A modest proposal
Future wars should be fought as laser tag games.
Yes, I’m serious. We shoot you, you’re dead, you have to wait on the sidelines for five days. Never mind shock and awe, let’s have loud music and pretty lights and no actual property or body damage! WHY NOT?
Let’s share information, not bullets. Let’s find solutions.. if it means mining the astroids for everyone on earth to have enough that we don’t have to fight over possessions.. then let’s bloody mine the asteroids. We all get further when we all know more. I don’t know who originally told this to me, but it’s become sort of a mantra… (of course, I have a bunch of those. How many of them have I learned from other people and how many have I just made up on the spot because I needed one that fit the situation? I don’t know. Do I care? Probably not. It’d be nice to be able to credit every single one of my influences.. and some day maybe I’ll try, although it would take a while.. but let’s face it, I have *lots* of influences. We live in a world that’s full of them – ideas travel, and these days they travel *far*. Our thoughts are finally free, they’ve finally escaped the cages of our brains and are racing around the world. With increasing use of wireless networks, they are beginning to radiate out into space – no longer do you have to be the elite with a radio license to broadcast, now we *all* are bouncing our ideas outwards.
Is this the only place intelligent life exists in the universe? Probably not.
[few thoughts deleted. I wonder if I should really delete thoughts? I’m trying to document, for myself and so I can understand, my growth as a individual]
I wonder if LiveJournal has any way to get a dump of your entire journal? I’d feel better if it were being backed up somewhere else.. maybe I could pay for a account on LiveJournalBackup.com (oh, wait, does that exist?) How about LaserLiveJournal.com [we broadcast with a few hundred milliwatts straight at another star with a laser.. oh, wait, that’s probably not going to do much good because there’s some silly rule which says radio signals decay in strength as they travel in space. Hm. Unfortunately, laws of the universe aren’t that flexible]
February 15th, 2005 at 6:53 am
http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=8 😀
February 15th, 2005 at 9:00 am
Robert Wilson wrote a scifi story based on the opposite premise: that business people started hiring real hitmen to work over the competition. I like your version better.
Laser signals decay a lot less than radio signals because of their directionality.
February 19th, 2005 at 4:58 am
I’ve been mentally toying with the frustration of ‘adversarial systems’ — things like the justice system (where two sides argue two points of view — the defendant is guilty vs the defendant is innocent) and debates (same deal, different topics)..on one hand, all other things being equal (which they are often not in the real world) it is a fairly effective way of gleaning truth, but…are we better served by debating two falsely dichotimous viewpoints (say, about abortion, or coercive psychiatry, or most other topics) or by discussing what we would like outcomes to be, discussing where our destination is and how best to get there. More and more I’m leery of compromise — comproimising our health for political and financial expidiency, etc. the 3/5ths compromise so vaunted when I was in elementary school has become so distasteful to me.
When I was very little I told my dad that instead of having wars we ought to have dogs fight eachother. He told me this was a bad idea because the U.S. would probably choose a chihauhau and the USSR (this was back when there was a USSR, and a Cold War) would choose a doberman.