Sunday Open Thread – April 1, 2007

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

• The Fourth Turning: The coming dark and turbulent era, and how Generation Millennium is likely to cope with it (Monday’s post). 
• The ‘M’ word.
• Squatter Communities (in struggling nations, which now contain as many as 1.5 billion people) as Model Intentional Communities.
• Why We Hate: I weigh in on the root causes behind Kathy Sierra’s nightmarish experience and other hate-mongering, on and off the Web.
• Nowhere to Go: Is the closest experience most of us have to a truly natural life the ‘endless summer’ vacation of our youth?
• Getting Better: Why are there so few excellent craftspeople, and so few excellent conversationalists? Bad practice?

What I’m thinking about:

Another, simpler way to save the world? I was approached last week by a fledgling biotech consortium that is developing a drug that can be put in all the world’s water supplies, and which will cause everyone in the world to develop an insatiable sexual appetite. The theory is that much of the world’s violence is caused by repressed sexual desire, and if everyone in the world wants it all the time, there won’t be any more repression. And with all the endorphins produced, no one will want to fight anyway.

What’s more, with everyone having sex all the time (an average of 8-10 hours a day according to the simulations and pilot tests), there won’t be time, energy or money for all the activities that are causing global warming. We’ll eat simple, natural foods on the fly, drink lots of water (ingesting even more the drug), sleep ten hours a day blissfully and exhausted, and not do anything else. No consumer products, no new construction, no appliances, no clothes. No driving, so no cars and no CO2 emissions. No more wage slavery since everyone who can will live off their savings and everyone else will demand a large amount to work, since their leisure time will be so much more valuable to them. So only essential services will be staffed at all, and even the people who work for them will only work a few hours a week.

The potential drawbacks to me were unwanted pregnancies and STDs, but the consortium has convinced me that neither is a problem. It seems that, according to studies of males who spent eight hours or more a day having sex, those males end up spreading their sperm so thin that they effectively become sterile after the second day. And computer simulations indicate that although everyone will be having much more sex, on average they’ll be having 75% fewer different partners, geographically less dispersed, so with expected rates of use of condoms, STDs will actually decline 64%.

What they’re working on now are lubricants and balms that will be needed as a result of all the constant sexual marathons, to prevent blistering. The other problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any antidote to it, and since it goes through the digestive system and water treatment systems unaltered it just keeps recycling with no loss of effectiveness. So we need to besure it’s what we want to do before we introduce it.

Sound too good to be true?