Author: JeremyC

With the population of the world on a steady rise, humanity must face the prospect of finding another place to plant our civilization. One solution is to colonize our neighboring planet, Mars. Surviving this foreign climate can be made much easier thanks to genetic modification. However, modifying the structure of human beings can be seen as inhumane, and it may be a little too soon to start investing in this extreme solution.

Space exploration is important for our understanding of the universe, but having to modify human genetics proves that perhaps living life on Mars is not ideal yet. Although using the abilities of some extremophile microorganisms, like stated in “Colonizing Mars may require humanity to tweak its DNA,” can help astronauts journey farther in space, scientists still need to consider the risk factor since this has not been put into practice at this high of a scale before.

Another aspect of going to Mars is how us as humans use the land. Terraforming, or altering the terrain of a particular place, would affect life living there if there was any in the first place, making it harder to research. Terraforming is the most efficient solution until technology further advances and allows us to do things like climate and atmosphere control.

Going to Mars for research may help our understanding, but due to issues like the dangers of genetically modyfing the DNA in humans, or the effects of altering Mars’s surface, right now is not the best time to consider it as a suitable place to inhabit.

In theory, the United States Criminal Justice System ensures lawbreakers get punishment proportional to the crime they have commited. However, although the U.S. condemns other countries such as China or Russia for utilizing torture, our usage of Solitary Confinement is not different. The effects of such isolation are serious, and are essentially torture that just goes by a different name. This violation of human rights does not benefit society, and worst of all, this situation is being covered up and swept under the rug.

According to the TED talk, “What Happens To People In Solitary Confinement,” in the ADX, a federal prison in Colorado, prisoners faced symptoms of lonliness, including lack of usage of vocal cords, dissociation, insanity, and attempted suicide. When they do get out of prison, the inhabitants are likely to be cut off from the world, as people are defined by their connections and relationships to others.

Prison’s purpose for the most part is to correct people and to make them suitable for society again. However, damaging them beyond repair is not going to help. No matter what heinous crime one has committed, the correct reaction should not to hurt them more and make that criminal into a more dangerous one, but should be to rehabilitate and restore them. However, this will only occur in a Utopian story, and will never happen anytime soon in reality if the Justice System stays this way.

Although such brutal torture is being tolerated by the U.S. government, they refuse criticism by keeping all these practices in secrecy. Ironically, our country calls out other countries’ use of this, but shields our own people from these truths. This is because we are too lazy to find another better, more humane method.

Solitary Confinement has no place in our Criminal Justice System, as it does not help prisoners, and is a lazy, inhumane way of torturing people.

First impressions can deceive us. There is no way to truly know one’s situation from a first look. However, human nature makes people construct assumptions off of impulse, whether true or not. This is exemplified in the story “Miss Awful,” by Arthur Cavenaugh, where the characters show the tendencies and effects of judging people without sufficient knowledge.

The protagonist of the story, Roger, is in for a surprise when his third grade class’s lenient teacher is temporarily replaced with the strict and more responsible teacher, Miss Orville, whom the children refer to as ‘Miss Awful.’ Throughout the week, she disciplines the rowdy and talkative class. The students initially think Miss Orville acts the way she does without any reason, and devise a plan to try and get rid of her. They tear up her plants, hoping to get revenge. What the students, save for Roger, do not know is that Orville was actually evicted from her apartment and her plants were the only things she could keep – and now even they are gone, ruined by unnecessary violence.

After the class rebelliously rejoices when finished with committing the deed, yelling informal slang like “ain’t,” Miss Orville berates them, telling them that the privilege of education is invaluable, that wasting it only cripples society as a whole. She reveals, or rather, clarifies her true motive for being harsh to the children who seemed to care so little.

In these two ways, the students in “Miss Awful” show that prejudice causes pain that could have been avoided, and shows that not looking into the full storyof someone ignores their most important lessons.

The words surprise, anger, disgust, and fear all share one obvious quality: they are words to describe human emotions. Not only that, but these feelings are powerful; they rile us up and make us anxious to act. In today’s world that is dictated by the spread of information through the Internet, these sensations can be evoked easier than ever, through false knowledge, or fake news. As technological advances continue to drive forward, it is more than important that no one is turning lies into fact for society and that reality stays intact through this age of misinformation.

In a perfect world, the truth would appeal to everyone more than lies. However, the human brain is simply not wired to work in that manner. A research study published by Science found that the emotions of surprise, fear, anger, and disgust were more prominent in fake news than in factual reportings. This is to be expected, as usually forged media is aimed at a certain agenda – whether it is to incite people, push a political objective, or manipulate minds. Our minds are prone to more arousal via higher dopamine releases, which is easily created through excitement from the above emotions caused by this type of information. This is the reason why when on a news website, many article headlines are designed to be shocking, eye-catching, or otherwise negative, for the sake of clicks. This urge causes increased sharing among people, and eventually spreads to many places real news cannot.

