What if you could control the course of your life?

What would we do if we had the power to control the course of our lives? To make sure that our lives were 100% the way we wanted them to be? What if we had the ability to ensure that bad things and misfortunes never happened? What if we could control our fates, and that if we didn't like the way certain things turned out, we could go back and change them to be the way we wanted?

A few years ago, I grabbed a book off of my dad's bookshelf called "The End of Eternity" written by none other than the great father of science fiction Isaac Asimov.

 

    The story in the book revolves around a group of men who discovered a way to travel through time. They found a way to construct a place inside of a kind of time bubble, a place they called Eternity, from which they could travel back and forth through time as they wished, and visit any era of human history; past, present, or future. They were known as the Eternals, men who never grew old, observing the course of human history from afar in Eternity. However, these men did more than just watch. They realized that through small actions in the right place at the right time, they could change things, and avert many of the terrible things that would happen throughout the course of human history. If they could effect a small change in a critical moment, they could alter the entire course of the human race. They could stop wars, avert diseases, and protect the human race from any malady at any point in history, be it the far past or the distant future. They themselves remained immune from the changes, safe in Eternity, and so they became the guardians of humanity from all her afflictions, throughout all time.

   This sounds like an ideal situation, right? Humanity continued on throughout the ages, and if anything bad ever happened, the Eternals would simply travel to a point in time before that bad thing happened and stop it from ever happening. So, thanks to the Eternals, nothing bad would ever happen. No wars, no diseases, nothing. No trials, no difficulties, no hard challenges to overcome.

  However, something happened that the Eternals didn't expect. The main character, who is an Eternal, travels to the far, far, distant future, farther than any Eternal had ever gone, and discovers that after a hundred thousand years, the human race had died out. Humanity had stagnated, and eventually withered and rotted and died, despite, and actually because of, the Eternals. Due to their intervention, humanity never had to face difficulties or challenges. It never had to figure out how to overcome anything, and because of that, it lost all of it's inventiveness, creativity, and innovation, and most importantly, all sense of purpose. Humanity could never aspire to achieve anything, because thanks to the Eternals, it never had anything to overcome. Because of this lack of opposition, humanity could never grow or develop, or ever really do anything of significance. It just sat there and rotted away in it's idleness and purposelessness.

  When the Eternals took away all of the challenges and difficulties from humanity, they took away all of the motivation and opportunity for humanity to grow and progress as well.

What if, like the Eternals, we had the power to control our own fates? What if we could, with a wave of our hand, as it were, make all of the wars in the world go away? Or make all of the diseases in the world go away? Or the poverty, or suffering, or injustice and inequality? Or, on a more personal level, what if we could make it so that we never suffered the untimely loss of a loved one? Or if we could make it so that we would never get in an accident while driving? Or suffer health problems? Or lose our jobs? Or that we would never have troubles in our relationships? What if we could make it so that we would never have to go through anything hard? Would we?

I think that alot of us, if not all of us, would. At least to some extent. I mean, given the choice, why on earth would we ever choose to get in a car accident? Or get sick? Or go through a divorce? Or lose someone we love? Why would we ever choose pain and hurt and suffering? We wouldn't.

   Unfortunately, like the human race in the book, without our trials and challenges and struggles, we would also stagnate and wither. Our pains and our difficulties are what motivate us to learn and grow and develop, and become better. If we never face opposition in life, we can never achieve anything. If we never have to struggle, it seems that there's no point to us being here.

  However, as long as the reins are in our hands, we won't steer our lives into pain and suffering. It's human nature to avoid pain where possible. Like I said, given the opportunity, who wouldn't make it so that their loved ones never suffered untimely deaths?

  It's also a human tendency to always take the path of least resistance, or the easiest way. The main character of Asimov's novel realizes this, and comes to understand that as long as humanity (or at least a segment of it, namely the Eternals) had control over it's own fate, it would always choose the least difficult path. It would always choose the path of least resistance, avoiding challenges and difficulties as much as possible. As long as humanity didn't have to face these difficult things, it would never grow and develop. It would only rot and wither, as he had seen.

