Science Fiction
My all time favorite genre is Science Fiction. Mostly I blame my dad for that, I was pretty doomed to follow the genre when I was reading Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles at age 7. I mean you just never get away from something like that. Some time after that I read Dune, well the first 3 books anyway. Growing up I watched a lot of the original 3 Star Wars movies, and then when episode 1 came out, well I was obsessed. I read so many spin off series from that universe it is probably a problem. Star Trek was another popular series, and that took some dedication to watch. See we had satellite and not cable, it required us to use an antenna to pick up UPN to be able to pick up new Voyager episodes. This only worked so well, especially in dark scenes where the static made it difficult to see. Sliders was another show we watched as a family, until that got too dark, but definitely interesting SciFi. The Time Machine from 1960 was another movie I'd always pick to watch as a kid. Which looking back probably should've tipped my parents off that I was different. Princess movie or The Time Machine? My love for SciFi was strong. And then there were all the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. While not all of that was SciFi, that genre definitely had a heavy presence. Plus they were on a space station so that made it Science Fiction-y right?
What makes Science Fiction so interesting though? I think it's that ability to take one thing from our lives today, and fast forward it to an extreme point. Scientists start playing around with DNA modification, Science Fiction writers create a world of Bio Engineering run amuck. Even Planet of the Apes is a look in the future of the decline of one race and the rise of another. For the record, I'm not a huge fan of any of the movies in that franchise, but it's thought provoking at a minimum. A world that is very far removed from our own tends to fall into Fantasy and it can be compartmentalize mentally as not being possible, but Science Fiction forces us to think!
We were listening to NPR the other day and they were talking about how Science is getting close to DNA modifications to eliminate certain debilitating diseases, potentially from our gene pool all together. And the reporter was doing a decent job asking questions on ethics and the right and wrong of it, but the man she was interviewing was completely the evil villain you would see in a movie. No qualms about any level of modifications a person would want to do, even beyond base level birth defect modifications. Things like making a person smarter, prettier, only with blue eyes, blond hair, nicer, and so on. In theory all of these things are possible once you open that Pandora's box. Isn't that what Science Fiction is for, to train our minds to see these things for what they are before we fall down the rabbit hole?
That doesn't mean we avoid new technology because of the misuse that could occur, but it does mean that we should be aware of the obligation that we have to the new things we develop? Well the reality is once you ring a bell, light a match, whatever analogy you want, you can't undo it, but we also don't have to always go hog wild SciFi Dystopian with it either. It's that give and pull between knowledge and the world we know already. Advancement vs status quo.
The question is always where do we go from here, but we can never go backwards, we can never unknow....
What makes Science Fiction so interesting though? I think it's that ability to take one thing from our lives today, and fast forward it to an extreme point. Scientists start playing around with DNA modification, Science Fiction writers create a world of Bio Engineering run amuck. Even Planet of the Apes is a look in the future of the decline of one race and the rise of another. For the record, I'm not a huge fan of any of the movies in that franchise, but it's thought provoking at a minimum. A world that is very far removed from our own tends to fall into Fantasy and it can be compartmentalize mentally as not being possible, but Science Fiction forces us to think!
We were listening to NPR the other day and they were talking about how Science is getting close to DNA modifications to eliminate certain debilitating diseases, potentially from our gene pool all together. And the reporter was doing a decent job asking questions on ethics and the right and wrong of it, but the man she was interviewing was completely the evil villain you would see in a movie. No qualms about any level of modifications a person would want to do, even beyond base level birth defect modifications. Things like making a person smarter, prettier, only with blue eyes, blond hair, nicer, and so on. In theory all of these things are possible once you open that Pandora's box. Isn't that what Science Fiction is for, to train our minds to see these things for what they are before we fall down the rabbit hole?
That doesn't mean we avoid new technology because of the misuse that could occur, but it does mean that we should be aware of the obligation that we have to the new things we develop? Well the reality is once you ring a bell, light a match, whatever analogy you want, you can't undo it, but we also don't have to always go hog wild SciFi Dystopian with it either. It's that give and pull between knowledge and the world we know already. Advancement vs status quo.
The question is always where do we go from here, but we can never go backwards, we can never unknow....
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