bludgeoned, and executed second only to Kill Bill. However, Kill Bill had an anime/cartoon-ish feel to the fighting -- and Equilibrium was grotesquely real. That was my only complaint. I could have done without hearing bones snap and such. While the movie was a bit harsh (in all fairness it is about a revolution taking place...) it had a really interesting theme. Basically, humanity barely survives WWIII -- this time a nuclear holocaust. To put an end to war, they force everyone in society to take a daily injection that subdues all emotion. Think of it as Prozac for the masses. While this brings the world to a calm sense of peace, a religious monastery releases "Clerics" to hunt down anyone that intentionally misses a dose. The people that can still "feel" are executed without trial. Most of the time they are caught hording art, music, and other emotional materials in hidden rooms. This continues until the best Cleric misses a dose and discovers he likes having feelings. So he starts a revolution that ends with all the pharmaceutical plants blowing up across the city and the entire city missing their meds. Interesting idea.
There is a Sci-Fi book that I read called A Canticle for Leibowitz that experiments with the same theme. If we could remove a part of humanity could we live peacefully? In this story, the world again suffers a nuclear war, but the remaining population blames politicians and scholars for it all. So people thrust themselves back into the middle ages by actively finding bureaucrats and scientists -- killing them. They also burn libraries, books, universities, and all other sources of information. The monks in this story take it upon themselves to keep the world's information safe from the public for hundreds of years -- to the point where English is the new Latin. Eventually, society rebuilds itself to another technological Mecca with the help of the ancient documents, only to blow themselves up again because they don't have faith the in ancient warning that precede it.
What else could be taken from humanity in an attempt to safeguard us from ourselves? Privacy? Communication? Mortality? If we were able to live 500 years from a new medicine, what would the consequences be? With the Internet age helping us carry ideas from one generation to another...would we advance technology even faster? Would the population increase put a strain on the earth and make it a necessity for population control? Maybe the amount of money that changed hands in inheritances would decrease, and the middle class would rapidly disappear. What if men were given medication at birth to make them infertile except for a selected few? Would a world with less testosterone really make warfare happen less often? Or would women just perfect how the game is played in men's absence?
Any thoughts? What part of humanity would you suppress in an attempt to better the species?
I realized that I have a major problem to figure out with my comments section. Either (a) the comment link is broken and requires people to enable some weird java stuff or (b) the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated and I no longer have any readers. I think it might have been a combo of the two.
I've been having interesting thoughts about a movie I watched tonight called Equilibrium. The movie is definitely not for the weak at heart. This movie had more people getting shot, sliced, stabbed, bludgeoned, and executed second only to Kill Bill. However, Kill Bill had an anime/cartoon-ish feel to the fighting -- and Equilibrium was grotesquely real. That was my only complaint. I could have done without hearing bones snap and such. While the movie was a bit harsh (in all fairness it is about a revolution taking place...) it had a really interesting theme. Basically, humanity barely survives WWIII -- this time a nuclear holocaust. To put an end to war, they force everyone in society to take a daily injection that subdues all emotion. Think of it as Prozac for the masses. While this brings the world to a calm sense of peace, a religious monastery releases "Clerics" to hunt down anyone that intentionally misses a dose. The people that can still "feel" are executed without trial. Most of the time they are caught hording art, music, and other emotional materials in hidden rooms. This continues until the best Cleric misses a dose and discovers he likes having feelings. So he starts a revolution that ends with all the pharmaceutical plants blowing up across the city and the entire city missing their meds. Interesting idea.
There is a Sci-Fi book that I read called A Canticle for Leibowitz that experiments with the same theme. If we could remove a part of humanity could we live peacefully? In this story, the world again suffers a nuclear war, but the remaining population blames politicians and scholars for it all. So people thrust themselves back into the middle ages by actively finding bureaucrats and scientists -- killing them. They also burn libraries, books, universities, and all other sources of information. The monks in this story take it upon themselves to keep the world's information safe from the public for hundreds of years -- to the point where English is the new Latin. Eventually, society rebuilds itself to another technological Mecca with the help of the ancient documents, only to blow themselves up again because they don't have faith the in ancient warning that precede it.
What else could be taken from humanity in an attempt to safeguard us from ourselves? Privacy? Communication? Mortality? If we were able to live 500 years from a new medicine, what would the consequences be? With the Internet age helping us carry ideas from one generation to another...would we advance technology even faster? Would the population increase put a strain on the earth and make it a necessity for population control? Maybe the amount of money that changed hands in inheritances would decrease, and the middle class would rapidly disappear. What if men were given medication at birth to make them infertile except for a selected few? Would a world with less testosterone really make warfare happen less often? Or would women just perfect how the game is played in men's absence?
Any thoughts? What part of humanity would you suppress in an attempt to better the species?
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