I’m not going to provide specific threads about this because I don’t want to rant at a specific doper. I bet most of us are guilty of this, including myself, but it’s really boring!
I’ve noticed that whenever anyone posts a “what if” question, very common replies are:
"It’ll never happen"
“that ain’t going to happen”
"No need to worry about that. It will never happen"
Look, friends, “What if” questions are not asking if something can or will happen. They simply ask “what if it did”. They consist of imaginary scenarios. They allow for a little fantasy of circumstances. They can be fun, and I enjoy them. But too many people are sucking the joy out of them by explaining why something is not going to happen, instead of exploring what if it did? Ask what would happen if the sun were to suddenly fizzle out and you’ll get 50 paragraphs about why it won’t. Boring! Ask what would happen if nobody would sell oil to the U.S. and every answer is peppered with why it won’t happen. What if
questions are candy for the imagination and thought process, not a forum of deciding what can and can’t happen.
Nothing wrong with writing fiction, pk. If we’re going to do that, and the proposed scenario is one that causes some folks to doubt the possibility of said scenario coming to pass, then I guess we just ignore whatever real world facts cause those doubts. In that case we can toss in whatever we want.
So if suddenly the entire rest of the world refused to sell petroleum to the U.S., perhaps a quick thinking investigator would realize where all others had failed to look for the Nazi’s synthetic oil recipe. That discovery would give a huge shot in the arm to the coal and (now moribund) shale mining industries that gear up just barely in the nick of time in a gripping struggle to come on line before the Strategic Petroleum Reserve runs dry. The closely guarded secret allows the U.S. to become a net exporter of oil and OPEC is driven into the ground, while SUVs triple in size.
Au contraire, Sterra – if it will “never happen”, as you postulate, then Hollywood would rapidly run out of ideas upon which to make their disaster movies. Scriptwriters would be up burning the midnight oil, rehashing “Towering Inferno” themes, and penning remakes of “Titanic”. Why, they may even resort to creating ideas concerning volcanoes erupting in downtown Los Angeles! And chunks of asteroid hitting Mother Earth!
As this, obviously, does not happen, I hold that your statement is false. QED.
[sub](Sorry - I just woke up, and had crumpets for breakfast. Crumpets do stra-a-ange things to the brain. Carry on.)[/sub]
I have to agree with the OP. One of the first threads* I started was stomped on by a long-time poster. I felt like I’d been bullied, and I’ll bet he felt like he’d made the mark of Zorro on me using Occam’s Razor.
If the attitude is “don’t waste our board’s bandwidth with your pustulent postulations,” then don’t even post a reply! Just let the thread die.
*If anybody cares, my squelched “what if” was what if besides the scourging, thorns and nails, it was revealed that Jesus had been raped by the Romans, what would that have done to our attitude about sexual violence. Boring maybe but trollish?
I admit that all too often I abuse this board with my personal deamons when my appropriate involvement should be to correct error and ignorance (especially my own), but if I’m a troll I’m too obtuse to even know it. I resolve that if I see a poster being dismissed again as the OP states, I will defend the poster for the sake of his or her point of view (not because we’re board buddies, of which I have none anyway). I wish someone had done that for me.
Hey Slithy and pkbites, man, I enjoy both of y’alls’ posts here. I responded to pk’s post in GQ as a GQ thread should be responded to. If we want to write sci-fi we can pursue it in other forums.
Go to IMHO and launch the postulate. It’ll get lots of traffic there; in GQ it will invariably bring those who spot the problem with the premise.