When you were a kid, how many times did you have a close call, dodge a bullet, have a near miss, or tempt fate? If you’re like me, it’s a miracle you’re still alive.
I remember out of high school, my twin brother and I bought a Harley. Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly a Harley, but it had a lot in common with one, such as both had two wheels. Our prize and joy was a Sears 106. It cost $249 out-the-door. It was underpowered and unstable. But it did come with a safety feature: two helmets. They doubled as batting helmets, so when we beaned each other playing baseball, it didn’t cause any more brain damage than we already had.
Later on, my brother and I bought our first car, a 1956 Plymouth Belvedere. Upon discerning it had no seat belts or even a padded dashboard, we took to wearing the motorcycle helmets when driving the car. I can only imagine what other drivers just have thought at night, upon noticing the silhouettes of our outer space alien-sized heads in their rear view mirror.
We took great pride in our ’56 Plymouth. Not only did it have a pushbutton transmission, it also featured manhole-sized rust holes in the floorboards. This enabled us to propel the car, Flintstone-style, when it wouldn’t run, which was often. In fact, the engine wouldn’t even turn over if it got below freezing. Majoring in Stupidity at the time, we would open the hood and cover the engine compartment with an old sleeping bag. Then we’d stick in an electric heater and pump the accelerator a few dozen times. VRROOOM! The old Plymouth would start a nanosecond before the combination of gas fumes, confined area, and heater coils blew us to Kingdom Come.
It has come to my attention that the problem of accidentally killing ourselves will soon become a thing of the past. This non-fake headline, just in from the Worldwide Web:
PEOPLE WILL SOON UPLOAD THEIR ENTIRE BRAINS TO COMPUTERS
I’m not making this up. Google’s chief engineer, Ray Kurzweil, postulates in his recent book, The Singularity is Near that “…humans will develop the means to instantly create new portions of ourselves, either biological or non-biological, so that people can have a biological body at one time and not at another; then have it again; then change it.” In other words, we will have “software-based humans who will live out their lives on the web.”
What does this say about our souls, immortality, God, and the fact we may never get rid of Miley Cyrus? For one thing, we’ll be free to pursue abject stupidity whenever we want, without worrying about the inconvenience of death. We’ll be free to zip in & out of traffic on our Sears 106 motorcycle! If we want to stick an electric heater under the hood of a ’56 Plymouth Belvederes and blow ourselves up, so what? We’ll have been backed up on our hard drives!
I have just one question: if someone accidentally trips and unplugs the cord to the computer, would that be involuntary manslaughter?