Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The End Of The World, As We (Don't) Know It. (Part 2-ish)

I'm tolerant, I'll say that much.
Tolerant, but not of gender, or sexual orientation, or race, or religion, or anything superficial like that.  These are aspects of our humanity, and I embrace them wholeheartedly.

Rather, I am tolerant of people.
Stupid people, to be more specific.
As my more comedic friends on Facebook are spreading it right now:
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Please put this on your status if you know or are related to someone who suffers from stupidity. People need to understand that stupidity is real and should be taken seriously. You could be sitting next to a stupid person right now. There is still no known cure for stupidity and sympathy does not help. Sometimes a 2x4 to the back of the head helps, but not a lot. But we can raise awareness!
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Stupidity. Ignorance. The hallmarks of our arrogance.

It's become my mission in life to know as much as I can, just for the sake of knowing ... and, methinks, the world would become a better place if more people shared that mission. (Think of a world as in Star Trek - the abolishment of money and therefore poverty and wealth and greed; the freedom and drive to work together to eradicate poverty and disease; the colonization of space, and true space travel. [The presence of extraterrestial life, I will leave open to speculation.]) Call me idealistic, but that is truly a dream I would rather not die for, but live to make true.

Sadly, a brain such as mine (or anyone's, really) was not built to store all the information we now have access to, and instead - my programmer friends will appreciate this - is filled with 'pointers' to where all the information is.
You'll find any number of scientific studies that prove this to be the case for most of the technologically-savvy world. Are we getting more stupid? I don't know, I'll Google it and get back to you ...

On a different and yet somehow related note, the survival of the species (our species, in case you were wondering) has been on my mind recently. To put it succinctly: our penchant for preserving life at all costs is having its consequences, as I mentioned in my last post. Not that I am against living longer, but still, living longer in a world that's going to shit (see: The Daily Show / Colbert Report) is not a particularly happy prospect. As good as people are getting at knocking themselves out of the gene pool (e.g. Jackass), it's not nearly good enough. Humans are still driven by genetically encoded tendencies, and since we've mostly overridden natural selection as it used to exist, we need to engage in a mission to purify the human genome™*. No, I don't mean eugenics ... well, yes, I do, but NOT in the way Hitler intended. Besides, Hitler simply thought too small - he wanted his one puny race to rule the Earth. I dream bigger by far - I want all of humanity to populate the entire Universe. And a step in that direction would be to, shall we say, prune our existing evolutionary tree of bad fruit. I mean, who needs the death penalty when we've got vasectomies?
Better yet, we need to encourage as many people as possible to compete for the Darwin Award.
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*What, you didn't know that most of your DNA - the fundamental building blocks of what makes you "you" - was patented? Better not try any DNA-based experiments, or they'll sue the RNA out of you.