   Fortunately, the main character decides that it's better for humanity to face challenges and learn and grow because of them, so he destroys Eternity and the Eternals, and the control that they have over humanity's fate. Well, he actually just goes back in time to before time travel was discovered and Eternity was created, and makes it so that time travel never is discovered, so that the Eternals never are formed, and all of the changes that they had made to history were undone. He also sets off a chain of events that ensures that humanity will continue to grow and develop, albeit through overcoming difficult challenges and trials, and learning painful lessons.

Coming from an LDS perspective, it's kindof cool to realize that this same issue came up in the council we all had with God in the premortal world, and it's even cooler to realize that each one of us here decided not to take the path of least resistance by choosing Lucifer's plan, but rather to come here to earth and pass through the pain and suffering, and learn and grow in the process and eventually return to God and become like him. We all made the right choice, even though it was hard. Props for us!

Still, God knows we're weak, and that even though we each chose to come here, we might still try to avoid the pain. That's why he doesn't give us complete control over our lives, because like we discussed before, given the choice, it would be very tempting for us to avoid the difficult things in life, and if we did chose to not go through those things, we wouldn't learn the things that God wants us to, which is kind of the point of coming to earth in the first place.

   So, I guess that's why God doesn't let us decide all of the things that happen to us in life. Still, I think it's a very thought-provoking question that we should all ask ourselves:  If you had the power to remove the bad or difficult things from your life, would you?

---I'm open for any comments or thoughts, so if you have anything you want to say, please don't hesitate.

Failed Information Economy

I read an interesting article that was included in one of the books I'm reading (Content, by Cory Doctorow) that talked about how the information age has affected the policies of congress with regards to the economy. It was titled "How Hollywood, Congress, and DRM Are Beating Up the American Economy", and here's the link to it:  http://www.informationweek.com/news/199903173  It talked about how since the economists predicted that we would be moving into the "information age", America tried to shift the focus of the economy to the buying and selling of information online, rather than manufacturing, and this resulted in dropping the tariffs and whatnot towards imported foreign goods, making it far cheaper to buy raw materials from overseas, to have all your products manufactured overseas, or even to buy finished products from overseas, than to buy them from US companies. Thus, our economy's hopes and dreams were more or less pinned on the idea of being able to buy and sell information on the web. Unfortunately, there was one big problem with this idea, according to the author of the article, because they failed to take into account how fantastically easy it is to copy and spread information on the internet, and how ridiculously difficult it is to control any kind of information on the web. The key to being able to effectively sell and make a profit of a good is being able to control that good, making sure that no one else can take it, replicate it a bunch of times, and turn around and sell it(or just give it away) as their own (this is especially true of the entertainment industry: music, movies, games, etc.). Unfortunately, this is just about impossible to do on the internet. No matter how good the anti-hacking or anti-copying measures are on a certain product, all it takes is for one skilled computer guy to break that protection, copy the product(music, for example), and place that product up on the internet for free, and boom, control over that product is lost. Presented with the choice between paying for a product on the official website, and getting that same product for free on another website, lots of people will opt for the free choice. So, hoping for a successful economy based on buying and selling stuff that can be copied and given away for free so easily is a bad idea.
  I guess I should insert a disclaimer here, as there are obviously a ton of things I don't know about this topic, so if any of the stuff I put on here is incorrect, please feel free to correct me. Anyways, let's continue.
  I agree with this article because I think that the information age has incredible potential to improve the economy, as it's so much easier to access information than before, but the emphasis of the economy should still be on physical goods, because it's so difficult to enforce control over the digital ones. Digital stuff is so fluid and transient, for lack of a better way to say it. It's so easy for someone else to get their hands on, and so easy to copy, that depending on it seems unwise. It's a shaky foundation for an economy. It's kindof like trying to build your house upon the sand instead of upon the rock. Now, if we were to try and build our economy's foundation   on physical goods,  by trying to put the focus on promoting things like US manufacturing, that would be a much stabler foundation. "Copy and Paste" doesn't work on factories and manufactured products.
  I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't try to incorporate the internet into our economy. There are undeniably many economic opportunities presented by the web. However, I don't think that our economy's entire focus should be on the web. We don't want to throw all of our valuable eggs into one virtual basket that can be copied and pasted by anyone anywhere on the planet with a few computer skills, or access to someone who does. We can definitely develop both our country's manufacturing abilities and online endeavors at the same time. Just look at China. Their manufacturing is still immense, and yet they are rapidly expanding their presence on the world wide web.
  I guess I just don't like the idea of our economy depending so heavily on stuff done on the internet, which somebody else someplace else can easily copy, and maybe even do better. It makes it so that everything we can do, they can do too, with little effort. Not a good business plan.

