If one of the things that watching the series “The 100″ (brilliant series with brilliant actors by the way), it’s that we have time, but we are probably going to die. Now when I say this, I don’t mean the death of our species, on the contrary. Chances our species will live on and survive are high.
The human race has sadly always been a selfish one, privileging choices to survive over anything else, and I can tell you, “The 100″ is the most accurate series when it comes to depict the human nature.
We are selfish but we need to survive. I will not write about the plot, for I assume that if you are reading this, you have probably watched at least a few episodes.
The series is terrifying: It shows us everything good about us but just as we are good, we are bad. Indeed, we are two faced people. I can almost hear people cry out to me “People born under the Gemini sign are the two-faced people!!”. What if that wasn’t true? I’m half joking, but everyone is deeply two-faced when it comes to making heavy choices.
Back in the days, our ancestors had to fight for their lives, in a daily battle, on what we’d now call the field. They were threatened and faced with so many dangers that death was part of their life. It was sad, but you had to move on, because all it truly was about was survival. They were satisfying primary needs: sleep, eat, reproduce, live on, survive. Eat meant to kill, and killing happened in every species. The population was regulated this way.
However the human beings are smart people, or at least, they used to be. They evolved into something designed to improve the quality of life and allow survival to such an extent that, nowadays, nobody knows what it means to survive anymore. What we now strife for is happiness, fulfillment, something that came from basic knowledge that the specie was safe, something that isn’t the case anymore.
We know that we are safe, or close to being so. Our biggest enemy, which used to be the nature’s danger, is now ourselves. By allowing a rise of the population, we kill ourselves: not directly, of course. And that is why I mentioned “The 100″. The series depicts how leaders are willing to “cull” people to survive and carry on, with modern knowledge of the world. It depicts science versus religion and how both sides are forced to make choices and alliances to carry on. The society is eventually reduces to the minimum necessary, in which only survival matters. We see, however, all of the facades of human nature, how people are willing to abandon others that they do not consider their “kin” when they are truly, only other people, just not from the same border.
Living with nature is what will allow us to survive, but the question remains: are we truly ready to take such a decision? All I know is that, as selfish as it is, I must enjoy technology while I still can.