The Age of Stupid: We Decide How Long We Live

           “We could have saved ourselves.”

           We could have, but we didn’t.

           “What state of mind were we in, to face extinction and simply shrug it up?”

         Pure stupidity. We were just plain stupid, that’s all. What else could it have been?



The red area might go underwater
 if global warming continues.

           What kind of creatures are we humans to be facing such a big danger, called global warming, and not be so alarmed? How can we call ourselves ‘intelligent’ when we’re so insensible about something that can kill us all in the long run?


           Concerned people have been trying to warn the general public and make them do something to stop, or at least slow down, the ever-increasing effects of global warming. They’ve held campaigns, made speeches, and showed documentaries. There have been movies depicting the expected consequences of global warming, such as The Day After Tomorrow (trailer).

            The Age of Stupid is one of the results of those efforts. It takes on a unique perspective of an archivist from 2055 looking back on our actions around 2010—how global warming started affecting our lives, and what we could have done about it. The majority of the film is composed of several separate clips of ordinary people just like us, all related to global warming in some way. It is this factor—the unique plot—that makes this film stand out, and not be another typical, boring documentary full of monotonous narration with some statistics thrown in. This feature also strengthens the film’s appeal on the viewer’s emotions—the pathos. Showing these clips of people just like us makes the viewers sympathize with these people, and lets them realize that all these stuff about global warming aren’t something distant. These things could happen to us any moment; it will if we don’t do anything about it.

            Recently, there have been many signs of unusual changes in the earth’s environment. For a start, there was Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans, La., in 2005 and was recorded as one of the five worst hurricanes in the U.S. history. The residents of New Orleans, including Al Duvernay in the movie, lost everything—their houses and all their belongings—because of it. They had to reconstruct the whole city.

The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina

          
           The melting of glaciers is another big environmental problem. There has been constant news on how much ice in the North and the South Pole has melted, and how much the sea level will rise as a result. Fernand Pareau, having worked as a mountain guide in the Alps for over 50 years, witnessed the melting himself—he noticed that as time passed, summers got hotter, and the amount of ice on the mountain summits decreased gradually as a result.



"STOP THE SPIN"
Guys' neighbors protesting against wind farms

           But it isn't easy to stop these phenomena. The clip about Piers and Lisa Guy, married environmental activists, portrays the clash between the couple and their neighbors on whether to construct a wind farm or not. Here, Piers Guy sadly admits that although “UK-wide, surveys point to about seventy to eighty percent in favor of wind farms as a concept, [when] you get one in your own doorstep, [people display] Not-in-My-Backyard Syndrome. […] The ultimate thing is that they don’t want to spoil the view.” This clearly shows the duplicity of the general public. From all the warnings, we know by heart that we should save energy, emit less carbon dioxide, and use alternative energy as much as possible. However, when it comes down to ourselves, we usually are reluctant to do these. We just don’t want to lose the convenience, the stability that the current usage of energy provides us with. Yes, we know something should be done for the mankind to prosper, but if doing it is going to do us any harm in any way, never mind, we won’t do it.

           We must get out of this kind of mindset. If the climate keeps changing because of us, well, we’re not talking about having new small inconveniences in our lives here. We’re talking about the extinction of the whole humankind, the destruction of our own planet. Now, who are the stupid ones, people like the Guys trying to save our planet or the majority of us who don’t really care about our planet for our own individual comfort? Yes, there you go. We’re living in the age of stupid.

           “I just find it surprising that after so much effort, the final act of our existence should be suicide,” the archivist regrets. In 2055, yes, it would be too late to restore everything to its original condition.

           But how about us? Mark Lynas, the author of High Tide: The Truth about Our Climate Crisis, says if we start cutting off our use of energy before 2015, we can prevent global warming from destroying our planet.

           It’s not too late. Yet.
           
           Act now.

English Conversation_Aliens?

The Great Pyramids. The Mayans. The Aztecs. The Nazca Lines. Atlantis.

How could they build those amazing, gigantic structures such a long time ago?

Do you really think the ancient Egyptians moved around carrying stone blocks weighing well over 70 tons?

Do you really think the Mayans created such an exact calendar, and then disappeared all of a sudden for no apparent reason?

Do you really think ancient people could have drawn big pictures on the ground with such accuracy, when there was no way of flying above the ground?

Weird, huh?

Maybe, just maybe, aliens did this stuff. Maybe they helped develop the ancient civilizations.

Or, maybe it really was a highly developed human technology; maybe it's just us that can't figure out how they got there.

So.. What do you think?