Ever noticed that in sci fi movies, whenever a scientist discovers something really awesome and finds a way help out mankind, there’s always some guy who brings about a big downer. And, it’s always some guy. Granted, I sort of understood in Jurassic Park what Ian Malcolm was getting at, especially when the scientists decided it would be totally awesome to clone a T-Rex and velociraptors. In that case there should have been someone there to say, “maybe we should stop at the triceratops and NOT clone the creature that can devour us whole”.
But in other things there’s often doom and gloom with regard to a scientific or engineering breakthrough where someone says “NO GOOD WILL COME OF THIS”. It even happens in real life, and the constant examples of film showing disasters based on a scientific or engineering breakthrough has actually broken the fourth wall and become part of our culture.
Science = REALLY BAD THING!
No it doesn’t. I’m sorry, but the Hadron Collider did not open a black hole and suck the Earth inside when it was turned on, even though a large number of people panicked when even the mere mention of that was spoken. Granted, the ignorant media decided “Hey, let’s run with this and just let it snowball”.
Back in 2000 there were no riots because computers did not have a problem switching over to 2000 from 1999. Traffic lights did not fail. Telephone service did not stop. And people got to see their stupid reality TV shows (although, losing those would not have been a bad thing, really). Systems engineers and programmers knew there was a problem, a slight problem. They recognized it, and worked on it, and said “yeah, there’s an issue, but we’re working on it and we think we’ve got it covered”. But the public just heard up to “yeah there’s an issue” and then panicked. They seemed to refuse to listen to the entire statement and let their little reptile brains take over.
Just once in a sci fi movie, I’d love to see some massive scientific breakthrough happen, some guy come along and freak out about it being the end of the world, and when nothing happens everyone just thinks he’s a jerkface for being paranoid.
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