From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri May 18 2001 - 00:01:55 MDT
Harvey wrote:
>Good Luck! Will it be carried on any C1 satellites that I might be able to
>tap into? I would love to see the show.
First two eps were pretty good. The cloning episode on Tuesday was a
schemozzle. A Raelian facing a professional Christian dour-gooder, with
poor Prof Alan Trounson (surely a future Nobel laureate) trying to say
useful things about epigenetic switches being munged in current cloning
experiments. I can't imagine why they didn't invite a $cientologist and a
witchdoctor as well to provide well-considered ethical and scientific
opinions.
After seeing the first two eps (I participated in the second), I'd rather
chided myself for not allowing them to name the series THE SPIKE, as was
suggested at one point. Now I'm intensely grateful to my own caution.
I mean, people think extropes are weird. A fucking *Raelian*! You all know
about them, I suppose? Life on earth was created by ETs using cloning (of
what? some primordial slime the greys just happened to have stuck to the
treads of their UFOs?), and we'll use accelerated cloning to create perfect
physical copies of ourselves, and then nanotech will copy our brain
structures into these compliant shells (a.k.a. our twins, who will thereby
be brain-murdered, but hey, get an eternal life you moralizing dolt) and
we'll go out into space where our forecritters live. Wow, thanks for
bringing us that really interesting information.
And of course the rotating smashcut graphics were all of hairless plastic
mannequins exactly alike, even though everyone kept saying `It would be a
stupid and vulgar mistake to imagine that delayed twins are *carbon copies
of you*...'
I'm hoping to see Emlyn appear in a crushed aluminium foil suit, insisting
that he's beamed back here from the future to prevent the cloning of Jesus,
which went terribly wrong and caused all the oceans to turn to rather pissy
and undrinkable wine.
Damien Broderick
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