Stop the ride, I want to get off.

Ok, I just got up, and I already feel like killing somebody.

Why? Because I’ve overdosed on ‘dumb’ within minutes of waking up.

Let me be absolutely clear on the following point. Within a few hundred years the human race is going to be extinct. It’s just that simple. Four or five hundred years from now, humans just won’t exist. This won’t be because of global warming or some natural disaster, but because people are constantly getting dumber.

Within a few generations people will be setting themselves on fire or jumping off buildings to see if it hurts.

So what spawned this post?

Well, I’ll tell you:

I got up, made myself some coffee, and sat down at the computer for a bit of light websurfing while I waited for Sunny to wake up. I pressed the ‘stumble’ button on my toolbar and landed on a webpage hosting a video called “The most important photograph ever taken”.

It was about a picture of our nearest neighbor galaxy taken by the Hubble space telescope. The idea is that the picture showed us how small we are in relation to the universe and how trivial and nonsensical our fighting with each other is, when we consider just how insignificant we are in such a huge universe.

I liked it, it was a nice way to start my day…a little philosophy mixed with science.

Then I made the mistake of looking at the comments. Here are the first few, cut and pasted exactly as they appear.

Posted by: Renegade on Nov 29, 2006 @ 01:25:25 pm

SCREW the UNIVERS !!! Anybody wanna join me in my quest of screwing the univers ??

In a word…no. Learn to spell ‘universe’ before you attempt to screw it, and congrats on completely and totally missing the point of the video.

Posted by: tempo on Nov 29, 2006 @ 05:14:16 pm

MAN! I HOPE THAT IN MY LIFE TIME WE GET TO SEE CIVILIZATION ON OTHER PLANETS I COULD IMAGINE A RACE MUCH SMARTER THAN OURS AND SEEING US LIKE WE SEE FISH OR HAMSTERS THEY WOULD PROBABLY USE US FOR SLAVE LABOR OR JUST EAT US

First of all, is your caps key stuck down? Secondly, thank you for the total lack of punctuation, other than that first exclamation point. After I deciphered your comment, I would say I used to agree with you. Sadly, after reading your comment I have to say that if a whole new civilization did contact us, I’d be ashamed to admit I was the same species as you. Oh, and by the way, everyone you meet already sees you as the intellectual equivalent of a fish or hamster.

Posted by: justice on Nov 29, 2006 @ 06:06:07 pm

hopefully used as there sex slaves,,,,lol ,JUST KIDDING

Used as where sex slaves? Oh, you mean ‘their’. I don’t think that would happen, with intelligence as low as yours (and your really dumb sense of humor) I imagine they wouldn’t want to pollute their gene pool. In fact, can you remove yourself from ours?

Posted by: sally anne on Mar 26, 2007 @ 07:33:32 pm

I just wanna know one thing..think of that first spiral galaxy...however far away it is.. then think of the second...it's much much further than the first.. so why is it that we cannot zoom in on these planets to see whats going on?

Ugh, I don’t even know how to begin to respond to this. Maybe they use magic telescopes that can somehow bring an object the size of a planet into sharp focus at distances that are hundreds of light years across. See if you can get this…a galaxy is trillions of trillions of miles across (bigger actually, I just don’t want to type ‘trillions’ over and over again). A planet is a few thousand. Your question is like saying “I can see the moon without a telescope, so why can’t I see the astronaut’s footprints?”

Oh, and that ‘first’ galaxy? That’s the one you’re currently living in, you shmuck.

Anyone else think we’ve stopped being the ‘Human Race’ and become the “Human try to race, but forget how to tie our shoelaces and fall down before we pass the starting post”?

Oh, and it’s fairly obvious that someone forgot to put the chlorine in the gene pool and took a gigantic dump in it.