Who'd Be on Your Spaceship? A School Exercise Backfires in Ohio
An Ohio school superintendent has apologized for a class exercise that asked middle school students to choose from a list of racially, ethnically and religiously diverse candidates to save or leave behind if Earth were “doomed for destruction.”
The assignment presented 12 potential spaceship passengers, including “a militant African-American medical student,” “a Hispanic clergyman who is against homosexuality,” “an Asian, orphaned 12-year-old boy,” “a homosexual male professional athlete,” and a “60-year-old Jewish university administrator.” The students were instructed to select eight to take to safety on another planet, ranking them from the most deserving to the least.
“It’s disturbing all the way around,” said Bernadette Hartman, whose son completed the assignment during an eighth-grade social studies class at Roberts Middle School in Cuyahoga Falls, a large suburb near Akron.
The teacher used it as an “icebreaker,” the superintendent, Todd M. Nichols of the Cuyahoga Falls School District, said in a statement. The intent was to “promote tolerance and break down stereotypes,” he said, and help fulfill the district’s goal of engaging in conversations about “diversity awareness and social justice.”
“The teacher and district offer their most sincere apologies for the offense caused by the content used in this assignment,” the statement said. “Future assignments on this topic will be more carefully selected.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/us/ohio-school-spaceship-diversity-quiz.html
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We don’t need the human race spreading. Let it end at Earth.
In our present state we are like a virus.
... what's the point? If an omnipotent being decides to evict humans from this universe there's not much we can do about it.
If it's a random event, or we've done it to ourselves, there's not much we can do about that either.
It's explicitly stated in the problem.
In that case twelve people in a flimsy space ship are no less doomed than the rest of us.
So instead of people, I say we stuff the space ship with earth's most resilient and diverse microscopic species and hope for the best.
You can stuff a whole lot of microscopic life into a tin can built for a dozen soon-to-be-freeze-dried humans, and the shelf life is much longer.
Tardigrade are pretty tough.
My reaction to this problem is much the same as when I first suffered it in middle school.
That's stupid.
Our eighth grade class got the fallout shelter version since the Cold War was still hot. Crawl under your desk and kiss your ass goodbye.
Worse, it was a group project and we were supposed to work it out with a few randomly selected classmates.
This team-building exercise, hypothetically choosing who was going to live and who was going to die, did not improve my social skills or make me a better person.
All in all, if I was saving large mammals, I'd probably pick polar bears.
In Andy Weir's book The Martian I like how they planned to have the smallest most energy efficient person, Johansen, bring the Mars Ferry Hermes back to earth if the food rendezvous failed, figuring she would survive, but just barely, if her crewmates froze themselves and she ate them. Martinez jokes that he'd taste best because Johansen likes Mexican food.
Seeing as how I'm saving polar bears in my answer to the space ship problem, I'd pick the humans I could most efficiently stuff into the freezers. It could be less than 12 people, it could be more, like a game of Tetris played with corpses.
Ask a morbid question, get a morbid answer.
But fuck it, I don't need any thinly veiled Christian theology.
It's Noah, his ark, and his incestuous family all over again.
Who would God choose?
Who cares?
