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Post by The Curmudgeon on Jun 22, 2008 13:44:15 GMT 2
OK, thinking caps on here people. Now, imagine that one amazing, fantastic thing that only exists in movies and fiction actually existed in everyday life. What would you pick, and please think of the consequences before you choose.
Like, if you wished that people could actually have super powers, and you imagined yourself flying around in a costume fighting crime - just think when OTHER people get those powers. Suddenly the world is filled with costumed maniacs, far more dangerous than anything the world has ever had to deal with before. Not such a glamorous idea now?
Or if you wished that there was genuine, concrete, accepted proof that ghosts existed around us. Brilliant - proof of the afterlife, and proof that when we die it's not the end, merely the beginning of something new. Awesome - except for the fact there could be a ghost behind you RIGHT NOW. And all manner of Poltergeist/Shining shenanigans goes down. Would YOU want to live in a world like that?
Not so easy, is it? So go on then - name one thing, any one thing you would LOVE to see in the real, everyday world; dragons, super heroes, aliens.. anything. What would it be?
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Post by trashcanman on Jun 23, 2008 12:26:12 GMT 2
Um, everything? Life would be so badass that I would never have to spend another minute watching tv, playing video games, or reading comics. It'd be like living in a damn anime. Mmmmmm.... giant mecha [gurgle]. Just don't make me The Sentry. Nothing could be lamer than possessing the power of a million exploding suns and having agoraphobia. Who writes this shit?!
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Post by The Curmudgeon on Jun 25, 2008 13:36:26 GMT 2
Ahhh, but, see - if you made EVERYTHING real then you wouldn't be able to sleep for fear of vampires, or Freddy Kruegar or ghosts or aliens or.. fuck, everything. You couldn't play video games either 'cos of this guy..  Does THAT sound like a world you want to live in??? |
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Post by trashcanman on Jun 25, 2008 23:06:40 GMT 2
Vampires and all them couldn't hurt me while my pet dragon and laser-wielding sex-bot (Boomer or 6, I can't decide) guard my slumber! I'd go all Dream Warriors all over Freddy's ass, complete with the Dokken song blaring. It'd be like that Dio video where he's swinging the broadsword around with fire and all that. I'm a HUGE nerd. And who needs video games when there are actual vampires to hunt, zombies to hit with pies, aliens to blast across the galaxy, and real women who behave like anime girls to chase? And with life-expectancy being about 20-30 years tops (assuming you have superpowers), no old people! Unless you have those resurrection potions and Lazarus pits...
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Post by The Curmudgeon on Jun 26, 2008 0:15:21 GMT 2
Hmmm.. now you come to mention it..
And you could just go into a lab and fall into some chemicals holding, like, a lightbulb to get some bad-ass powers. And you could live in a castle way up in the mountains and the stupid peasant villagers would cross themselves when they talk about you. And you could form an alliance with every supervillain and monster in the world to create an unstoppable Sinister Seven type group.
Man, that would be awesome! Stupid real life!
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Post by Benjamin Haines on Jun 26, 2008 7:42:54 GMT 2
Unlimited bodily regeneration and immunity to disease for every human on Earth. What kind of negative consequences might that yield?
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Post by The Curmudgeon on Jun 26, 2008 8:45:02 GMT 2
Ummm.. mass over-population?
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Post by Benjamin Haines on Jun 26, 2008 8:57:31 GMT 2
People could still die of old age, starvation, or thirst. Murder wouldn't really be possible unless one were to imprison somebody else and force them to die by one of those means.
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Post by The Curmudgeon on Jun 26, 2008 22:40:57 GMT 2
What about suicide?
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Post by Benjamin Haines on Jun 27, 2008 7:07:19 GMT 2
Haha, now there's a doozy. I guess the only way to kill yourself in that world would be to not drink or eat.
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Post by The Curmudgeon on Jun 27, 2008 16:39:15 GMT 2
See, Benjamin I reckon you've got this one pretty sussed - except - some major things this site holds dear; horror movies, action movies, gangster stories, murder mysteries - everything like that - wouldn't exist. Hell, Macbeth would never be written, for one. No-one dies, so the only source of entertainment would be romance novels and comedies (without any actual sense of danger, a la Ace Ventura, for example).
What a world..
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Post by Benjamin Haines on Jun 27, 2008 21:05:21 GMT 2
Wow. Now there's something I didn't think of. That begs the question of just how much this entertainment is worth. I guess if I had the option of making that "unlimited regeneration and immunity" world a reality tomorrow, I'd do it, being that the past century of cinema and what not is already here to enjoy. And of course, anybody who's lived up to this point in time without such fantastic benefits would clearly recall living without them, and as such could still make more movies featuring peril and danger set in a then-fantastical world where such regeneration and immunity does not exist, and us viewers who haven't lived all our lives with it could accept it. Imagine that - a Halloween movie where the actor playing Michael Myers can really stab his knife into the other actor right on camera, providing the ultimate money shot, because the actor would be able to survive the take.
