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1. If you had to live in one, Which Sci-Fi dystopia would you live in, and why?
2. You have access to a single-hop time machine that can jump you 60 years into the past or the future. There's a gun at your head and you must jump or perish. You can only travel once. 1960, 2080, or oblivion? Why?
3. Tomorrow you are launching on the first manned mission to Mars. You are about to be in for 36 months of rehydrated mush and vacuum-sealed nutritious shelf-stable goodness. What is your launch-eve dinner (anything you want)? Bonus points: describe it in a way that will make us want it too.
4. Sponsors of the Mars trip have arranged 24/7 streaming of Fox News to your ship and habitat as your primary entertainment. In your private time you are allowed 15 minutes a day where you can listen to your own audio media. You can take 10 songs/tracks of up to 7.5 minutes in length each with you on your trip to Mars - what are they?
5. Tomorrow's headline: scientists prove definitively that we live in a computed simulation. What do you feel about this?
Paul's elegant and pragmatic future-forward answers
Ávalos' deep reflections and "quality first" responses
Case's "all the ramen" salad bowl of dystopic love
Shufei's glorious feast of history-making guerilla wisdom
1. I love the attention to detail and the worlds built for each of these films, and have spent many hours exploring the nooks and crannies of each of these universes, geeking out to the texture and flavour delivered by the visionaries who put each of them together. As a child, I was in love with the world of Bladerunner - I wanted to walk the steamy streets of 2019 Los Angeles, and look up at the Offworld Colony blimp as I ate my noodles at the White Dragon kiosk. I wanted an Esper machine and wanted to live in Deckard's apartment on the 97th floor. As I got older, I came to realise that this was a dying world, in a far worse state even than the one we inhabit. Whilst it would indeed be interesting to visit, it would probably be a drag to live in. Bladerunner 2049 serves well to underline this outlook.
Although I would like to visit and explore each of these worlds, if I was forced to live in one of them, there is a clear stand-out winner. Each of these scenarios was envisaged as a dystopia, and indeed, from the perspective of the time in which they were envisioned, as well as the full range of all possible worlds, they do not appear to be the nicest places to live. Ironically, one of these worlds now almost seems idyllic compared to how reality is actually shaping up - this is the world of Demolition Man. If we have to live in a fascist-run plutocracy, let it be one where the dictator is Mr Rogers and the brown shirts wilt at bad language and are armed with neo art-deco tazers. Sure, there are endless nicer possible futures, but really, on the spectrum of dystopian worlds, San Angeles looks like it was put together by Disney Imagineers. Soft fascism is ugly, but this fascism is borderline soft-serve. There is clear evidence that there are ways around the restrictions without becoming a "scrap" - take for example the accidental nude videophone misdial that John Spartan receives in his domicile. So what if Taco Bell is all that is on the menu, and you need to tackle the three sea-shells to deal with it on the way out. It looks like the climate is stable, the environment clean and intact, and civilised daily life successfully colouring between the lines staked out generously by this velvet-fisted regime. Besides, if it really does blow you can become a "scrap" and live a fairly decent (if subterranean) Mad Max flavoured life, and besides, Simon Phoenix and John Spartan come along and open up a world of possibilities for regime change, so the crystal-blue sky is the limit.
2. As I have gotten older, my appreciation for and interest in the past has grown. I have come to relise that it wasn't a shallow black-and-white echo of reality, but instead a rich universe of experiences that just happens to only be available to me second hand. But my heart has always looked longingly to the future. Although I know that jumping back would deliver me to a 60-year period that would definitely be survivable - very comfortably if I took the knowledge of 2020 back with me to 1960 - but I've never been one to be that risk averse. I know what the last 60 years delivers, and if I take various paradox theories to heart I could choose to believe that I cannot rewire history. I love travel, exploration and the novelty of the new - so I think I would go forward, and explore whatever the next 60 years delivers us. And besides, somewhere in the multiverse I went back, and built a better future for us by fixing the past.
3. My perfect pre-flight meal is:
4. I'm so bad at containing myself in top tens, and I guarantee that on another day, i'd give you a different list. But here goes - my desert-hellplanet playlist is:
5. So what? That is what appeared most probable. What material differnce does this make to my existence - does it make me any less real? I don't think so. Yes, we could be "switched off" in a heartbeat; we already knew that enyway. Whether computed in a contrivance of intelligence, or whether we are constructed directly of the matter of the base universe, we are what we are, and that thing is information. The most interesting aspect of this discovery would be exploring the nature of the infrastructure on which we exist, and investigating the possibility of transcending it - that should fill a lifetime or two.
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