And now for something different...

Every so often I come across something that reminds me of the bigger picture. If I can get this to link properly...

This is one of my top 5 all time favorite film clips.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZKkxAQYxyE

The movie Bladerunner is always described with the word Dystopic. The opposite of Utopia. Generally a bleak and cheerless view of the future. I beg to disagree with this. I feel that movie could very well likely be a possible future for us. Huge, crowded cities, hives of humanity that are shady, seedy, and indifferent. That can describe any big city today, especially the port cities of China and India. At the end of the film, you can clearly see that nature still exists, with the main character driving along a wonderfully forested highway.

Genetically engineered humans doing our grunt work? Yes. Genetically enhanced soldiers? Yes. I see that in our future very clearly. Much of the technology in that movie exists today, except that we do not yet posses interstellar travel or posses off-planet colonies. I feel that will come too, eventually.

Humanity will work it out. There will eventually be one world government and one world currency. We will speak with one voice. I feel that we have so very much to learn before that can happen. Issues that need to be settled. Marxism and Capitalism can not coexist very comfortably, just look closely at China, a perfect model of this. Islam and, well, anything else can not coexist peacefully, so that will have to be settled as well.

Dystopia is a matter of perspective. Even in the Great Depression there were movies being made (and people with the money to go to them). Heck, some of the best films Hollywood put out were from that time (the Golden Age). The Empire State building went up as a proud monument for New York. The world is never all bad or all good. A Roman Citizen, living around 200 a.d. in Southern France had a pretty good life. There had not been a civil war in years, the Empire was at peace, literally the Pax Romana. There were dark times, too. The merchant that invested everything he had in an expedition to Britannia to mine tin and other metals and then lost the ship to a storm; the Christian priest trying to help the poor in Antioch while avoiding the Roman authorities; the frustrated Roman house wife who just had to let some of the servants go because her husband lost his monthly salary playing dice, they all had their tough times. The list goes on. We all have our bills to pay and we all have our challenges in life, no matter the stage of life or the time frame in our history. They have always been there. Some of us have had it worse than others, but some have had it better. We may not be in control of the big things in life, but we do have the ability to improve our chances of weathering the consequences of those "big things".

As a species we have changed very little since the last Homo Sapien saw off the last Neanderthal in Spain. Clean them up and give them a shave and you have a Wall Street Lawyer (but with more morals). The same needs, wants and desires. The wish for a better home and a better future. The only thing that changes is our culture and our technology (redundant there?).

We must never stop looking over that next hill or past the horizon of the ocean. We must not stop reaching for the moon and Mars, nor stop striving to reach the stars. Robots are great but until there is a boot print on the soil of Mars, we can not really say that we have arrived.

Bladerunner gives me hope. As bad as the screen writer tried to get across the dismal hopelessness of society at that time, the writer also intimated that we had gone not just to the moon and Mars, but had already begun the great Terran Diaspora, lead by the Replicants. They did the hard fighting, the hard work, and endured the dangerous conditions making things safer for human colonists to come after them. That world had its issues to settle; issues of freedom and slavery. Then again, so do we.

--Zavost