I don’t generally have too much patience for idiocy, and the hype surrounding the new movie “Avatar” is getting to be just that. Apparently people are considering suicide because they discover that the moon “Pandora” upon which the movie is set… doesn’t actually exist.
The cultural pull of works of fiction these days just astounds me – it’s not the movies’ faults (even though I’m no fan of James Cameron), it’s the impressionable idiots that go watch them.
But look out, there’s a chance we might just find a world out there just like it. At which point people who feel like it could go live in idyllic tranquility! Huzzah! Yeah, that’s a bit overly-optimistic of human nature. If you’ve ever shown any laziness tendencies, you will not survive on such a world.
Let’s just completely disregard the fact that the fictitious moon is set in the Alpha Centauri system, our closest celestial neighbor (I think? I could be wrong on that) which just happens to be about ~4 lightyears away. That means even if we perfect that pesky little detail of near-light-speed travel, it’ll still take four years to get there. That’s not exactly “look in the phone book for long distance movers, and then start booking flights” kind of distance.
It’s more or less probably never going to happen in any lifetime the majority of us will be remembered in, so it’s a waste of time even pondering it. Even if we could reach out to other hospitable worlds – should we really subject the poor place to our parasitic tendencies? The dream of working hard to live the good life is about the only thing keeping us from devolving into complete anarchy (well that and massive military power) and then we’d never get anything done.
But hey, if that’s enough to make you depressed enough to want to off yourself, I say go for it. Because dog knows we don’t want impressionable idiots like you breeding.