Thursday, November 10, 2005
Balance
In The Deadly Mantis (1957), the creature is flying over Northern New Jersey while the Air Force is trying to shoot it down. Some of the rockets fired miss their target. Then one of the pilots has to eject himself before his jet collides with the mantis and crashes to the ground below. I wonder what the people in Jersey would think about these carryings-on. I doubt they would like it very much: an out of control jet plane perhaps smashing into some Italian neighborhood; errant rockets exploding who knows where? I know they had this monster flying over their rooftops, but please! Sometimes the cure can be worse than the problem to begin with. Talk about friendly fire. And World War II hadn’t been over that long. I bet the guys at the VFW would have a thing or two to say over their beers about the military action going on in the skies above their families’ heads, endangering their children and their homes.
The opening line of The Deadly Mantis is "For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction." I remember this principle from my childhood, when science was even presented in the cartoons I watched. It’s Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Science was so full of promise in the 1950s. They all talked optimistically about the year 2000. That seemed so far away then. And of course there was no Silent Spring, no Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Challenger disasters yet; just dreams and promises. Things have not turned out exactly as I expected, and I guess I am a little disappointed. Farmers today have planted many transgenic crops. Scientists have made many monsters. Where is the equal but opposite reaction that should occur in response to these actions? What would it be like if it did occur? Have we grown so clever in breaking the laws of nature that they no longer apply to us? I doubt it. If the consequences of genetic engineering have not become evident yet, they will, sooner or later.
2001
The opening line of The Deadly Mantis is "For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction." I remember this principle from my childhood, when science was even presented in the cartoons I watched. It’s Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Science was so full of promise in the 1950s. They all talked optimistically about the year 2000. That seemed so far away then. And of course there was no Silent Spring, no Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Challenger disasters yet; just dreams and promises. Things have not turned out exactly as I expected, and I guess I am a little disappointed. Farmers today have planted many transgenic crops. Scientists have made many monsters. Where is the equal but opposite reaction that should occur in response to these actions? What would it be like if it did occur? Have we grown so clever in breaking the laws of nature that they no longer apply to us? I doubt it. If the consequences of genetic engineering have not become evident yet, they will, sooner or later.
2001
