It's Made from People!

[Brother Ragnarok]

The problem with eating people, as presented in Lucifer's Hammer (excellent book for those not familiar, check it out), is that eating ourselves is a major disease vector because we're all susceptible to the germs we're all susceptible too.  You'd have to cook the hell out of that meat.
If those meddling science jerks brought an alien back to Earth, it would wipe out the whole human race.  Think about what happened to the shake 'n' bake colony on LV246.
And John Hammond didn't get any jail time in Jurassic Park because he was eaten by a pack of compsygnathus.

Brother R

[JohnL]

>You'd have to cook the hell out of that meat.

Or irradiate it.

It's strange that this was posted, because I was actually thinking of posting something similar about The Matrix.

We're automatically supposed to side with neo and the rebels because being used by machines is wrong, but is the Matrix such a bad thing? Ok, maybe it's not so great as-is, but what if users could customize their own personal part of the Matrix to whatever they wanted? In the first movie, agent Smith tells Morpheus that people weren't fooled by the first version of the Matrix because it was too perfect, but that's only because they were TRYING to fool them and people started wondering what was wrong with 'reality'. What if they simply told the people, "You're in a computer simulation, you have the power to change your world and make it anything you like."? Then you would have no disease, no crippling injuries, no need to work unless you wanted to, and the machines would take care of you. When you think about it, the Matrix is an act of consideration by the machines, since they could just give everyone a lobotomy leaving them brain dead but alive.

What are Neo and the others going to wake people up to? Ruined cities, starvation, disease...

If the machines had just offered to hook people up to a system where they could have the equivalent of the Star Trek holodeck 24 hours a day for the rest of their lives, I think they would have had more volunteers than they knew what to do with.

[Conrad]

Apropos The Matrix, I'd nominate the Keanu Reeves character in "Speed".  He causes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage when a paltry few million would have paid off the ransom and saved the city from raising taxes by 1000% to repair things.

And don't get me started on John Cusack's character in "Con Air" ...

[Neville]

What about Ahnold in "Collateral damage"? Just because he needs t ohave revenge he causes the deaths of the character by John Leguizamo, then causes a whole colombian village to be bombed, and ends up causing the deaths of a couple FBI agents and security guards in the third act of the movie. And is he sent to jail? No! He is even allowed to keep the terrorists' child!

About the eating humans part, I am with Paquita. I mean, not the whole human-farm stuff, but the fact that I wouldn't think twice about eating a human entrecote if the alternative was starvation. After all, its just meat.

[AndyC]

Yeah, apart from the rioters scooped up by the trucks, everyone eaten in Soylent Green either died of natural causes or voluntary euthanasia. No murder or people farming there. Small comfort, I know, but we are talking about extreme circumstances.

Funny, I had thought about the disease factor myself (Niven is one of my favourite authors). I suppose whatever is required to reduce a human body to little green wafers will probably kill anything in it. I do kind of wonder whether, with people eating people who ate people, and no balance in the diet, whether the nutritional value and health of the population would gradually decline. Consider also that the calories are being burned, but there are few crops to store the sun's energy in new food.

Of course, that brings us to the question of whether the system in Soylent Green is sustainable. Definitely not. I think they're just prolonging the inevitable at that point. That's what is really horrifying about the ending - things are beyond repair, and extinction (or at least the collapse of civilization) is just around the corner.

[Brother Ragnarok]

Yeah, eventually they're either going to have to start breeding human foodstock, or just go extinct.  That movie was really depressing.  They did dystopia right.

Brother R