Edge Question: What are You Optimistic About?

Every year Edge sends out a question to all the world’s greatest minds. This year, the question was “What are You Optimistic About?, somehow, my invitation to answer the question got lost in the mail, and Edge forgot to post the response I so helpfully e-mailed them, so I guess I’ll just post it here for you to enjoy:

Ahem.

I am optimistic that the Baby Boomers will all die off before stem cell therapies, nanobots, and Star Trekesque medical advances extend average human lifespans beyond a century in length.

Seriously. As we age, we lose our placticity of mind (depending on how much you exercise and keep mentally active), and we become set in our ways. Baby Boomers are totally entering the age of obsolescence (and, unfortunately, in America we consider this the perfect age to elect them to office).

Too Late for Stem Cells to Save these Qwerty-Using, Standard-Measurement-Worshiping Homo Sapiens Photo by NarkHaertl

This sucks because Baby Boomers expect everyone to adhere to antiquated dress codes, despite the fact that children’s perceptions of scientists grew more favorable when they discovered scientists wear jeans.

When Baby Boomer media regularly warns of InterWebs destroying our Grammar and writing skills (they think their grammer is so much gooder than ours), they’re actually lamenting the fact that younger generations are shrugging off all the pointless rules and regulations our elders imposed on communication. If everyone knows LOL means “Laugh out Loud,” then there’s nothing wrong with using it. Baby Boomers didn’t have LOL growing up, and that makes them poopy. Some people, who probably aren’t Baby Boomers, are calling the surge in text-messaging a linguistic renaissance.

Baby Boomer’s impose the QWERTY layout for keyboards on us, a layout purposefully inefficient in design to keep mechanical typewriter keys from sticking. Instead of letting us use the Dvorak layout, Baby Boomers make us use the layout they’re used to because they’re concretioned… concreted… crocheted hardened brains can’t make the switch.

And don’t even get me started on the Metric System.

The human race needs regular Generational “reboots” (read: death), to maintain a progressive momentum. If human beings lived forever, nothing would change. Imagine your parents or your parents’ parents having authority forever.

That’s why I’m optimistic the Baby Boomers will die just in time to miss the nanobots that will extend life for the truly wise minds who have got it all figured out for real this time: Generation X.