Pinkocalypse

COMING SOON

What you will need:
A copy of Savage Worlds, just the core book.
A Base book character.
A Character Concept.

Concept Limitations: Someone from 1800 to 2015,
which is pre WW3.

Send Pre-Chars and Concepts to:
PinkTGShowtime@gmail.com


Here's the big question about cryonics, I think:

Let's say cryonics works. Fifty or a hundred, or a thousand years in the future, they can thaw out anyone who has been cryogenically preserved, fix whatever is wrong with them - be it cancer, old age, or decapitation (some people just get their heads frozen, saves on cost) - and bring such people back to life.

Why would they bother? After the first guy they revive, to talk about the past, about our time I mean. After his novelty wears off. After cold, old people from the past aren't interesting anymore, and can't sell life-story books, and aren't bookable on the hyper-wave 5D subspace chat-shows of the far future?

Think about it. Hundreds, perhaps thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands - of people frozen in the past. Unskilled labor, don't know crap about the world, have no idea how superteledildonicnanotechnobabbletronics works, have to be trained like children just to operate even a simple technobabblizer without disintegrating themselves... a drain on resources, useless, bothersome old people from the past. People with really unpopular ideas and ancient narrowmindedness and ancient bigotries - or a lack of the proper, current, future-time bigotries that are considered right and true.

Whatever the case, popsicle people are going to be completely, utterly useless to the future. Once that lucky lottery-winner has had his fun talking about the past, I mean. One guy will definitely clean up as a novelty act. His book will keep him in future-stuff for life.

But for everyone else, you will be, at best, an institutionalized burden. Why bring you back at all? Who wants to pay for that, plus all the rehabilitation, medical treatment, and life-long care, if needed?

Consider this problem in modern terms: we find a man from (pick your time period) in the past, frozen in whatever, and we bring him back. Great, the first one is a novelty. Mr. 1400's is hilarious, scary and interesting. He writes a book, everyone loves him despite his narrow views and scary religion and terrible personal habits.

Now, what if we could bring back 100,000 people from The Year Of Our Lord 1433? Think about it.

Or even 100,000 people from every year starting at 1400, all the way to 1800? Who would pay for that? Who would want that?

Who takes care of them? Who tries to train them how to live in 2009? Who explains to them that their religion is stupid, and that microwave ovens are not satanic magic? Who trains them not to beat animals with boards for fun because it is now somehow 'wrong'? Where do you put these people when they refuse -or simply fail- to adapt to our modern morals, ethics and worldview?

Who wants to pony up extra taxes for that? Again, why bring them back en masse? It would be stupid. It would make no sense.

We already have nearly seven billion people, most of them poor and ignorant already. Why bring back to life a huge number of ignorant cusses from ancient history? I mean, after the novelty has worn off (the first guy from a given era?)

At best, the reason would likely have to be something like slavery, or for spare parts. As part of a scheme to get around the law - maybe because popsicles are considered not to be people anymore by reason of having died already. Or somesuch.

One thing is NOT going to change in a thousand years, and that is the selfishness and self-interest of people. I don't care how brilliant you were in your own age, in a future time you are just one more mouth that no longer has relevancy anymore. They are NOT going to resurrect you.

Examine really famous people from history in this light: what if we could bring back Thomas Savery, the man who first patented a steam engine in 1698? Brilliant man, sure. Genius. Made history. Do you want to pay to take care of him? Do you want to explain to him that beating women with wooden rods isn't allowed anymore, or that bathing is expected now? You have a job for him? Yes, he made a very crude steam engine for a coal mine, but... now what? He is going to take a few decades just to get up to some sense of our world, much less electric, gasoline, and diesel engine technology.

I'll tell you where Thomas Savery will end up. Sorting trash at the recycling center next to all the Down's Syndrome folks. He'll go home to a crappy flat where the television will still frighten him, and he will be evicted for his insistence on hanging fresh meat on hooks -for days- by his door to 'ripen'. "It's the proper way!". No, not anymore. Final end: institution. For his own good.

This is why I did not spend my 20,000 dollars that I once had from my Happy Puppy days on a cryonics ticket. Instead I helped Sandi build a house which we sold. At a loss, sadly. The housing bubble and all. But I didn't waste it on a date with a can of liquid nitrogen for a very rational reason:

No one is going to ever revive you in the future. Not on average. Not statistically. One or three people will win the lottery. That's it.

Cryonics seems to me to be a new kind of religious afterlife for the desperate atheist. Just have faith that you might live again in a better future.

No. That is not going to happen. Why? Because people are people. They are human even in that precious future. And they have their now, their lives, their poor and indigent to worry about, and that does not include you, the homeless hobo from the past.

If you want to have an atheist afterlife, I suggest a much more rational hope is that we are all living in a vast SIMs-like ancestor simulation, and if you are interesting enough, your data might just be saved off for use in other games and simulations. Provided we aren't being covered by some draconian post-Singularity copyright act, of course. Which we probably are.

See you in data heaven, where all the deleted programs go when they die.

Because nobody will be seeing you unfrozen in the future.

It's only reasonable, really.

Sadly.