[extropy-chat] category 6

Adrian Tymes wingcat at pacbell.net
Mon Nov 15 07:03:50 UTC 2004


--- Spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Is it just that
> the
> OJ Simpson trial sold so many papers that the news
> people needed something like that again?

That pretty much seems to be it, as far as I can tell.

> Secondly, we know that there are arbitrarily many
> formulaic global warming disaster movies coming out 
> on a regular basis.  There is one playing in the 
> background right now: Category 6, Day of
> Destruction.  
> Lots of wind, stuff getting wrecked.

Lots of bad science.  For instance, a major energy
company using computer security so weak that, in
reality, not even the most sleazy shoestring energy
company would dare try cutting corners like that.
Also see wind turbines right next to freeways.  (In
California at least, and maybe elsewhere, terrain that
is optimal for wind turbines - ridgelines and the like
- is suboptimal for roads of any kind.  Turbines are
thus naturally best placed far away from any roads,
with manual access so infrequent that it makes more
sense to drive up to them with offroad vehicles than
to build and maintain access roads that go within a
tower's length of the towers.)  And so forth.

> My questions
> are: 
> how did the formula come to include a rebellious
> teenager and a father trying to cope?

Just a guess, but - in times of disaster, respect for
competent, organized authority can increase your and
others' chances for survival.  Parents are an iconic
authority figure, and action hero type stuff (like a
rescue worker's job) was stereotypically masculine.
("Was", because one sees an increasing number of
female action heroes these days.)

> Why are
> all bosses on those movies total jerks?  Most bosses
> I know are decent types.

Stereotypes, again.  Incompetent authorities are
another cause of lowered survival rates in times of
crisis - and thus, contribute to drama (sometimes at
the expense of plausibility, if taken to the extreme).

> Is there any limit to
> how fast they can depict global climate change in
> order to create drama?  We saw a decade, then a
> year,
> now a week.  Can they depict climate change in a
> day?
> How about a minute?  Can we have global warming
> occur
> in a few seconds?  What is the actual limit, as we
> allow silliness to approach infinity?

Remember the Genesis Device from one of the early Star
Trek movies?  That completely terraformed a planet in
a matter of minutes, IIRC.  Similar "warnings" about
science gone wrong (say, green goo designed to fix the
environment but inevitably going horribly wrong) could
be packaged as transforming the Earth in even less
time.  Remember that it only takes a second or so for
a signal to travel around the world - and that's using
our computer networks, not taking the orbital path or
going straight through the Earth.



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