Harvey

I stayed home sick from work today. Luckily, I recently got some new DVD's to help wile away the hours. Although I did catch some of the new Let's Make a Deal and The Price is Right. But there was no way I could sit through another judge so-and-so or a soap opera.

Anyway, one of the movies I put in was Harvey, starring Jimmy Stewart. I have to say that in many ways Elwood P Dowd is my hero. One line that has always stuck with me, ever since the first time I watched the movie was about advice that Elwood got from his mother:

'Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.' -- Elwood P Dowd (Harvey 1950).

Of course, it is really the entire character that I enjoyed. Perhaps its the naivete that gets to me, the simple natured man who won't see the bad in people. Someone who goes through life being friendly to strangers.

In a former life I collected quotes, that is to say I used to, but have fallen out of the habit. Another quote from Harvey that I found very interesting is when he is explaining what he does. He and Harvey sit at the bar and talk to people:

They tell about the big terrible things they've done and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar.

Of course, there is a lot of philosophy to be found at the bottom of a whiskey glass.

2012

This weekend I went to see the movie 2012. It was definitely a disaster movie, with just about every cliche including ones not typically found in disaster movies. I'm not writing here to review the movie however, so much as to wax philosophical about one of the themes of the movie, namely: who gets a ticket to survive the disaster.

In the movie 2012, there were seemingly three types of people who made it onto the "ships": billionaires, genetically selected people, and politicians/military. The billionaires bought their way on the ship for a billion Euros, the politicians are politicians who need bully boys, and then there is the carefully selected by scientists types...

First off, why even allow billionaires? The world is getting obliterated and they won't have any money. Also they are very unlikely to have any skills that would be necessary to rebuilt society. Sure, their money would come in handy to actually build the ships, but after that they would become dead weight.

The politicians are marginally more acceptable, because there does need to be an organizational structure in place for the days after the end of the world as we know it. Although I know the politicians that would end up being selected would be the absolute worst of the bunch, so everyone would be better off without them.

In the same category as the politicians I put the military. They fall into the bucket because they are government. They also represent structure. They are probably the most obvious group to have represented because the "survival" and "engineering" experts could be cherry picked from across the military. Such selection process is very easy to do without drawing attention to the fact that the world is coming to an end.

The final group in the movie were those that were screened genetically to ensure the survival of the species. What a bunch of boloney. That is important when you only get to take say 20 people and have to repopulate the world. When you have thousands, or hundreds of thousands there is enough genetic diversity that inbreeding is not an issue. If they had said people were screened for hereditary diseases, that would make more sense, but it would only eliminate a small portion of the population. If you excluded people with family histories, you can still narrow it down, but would have billions of people to choose from.

So who would I pick? It is tempting to follow the path of eugenics: select people who are the smartest and strongest/healthiest. However, while that would be good for the long term advancement of humanity, it would do little to help in the first decade or two. In those days it is most important to have the correct job skills and the correct personalities.

The personalities of the people who are saved is very important. They have to be hard workers, optimists, and morally upright people. When there aren't a lot of people you can't have people who don't pull their weight, or people who leech of society. Of course, the real question is how to select people by personality type...

As for job skills, there are a number that are obvious: craftsmen and doctors. Someone has to build the new world, and take care of the people in it. Throw in some engineers, and chemists, biologists (zoologists/botanists), and of course farmers/ranchers. Some of these occupations are things that most anyone can learn given some time, but it would be important to have a number of experts in the various fields. So everyone should learn some crafts and farming, but experts are still needed.

But there are a number of less obvious occupations as well. Teachers will be very important, as will librarians and people who know how to access and disburse knowledge and information. With all the time and effort being spent to simply survive the fall of society, it will be incredibly easy to lose the knowledge. Sure, the information will be preserved by some media, but it is important to know the information is there to be accessed. It is also important to keep the knowledge "living" because it is easier to pass on information from person to person than to rediscover the knowledge buried somewhere.

The final thing I would touch on is the age and gender distribution. Obviously to repopulate the earth you want a large percentage of the people who survive to be of childbearing age or younger. But just because someone is too old to have children doesn't mean they can't be useful to a post-apocalypse society. There is the knowledge base that is so important, and with age comes wisdom. So the elder members of the saved group would need to be chosen more for their expertise than anything else, and the youth more for their health and predicted capabilities. The exact distribution should also be chosen based on predictions of how quickly food supplies with regrow. It would be terrible to have tons of babies being born and toddlers running around without food. Also children take time to contribute to society, so in the first few years they are a drain (although psychologically they would be very important!).

Finally gender distribution. It would be easy to say, "save more women" because the women are what would ultimately determine how quickly the world it repopulated. But that would really only be an issue with a very small group of survivors. With a large group of survivors that becomes less important because there isn't a rush to preserve the species. In those cases the provider/nurturer pairing becomes important. Also, men on average have advantages in strength and stamina which would be important in a building society.

Anyway, I could go on and on. It wouldn't be an easy thing to decide and the practical considerations are monumental. How to keep it secret so there isn't mass rioting and anarchy? How do you convince people to contribute to the building/preservation who aren't going to get a ticket? [Stepping out of character for a moment, remember the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy throws the Nazi out of the zeppelin and says, "No Ticket!"]