Friday, March 4, 2011

Oh, the Humanity!

I have made my disdain for most people very clear. In fact, save you Dear Readers, I could probably accurately state that I don't like most people or things. It's not that I'm a complete asshole (although I can think of a woman or two that could make a strong argument for that), it's just that I really can't stand ignorance. Humans tend toward really awful and/or stupid things. Here are three examples of awful things, and an example of the stupidest thing I think we've produced thus far:

  1. This
  2. That
  3. The Other
  4. Fucking Stupid
As with most things in life, this thought was best said in a movie. In 1997 Tommy Lee Jones starred in a movie called  Men In Black and he had one of the best lines about humanity ever:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.




Occasionally though, we can get our shit together and do amazing things. That's what I want to share with you today. An example of a group of smart people coming together and doing something where others said nothing could be done. Getting their shit together and solving a world problem. It's lengthy, but find the time to give it a watch.


So, like I said, Humans can be pretty cool when they want to be. Sure, beavers can dam a river or a creek and make some small scale localized environmental changes but humans man, humans! "Hey, I need to rebuild this road that the river just took out. How can we do that you ask? Simple: We're gonna move the fucking river!"

"Boy, we're running out of space here. Grow out? No way! Check out this skyscraper. It's 91 stories high!"

"Jeez, disease sucks. Why do people keep fishing with the bug nets we gave them? Is that guy carrying vaccines in a bait cooler? Okay, here's a solution: Vaccine dispensers that work like pop machines. Great job everyone! But, hang on, what can we do about malaria? There's no vaccine for that yet. Hmmmm... I know! Let's look inside someone's eyeball and shoot some lasers into their blood vessels to see if they have malaria after all! No blood drawing involved! Then, if they do have it, let's just run their blood through a suped up, medical grade Brita© Filter to ease the parasite load. Brilliant! But, wait, that's really just treating the symptom. We don't have a vaccine yet, but what can we do to kill the disease before it even gets to people? What can we do about the mosquitoes? Hey, I've got an idea. Someone log on to eBay and get me a PS3, a laser printer, and a cheap digital camera. Here's our solution: We're going to use these relatively cheap consumer electronics to measure the mosquito size and it's beat frequency, determine if it's a female skeeter and, if it is, BLAST IT OUT OF THE FUCKING SKY WITH FRICKIN' LASER BEAMS! How do you do that? It's simple."

If you're human.




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