Trash Mountain
Immortal Garbage
Hydras do not know how to die. It’s only a matter of time before someone figures out how to splice their genes into ours. Hydra-Man will be the first real superhero. A bona fide X-Man (X-Them) whose superpower… in keeping with the times… is that they can reproduce asexually.
It is clear that the privileged few that survive the sixth extinction will develop new life extending technologies. People will live active lives for 150 to 200 years or more. I do suspect this will be a hit and miss proposition for the first few years. Humans are more complex than hydras (Don’t call me a ablest!). I can imagine when they test this technology on a billionaire explorer like Elon Musk there is a good chance that he develops an immortal cancer and there will be a great debate as to whether they should kill the cancer monster or let it live because it is an improvement.
The question is whether people, given an extra fifty to a hundred years, would be any better?
There is the idea that with age comes wisdom. It stands to reason. I don’t do a lot of the dumb shit I did in high school. Most folks only piss on an electric fence once. So maybe, with all those extra decades of learning and experience people will become incredibly wise. Maybe their experience will help guide us past whatever new cataclysms we face. We could find ourselves in a new glorious age guided by the Ancient Ones.
Then there is the proposition posed by the visionaries Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi. The vampires in What We Do in the Shadows manage to remain morons in spite of centuries of lived experience.
This seems more likely. An obvious example would be the 75 year old toddler who was elected President in 2016. There are plenty of old folks glued to Fox News right now tuning in for the wisdom of Tucker Carlson. Not to be ageist but a lot of old people are ignorant and selfish assholes. Experience alone doesn’t seem to cut it.
If I were to guess, I would say the missing component is questions. Most assholes don’t question anything. They don’t question Tucker Carlson because they like what he says. The only thing worse than being an asshole is being wrong. Trump never questions anything. The only answer he ever needed was money and in America money allows you to be wrong about everything.
I was wrong about most things when I was a kid. I did research before Google. I asked a lot of questions. I like to wonder about things. I am curious. I like to understand things as they really are. It comes in handy especially if you’re trying to survive in America without the benefit of a lot of money. If I live another century I would probably know even more shit about how the world works. I can tell you one thing I would know is to not be in such a goddamn hurry all the time.
Maybe Freud was right. Some people are anal-retentive. He just got the wording wrong. Asshole-retentive seems a better term. I’m not sure if it has anything to do with potty training but these folks clearly have shit for brains. I suspect it’s more genetic. Some folks aren’t into wonder. Maybe there is a gene for that, too. You could probably find it in a hydra. They do not appear to be interested in anything.
We are entering an age of super-humans. There is a lot of speculation as to where that goes. Some imagine a world divided between a privileged elite with a myriad of biological enhancements and a lowly servant class of natural hominids. This is already happening to some extent. The professional class can afford to raise their kids with great nutrition, send them to great schools, and protect them from most of the harms in this world. Poor people have to slug it out in the increasingly toxic backwaters. Of course, the rich kids outperform the poor kids. They get college degrees and great jobs but they are not necessarily wiser. A lot of them are total assholes. This pretty much spoils utopian visions like we see in Star Trek.
This always bothered me about humans. Folks have charted paths to wisdom and ethics thousands of years ago. Still, we do all the things the prophets and sages said we shouldn’t do. We kill each other over bullshit. We live these selfish and narcissistic lives. We even quote the great prophets as we fuck each other over. We don’t ask questions but we are convinced we are never wrong. For all the centuries we have been around all we have to show for it is a bunch of landfills in a dying a world. That may be all that’s left. Perhaps, in a million years some new “intelligent” being will discover the remains of human civilization.
Garbage. Shit tons of garbage.
