From: Harvey Newstrom (harv@gate.net)
Date: Sat Feb 28 1998 - 09:09:36 MST
With all this talk about "Virtual Obsession" spreading memes, it makes me
wonder if people on this list have watched episodes of "The Outer Limits"?
I have been taping them weekly for a couple of months. They have had
episodes about the following subjects:
- Cryonics, being frozen and coming back
- Transferring consciousness to a new body before death, including
transferring multiple consciousnesses into a single body
- An AI program that becomes sentient and demands equal rights, and finally
decides to ignore the physical human and deciding that the VR people are
more real, and the last physical human is irrelevant
- A world where everyone is in communication on a giant network with neural
chips built right into their heads from birth
- Many episodes where humans are extinct or close to extinct and replaced
by robots who continue society
- Lots of genetic engineering episodes, or end-of-the-world episodes where
only genetic engineering can make humanity survive in an altered form
- Lots of episodes where final humans turn against other humans in favor of
aliens, robots, AIs or other forms of life, deciding that humans aren't
automatically superior that other forms of life
- etc.
Some of these show the horrors of the technology. Some of these are too
fluffy-sweet showing that technology is so wonderful that we were idiots to
ever have war, disagreements, or boredom because technology solves
everything.
My favorite part about the series is that each episode is written by a
different author and has a different point of view and different
characters. Unlike Babylon 5, Star Trek(s) and X-Files, which are all
locked into the same characters and the same tired points of view, these
are different points of view every time.
It may be more effective to spread memes via a TV series rather than
individual movies. Then we could have a different author and story idea
every week.
-- Harvey Newstrom <mailto: harv@gate.net> PGP 5.5 Fingerprint F746 7A20 EB7D 27BA 80A5 4473 D8E1 6A54 1EB0 56F7 PGP Public Key available from <http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371>
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