If given the option of changing the past and making this fantastical world a reality since the beginning of humanity, I wouldn't do it. It'd be one thing to lose the past century of cinema and artistic entertainment as we know it, but if there's one thing ol' Doc Brown taught us, it's that messing with the past in such a way would never be a good idea any way you slice it.
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Post by The Curmudgeon on Jun 27, 2008 21:20:18 GMT 2
Going on a different slant from what you said - what if you discovered a Time Machine? Would you use it?
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Post by Benjamin Haines on Jun 28, 2008 8:40:19 GMT 2
I actually don't think that anybody could alter the past even if traveling through time was possible. I think time itself exists as a singular whole, on a linear scale with every instant of it being influenced by every instant that came before it.
You know how a two-dimensional plane is something flat, with height and width but absolutely no depth. We see the world around us in three dimensions (height, width, and depth), so we exist on one single three-dimensional plane. Think of a three-dimensional plane as basically being made of an infinite series of two-dimensional planes, overlapping one another across every direction from every angle. Try to picture that in your mind if you can to get an idea of what I'm saying.
So with an infinite series of two-dimensional planes making up the three-dimensional plane in which we exist, what does that make an infinite series of three-dimensional planes making up a fourth-dimensional plane? The way I see it, since we only ever exist at any one instant in time at any given time, and we exist in one single three-dimensional plane, every instant of time is a three-dimensional plane unto itself. The instant of time in which you are reading THIS word is a different three-dimensional plane from the instant of time in which you read THIS word. It is an infinite series of three-dimensional planes (spaces of height, width, and depth existing as single instants of time) that make up the fourth-dimensional plane: time as a whole.
Still with me on this? My point is that I think time is a single, whole plane of existence unto itself, in a way that we can't even experience because we're limited to existing on one single three-dimensional plane at any given instant of time. We can regard the instants prior to our current instant of existence as the past and anything yet to come as the future, but I think it's all just a part of the whole which already exists as it is. We view "now" as the present, but you know we viewed any prior instant in time as "now" when we were in it, and now we view it as the past. There is no real "now", just each individual instant of time which we live through one by one. That's what I mean by time being a whole. I think that endless series of instants that is what we call time exists unto itself as it is. There will never be any going back in time and killing Hitler. If anybody in the future were to have ever done that, that would have already happened in what we know as the past. If somebody in the year 2020 went in a time machine to the year 1940 and killed Hitler, we'd be talking right now in the year 2008 about how Hitler was killed by somebody in the year 1940. Our historical records in 2008 of what happened to Hitler in 1940 are not sitting around and waiting to be shaped by somebody deciding to build a time machine in the year 2020. Basically, the fact that Hitler was not killed in 1940 and that the Holocaust and WWII did happen (in what we now call the "past") is certification that nobody in the future is ever going to go back in time and change that. If anybody from the year 2020 were to go back in time to the year 1940, whatever they did in 1940 would not change 2008 as we know it today, it would make 2008 as we know it today.
I love movies like Back to the Future and The Terminator, but I don't think time works the way they present it. I think Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah did a good job of portraying the effects of time travel. The people from the future go back in time to 1944 and move the dinosaur that will one day mutate into Godzilla from his island home to a trench in the Bering Sea, hoping that the H-bomb tests that would later take place on that island therefore won't ever mutate that dinosaur into Godzilla. Instead, back in the "present" 1992, they find that not only have the past events of Godzilla not been erased, but he is still very much exists as Godzilla in that present time. Then Terasawa (the main character) learns of a nuclear submarine which sank in the Bering Sea in the '70s right where the future people had relocated the dinosaur in 1944, and he realizes that this event was what had actually turned the dinosaur into Godzilla all along. The people from the future went back in time to try to change the past so that Godzilla would never get created, but they inadvertently initiated the very actions which led to Godzilla's creation in the first place. That's how I think time travel would really work if it were ever possible.
So, to answer your question, if I had a time machine, would I use it? I guess I would. What the hell, right? If I'm right about how time exists and how it works, then anything I do in the past would only be integral to making the present as we know it today, almost like fulfilling a prophecy.
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Post by trashcanman on Jun 28, 2008 11:36:54 GMT 2
Anybody read "The Langeliers"? King's version of time travel is my favorite. The past is empty, lifeless, and static eventually ceasing to be altogether while the future is motionless as well until the present catches up to it. Brilliant. Time travel in entertainment is a cool device, but I simply don't believe it would work that way in practice. It makes no sense.
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