Your brain is trying to kill you

Attention fellow meatbags, your brain is trying to murder your success. Yes, that two pounds of gray matter inside your head that allows you to be you is trying to kill you. How? Why? You and your brain have different priorities. Why?

Evolution.

Survival of the fittest is a lie. We live in a world that is all about survival of the good enough. Passing is passing. Your brain only wants you to live long enough to reproduce, and raise your kids. That is it. It may sound mediocre, but it is good enough. Nothing else. It takes a long time for evolution to take place. The human brain floating around your skull was built for roaming around plains and scavenging wild berries. Your brain has not evolved to want to be wealthy and/ or successful. The brain was built for survival in a world that no longer exists. Humanity has changed its environment quicker than it can adapt.

A lot of modern day trouble can be traced back to that one fact. The human brain has to navigate this flashy, modern world with a brain that was not designed to do this optimally. Since the brain just is not optimized for modern life, it makes questionable choices sometimes. The brain is generally more conservative than it needs. Journeying over to that area of the woods may get you killed. There are a lot of animals that eat can people. There are even more things that can hurt people. A small cut can lead to a major life threatening illness. Starting a new business on the other hand may not, but sometimes the brain can experience the same fear in each situations. Your brain on the other hand may get those two things confused. A prehistoric brain trying to work in a modern era.

What is the most common fear? Fear of public speaking. Humans work well in groups. A lone human has a much more harder time surviving. If you said the wrong thing in front of your tribe, they could abandon you, or just simply harm you. One man can rarely fight twenty and survive unharmed.

It made sense. Now the likelihood that a crowd mobs you a bit smaller. We fear snakes, the dark, and public speaking, but guns, electricity, and global warming are okay. Think about global warming the potential to destroy our entire race. Think about that and feel the fear. It is non existent.

Fear does not equal danger.

People are afraid of random stuff. Sometimes people do not do things because of that. That is not living life to your full potential. Do not allow your ancient brain to hold you back.

Global warming can do.

Teleportation or assisted suicide

 A common staple of the science fiction genre is the teleporting device. This device may run on different kinds of made up science in each world, but the basics are the same. An object is disassembled in one place then appears in another place through science.

You may think a teleporter should send particles to the other machine to be reassembled. This does not seem too cost efficient in my opinion. A much more logical approach would be to scan in object in one machine. Then another machine would used this data to create and reassemble particles in the shape of the thing being transported. Does this sound good to you? No. I was not asking you sir.

Well, my smart reader you may realize this poses an ethical dilemma. In the creation of the logical teleporter. The original object would be destroyed. A person getting transported would be killed. In his place, there would be an exact clone. No one would be able to tell the difference

I can imagine multiple colorful uses for this technology. You want to die without depriving your friends and family of your wonderful company. Just step into the teleporter and brace yourself. Your life is over and a complete different person can finish your life for you.

Annoying Hollywood trends :Time Travel

Time travel has been a popular plot device in science fiction movies for a while now. Protagonists for centuries have tried to get a second chance at life.  It is almost as if humans are obsessed with changing destiny, however, time travel when used as a story telling device almost never turns out well.

One reason for this is because time travel is an inherently complex concept. This in turn can make movies overly complicated. In the movie Project Almanac a hero erases himself from history by causing a time paradox. Directly after this one of the first scene from the movie is replayed, the protagonist finds a second video camera along with the original the details the adventure before the paradox. This makes no sense logically. The new camera should have disappeared along with our protagonist. Knowing this makes it much harder for readers to suspend disbelieve.  This could ruin the movie for some people.

Traveling into the future may seem to be a way to avoid paradoxes and the such. This however creates more problems. The future being a place that can be traveled to mean the it is set in stone. The ability to travel forward time means there is no free will. Every decision made by everyone has been predetermined. That thought ruins the suspense.

 It may be felt that this headache may be avoided by using the multiverse theory. This states that there are a infinite number of universes in an infinite number of configurations. This would make time travel simple traveling to another universe that is in a similar state to the past. Paradoxes would not be a problem due the fact it is not actually the past. There is one flaw to using this as a device. You could not change your own world in anyway by traveling through time. There would be no point. A pointless adventure rarely makes a good story.

All in all time travel as a science fiction plot device should be avoided in my own opinion. It can be done well, but it has a high possibility of failing. A good author knows what he can do well, and he should not let people like me tell him what to do.