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LPF Week 17 - Salad Days
Mar. 8th, 2019 04:35 pmI think that most people can point to a specific incident in their lives that marked the end of their innocent youth. Maybe a beloved childhood toy came to life and ate one of their siblings. Maybe they experienced the joy of their first great love, only to have that love turn out to be exploiting their relationship in order to gain access to nuclear launch codes. Or maybe it was the moment that an evil space eel attached itself to their spine.
These sorts of stories are commonplace, and will likely remain so through the ages. Oh, certainly the details may change, but the essence will remain the same. Perhaps we will finally achieve nuclear deproliferation some day, but then our first great loves will betray us for some other classified information instead. Maybe we'll finally vanquish the evil space eels, but then some other malevolent alien entities will hijack our central nervous systems and turn us into their puppets.
Youth will forever remain the time in which we learn our most important life lessons through our mistakes. We learn not to brag about our security clearance on social media, or not to leave our little brother alone with that possessed stuffed tiger that crazy old uncle Silas gave us. True, many of these are mistakes that it would be hard to repeat, since we only had the one little brother, and it's hard to get another security clearance after foreign agents use your passcode to gain access to the secret government facility where they had the evil space eels imprisoned. But hopefully we learn enough to avoid other, similar mistakes.
Even these darkest moments in our lives can lead to some good. Sure, you infected the moon with self-replicating nanomachines, and that's pretty bad. On the other hand, now that the moon is a featureless perfect sphere of shiny nanomachines it reflects light a bit better, and we have more moonlight. Pretty!
So I encourage all young people to take chances and not be afraid to live their lives. Maybe that ancient tome of forbidden knowledge will turn out to have a great story and fun characters, but you'll never know if you don't try reading it. Maybe the artificial intelligence you create and give access to the internet will just learn to be a great conversationalist. Maybe uplifted sentient mutant bears will enjoy being used as a source of free manual labor. Maybe the idol isn't cursed. Maybe you can outwit the devil. You won't know until you try.
But seriously, I'm sorry about the evil space eels.
These sorts of stories are commonplace, and will likely remain so through the ages. Oh, certainly the details may change, but the essence will remain the same. Perhaps we will finally achieve nuclear deproliferation some day, but then our first great loves will betray us for some other classified information instead. Maybe we'll finally vanquish the evil space eels, but then some other malevolent alien entities will hijack our central nervous systems and turn us into their puppets.
Youth will forever remain the time in which we learn our most important life lessons through our mistakes. We learn not to brag about our security clearance on social media, or not to leave our little brother alone with that possessed stuffed tiger that crazy old uncle Silas gave us. True, many of these are mistakes that it would be hard to repeat, since we only had the one little brother, and it's hard to get another security clearance after foreign agents use your passcode to gain access to the secret government facility where they had the evil space eels imprisoned. But hopefully we learn enough to avoid other, similar mistakes.
Even these darkest moments in our lives can lead to some good. Sure, you infected the moon with self-replicating nanomachines, and that's pretty bad. On the other hand, now that the moon is a featureless perfect sphere of shiny nanomachines it reflects light a bit better, and we have more moonlight. Pretty!
So I encourage all young people to take chances and not be afraid to live their lives. Maybe that ancient tome of forbidden knowledge will turn out to have a great story and fun characters, but you'll never know if you don't try reading it. Maybe the artificial intelligence you create and give access to the internet will just learn to be a great conversationalist. Maybe uplifted sentient mutant bears will enjoy being used as a source of free manual labor. Maybe the idol isn't cursed. Maybe you can outwit the devil. You won't know until you try.
But seriously, I'm sorry about the evil space eels.