Takedown Notices: the precursor to SOPA?

I'm actually really enjoying one of the books that I was assigned to read, a book called Content by Cory Doctorow. It's a collection of essays and articles that he's written with regards to the internet, technology, copyright, and how it all blends together. About halfway through the book, there is an article called "Online Censorship Hurts Us All." You can imagine how that caught my attention, what with all of the stuff going on with SOPA right now. Interestingly enough, it addressed almost perfectly the main issue of SOPA:  the efforts by big media companies and legislators to stop copyright infringement online by imposing laws that enable copyright holders to take action against any website that is(supposedly, at least) infringing on their copyrighted materials. This article was written back in 2007, so obviously the issue of shutting down websites entirely for copyright infringement without due process(the main issue behind SOPA) hadn't come up yet, but even then, copyright holders had the power to send takedown notices to websites that were hosting their copyrighted materials (videos or music, usually) and force them to remove those materials from their websites. I'm sure we've all seen this happen on YouTube and other places, where we see a video once, and then later go back to see it again only to realize that it's been removed for copyright reasons. This issue of takedown notices was kindof the precursor to the sopa issue, as the same potential for abuse was there. All a company had to do was go to a website and say that some of the material the website was hosting infringed on their copyright, and that website had to remove the "infringing" material. I can't remember where I read it, but a good (though somewhat extreme) example of this kind of abuse that I heard about was of a woman's website getting into trouble with some music company because she had posted a video of her baby dancing to a song that this music company owned playing in the background. The company accused her of infringing on their copyrighted song. Mind you, the video was recorded in the woman's home, and the music was only playing in the background, off a a CD that she had legitimately bought.
  Anyways, this article was really interesting to me, and I found it surprisingly relevant to the sopa issue, even though it was written like 5 years ago. Here's the link to the article, if anyone feels like reading it (it's not too long). http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/02/censorship

Life with the Internet

You know, someone the other day posted something with regards to SOPA, and in it they asked the question "what would life be like without the internet?" That got me thinking a bit, mostly about how lucky we really are to have the internet in the first place. If we put it into perspective, the internet still is quite a new phenomenon. Our generation grew up with the internet, so it seems like a natural part of life that we take for granted, but it's not. We're the first generation in the world to grow up with the internet as a regular part of our lives. The generation before us at best thought that the old DOS systems were awesome when they were young (which they were, I guess). Also, the internet is still very much a first-world phenomenon. Sure, it exists in just about every country now, but a common person having a computer with internet access in their home is still a thing that is common only in our comfy, industrialized, well-developed first world countries, like the US. I served an LDS mission in Ecuador(South America), and while they did have internet there, only well-off people had internet in their homes. Everyone else had to go to these internet cafe-type places and pay to use their computers and internet. I guess my point is that we really are pretty lucky to have the amazing technology and resource of the internet so easily accessible, and for such little cost to ourselves. It's so easy to take it for granted. I imagine that if anything were to happen to the internet, it would be quite a hard adjustment for most all of us.

Digitally Civilized

How digitally civilized am I? Hmm... Well, I'm definitely not going to claim that I am a computer expert. That would be my roommate. Two of them, actually. They're both Computer Science majors, whereas I'm a Sociology major. Nevertheless, I wouldn't say I'm computer illiterate either. I know my way around using a computer, and understand the basics of using a computer and using the internet, but there's a lot I don't know, especially when it comes to programming, fixing, etc. When it comes to those things, I'm more or less clueless, though I like to think that I could learn those things without too much trouble if I wanted to. I feel competent in using a computer, but not much more than just using.