Pre-Class Past Week of 10.7.09 "Catch Up"

So this post is a little bit less than a week late, but in my attempt to be diligent about blogging I'm going to write it anyway.

PANDEMIC II... what a concept. Let's create a disease and try to kill the world, a bio-terrorist's dream game. And as sick as it may be the game is actually quite interesting. While I grew board with the game quickly I was really excited when I learned that my disease had spread to another region, or that the first death as a result of my disease had occurred. So, what's wrong with us!?

Playing PANDEMIC forced me to wonder just what it is about mass extinction is so interesting to us humans. Of course we're all interested in death, but for some reason it seems like the end of the human race is a hot topic for each of us. Even though it probably won't happen in our lifetime (or our great great great grandchildren's for that matter) and we definitely won't see much of it (we'll be dead or on our way to dead) we still want to know about it. I think this might have to do with wanting to know how to pre-empt the forces leading to human extinction.

This brings me back to "The World Without Us", and the author's point in writing the book. I think that maybe Weisman was trying to get us interested in what would happen to our "stuff" if we disappeared the same way we're interested in the way that the disappearance would occur.