Orson Scott Card's response to Agent Smith

[openspace4life]

"Call us a disease, I don't care--I am a human, and I want us to spread everywhere like an epidemic, so we can never be stamped out."

-Colonel Graff of the Interstellar Colonization Ministry, in Shadow of the Giant

(For those few who don't know what I'm talking about, this is how an AI program named Agent Smith describes humanity in the movie The Matrix: "I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet..." Source)

Comments

yay matrix

[(Anonymous)]

is it wrong to want to persevere? even the most fundamental aspect of life, DNA, is bent on self-survival and reproduction so that it won't get "stamped out" humans are just too big for this planet and we might stamp ourselves out in the process of working not to. did that make sense?

love sister abigail

Re: yay matrix

[scifiben.livejournal.com]

Actually, we don't yet use a significant fraction of our planet's total energy, which would make us a "Type I civilization." But we are using a quarter of the net primary productivity of the biosphere, which is close enough. The real problem is that we'll need a thousand space elevators to evacuate a significant fraction of humanity in any reasonable amount of time...

[fairydust3654.livejournal.com]

funny how that quote makes me think of Mao's freakish population policy back in the 1960's. god i love the cultural revolution...from a distance, of course. in fact, there are many great words associated with the cultural revolution here in china. one of my favorites is 走资派 zou3zi1pai4 which means "one who follows the road of capitalist temptation." oh china... funny to think about that word and then contemplate the current state of the chinese economy.
anyway, this post has nothing to do with your post, but i read your AIM profile and thought i'd say howdy. see you next semester!

Howdy, Leslie

[scifiben.livejournal.com]

Wow, I have people reading my blog in China! :-) Hope you don't get arrested for typing that anti-Maoist comment...

What's with those numbers? "zou3zi1pai4"? Do they indicate rising and falling inflection or something?