I want to welcome all the IE 8 users that can finally see the site as it was designed. Since this site was launched I’ve had to hide the style sheets from IE users as the CSS engine just wasn’t able to render the design at all, even though it could be rendered 98% perfect by Netscape 6 (released November of 2000. The 2% of rendering issues, were that the fonts look bigger in Netscape 6 and the drop down menus are finicky. Netscape/Mozilla fixed the out standing issues in their CSS engine by Netscape 7.1 [aka Mozilla 1.4], and thus rendered this site 100% perfect since June of 2003). Hey at least you can say your browser of choice finally joined the party of being able to view our site as it was designed, even if it took Microsoft about 9 years to catch up with it’s CSS 2 support?
So last year was the 10 year anniversary of the film Gattaca. It’s an interesting film that questions whether science really has all the answers when it comes out smarting Nature. It puts us in a world where if you where not genetically enhanced you are a second class citizen divorced of all the rights we enjoy now, all because you are a health risk, since science can supposedly predict before birth exactly what you will die from. Have you ever sat back and thought about what if the technology shown in that film was available to us today, whether we should use it or it not?
I tend think about these things any time I watch a great Sci-fi film like Gattaca, and then find my self wondering if and when any of the films’ predictions will come true. Take blade runner for example, it predicted that by 2015 that we would have flying cars and so over run in pollution in LA that we would have Acid rain all of the time. Well we have the acid rain but still no flying cars, and LA is cleaner than it has been in years, mainly due to advances in energy efficient cars and machinery, granted we still have a ways to go, to really clean the City up for good, but it’s in a better position then what Blade Runner assumed we would be at by now.
Which brings me back to Gattaca…
- Do you think in our life time we will be able to genetically enhance our children during conception?
- When do you think we will have such technology available to us, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years or more?
- If do end up creating that technology do you think that our society will fall into the same traps as Gattaca depicted in the film? If so why?
As I’ve been pondering these questions lately, I found it weird that, today I happened to stumble upon something that excited me as much as it frightened me, at how close we really are to having a world just as Gattaca predicted it could be.
