Time Machines

I've been reading about time travel lately. I had forgotten this gem of science fiction/fantasy for awhile and rediscovered it lately when reading about the future of human evolution.

I can't count how many times I watched the old Time Machine from 1960. My parents thought cable TV would rot our brains and we lived in the middle of nowhere. My awesome grandpa recorded some cable TV for us and we had some videos of several hours of nickelodeon, and a few other recorded channels I don't remember.

One of the videos though, happened to have the old 1960 Time Machine on it. I probably watched the movie 100 times or more during my childhood. When the new one came out, I may have been one of the few people in the theater who actually remembered how good the old one was.

This DeLorean kicks ass.

HG Wells didn't have a very glamorous theory on the future of humans. The 2002 version had humans that were sexy, smart, and just like us. They even spoke english. The 1960 version had a bunch of dumb blondes fumbling around eating plastic fruit and watching each other drown.

But the story HG Wells wrote was so dark they actually censored him. After saving Weena [my old friend called her Weiner], in both movies, the protagonist fought the Morlocks, won, and went home. Except in the newest movie where the time machine fucking explodes and wipes out the Morlocks.

Weiner.

In the book, the protagonist doesn't care about Weiner, he wants to know the future. He travels into the future again and -snip-, sorry, the publishers didn't like what happens to humans and made him create a new draft.

In his original version, the protagonist goes into the future and kills some weird animal. Upon further inspection he realizes it was an evolved version of the Weinerhumans he had encountered earlier. They had lost their intelligence, and become mere cattle to the now arachnid-like Morlocks.

Clearly a race of Arachnids.

In the new version HG Wells wrote, he just gets rid of this scene altogether and the world gets dominated by crabs and then the sun starts eating planets. Hardly packs the same punch.

I like this story because it is a punch in the gut. So much sci-fi involves humans conquering the galaxy, evolving into über geniuses, or just becoming gods. And it happened to easily. We kept making our lives easier for ourselves until eventually we just hired an entire underclass to live under our cities helping us live out our awesomely leisure filled lives. We became dumb, weak, and a race of pussy communists. The underclass, apparently became dumb, savage, blood-loving hardcore republicans or something.

Then everybody became animals - there was no longer a drive for intellectual and physical development. It was as if McDonalds and video games took over one half of the world, and the blue collars took steroids and ate everyone.

I can kind of see that happening. People are getting lazier, and physically weaker. However, another trend suggests people are actually getting smarter. I don't exactly see how humans could evolve into a bunch of retards, but we could atrophy. If we don't use our upper brains would they atrophy and become vestigial? Could you imagine some version of humans in the distant future realizing that fat thick stuff in their skulls was for doing stuff with? It'd be like finding out that the appendix actually does shit.


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