Human-created synthetic content is not the highest on the list of worries, however. Autonomy has made it all the more easier to facilitate and produce this kind of content. One instance of this would be the “generative adversarial network,” which is basically a program that loops a piece of fabricated media through an algorithm until it cannot distinguish the media from fact. This combined with the programs social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that tend to advance fake news makes it easy for fake news to be made and delivered to the home page of people’s social applications.

It is not difficult to understand the implications of an increased amount of false information. In the TED talk, one example showed the economy spike downwards after an inaccurate tweet from the hacked Associated Press Twitter account went public, and subsequently, viral. Fake news has also infiltrated its way into our government, compromising this country’s integrity as a democracy.

In this world of information and misinformation, it is getting harder and harder to distinguish fact from fiction, and it will only get more difficult from now on.

dasdawdwasdw

In today’s world, the seperation between arbitrary age groups is prominent. Society has been divided into generations, such as Generation X, who share birth years between around 1965-1980, Generation Y, who have birth years in around 1980-1995, and Generation Z, with birth years in 1995-2015. One might say that it would be excruciatingly obvious that age differences might affect the interactions between generations, but the context of the time period in which these people were born impacts this separation more than that, creating a sort of disconnect that sometimes leads to mild hostility. This bias is fixable if people come together and share their difficulties, instead of berating the other generations on how much harder life was back in the day, which will be beneficial to society.

Understanding why older generations tend to be quite condescending to Millenials and Gen Z relates to the hardships thay faced during their time period, including finacial decline and hard jobs. Today’s media, generally infested with the stench of partisan politics, tends to portray Millenials negatively to for their own agendas, often blaming them for “economic issues,” according to Market Watch, just because they were born in a time where the economy was more stable. Similarly, the TED talk we watched, “Dear Grown-ups… Sincerely, Gen Z,” presented many ways in which parents, often members of Gen X, condescend, patronize, or belittle us children, generally members of Generation Z, putting the responsibility of problems like climate change on our shoulders when in reality it was caused by the sheer negligence of the former generation in the first place.

All of this seems like a valid point when the issue is looked at superficially. The older people dealt with harder problems, and did not have that fancy technology to help them. However, If one would say that the world was better when Gen X was flourishing, they would be wrong in more ways than one. First of all, crime rates are at a low. The world if actually safer than it ever was, apart from COVID, which is a special circumstance, according to History News Network. More people are educated today and technology is developing faster than ever. Unfortunately, some people are still stuck in a pretentious in which everything that is foreign to them would be considered harmful.

Sharing our differences allows us to relate to each other. Instead of Gen X dissing or shaming Internet users for being “lazy,” they should embrace it, as it is a way people learn, work, communicate, and vent today. Likewise the current generation should not gatekeep against older generations, and instead remove hostility, relating to and helping them with comprehending our problems.

Coming together and mending the rift created by media conglomerates and a long-standing rivalry makes society more productive in solving issues such as the current problem of COVID-19. We cannot accomplish much if we are still at each other’s throats, complaining about issues that are rendered insignificant by real social problems.

For the past few months, we have been trapped inside our houses, unable to attend school, let alone anywhere with more than three people. The Coronavirus, or COVID-19 has ravaged the country, or so some think, and has shut down businesses across the country. Everyone knows this, probably even the illiterate Cro-Magnon living in the basement level of some dilapidated parking lot. In short, this pandemic has affacted society in more ways than many, but it takes its toll on us individually in the form of cutting off social connectivity.

Solitude is nice. It’s a break from the agonizing screams from parents, siblings, or both, a pause button for life’s worries and stress. However, on the contrary, isolation is, well… boring, not just as an annoyance. When society lacks social contact, datrimental effects befall on us people.

In “Forced Social Isolation Causes Neural Craving Similar to Hunger,” by Scott Barry Kaufman, MIT researchers conducted an experiment in which 40 people were instructed to spend 10 hours away from any and all forms of social contact, and the results showed that the participants experienced a feeling of hunger or withdrawl in the midbrain, not dissimilar to an experience of going long periods of time without drugs or food, creating a craving sensation. Earlier in the article, it states that, “If the need for connection really is a basic need, then its deprivation should show similar effects on the brain and behavior as the deprivation of other basic needs such as food and sleep.” Thus, taking the research into consideration, it is safe to assume that human nature has a specific requirement or need for social contact.

As humans, by nature, are social animals, this craving of being with friends, or even making new ones out of strangers, seems completely normal and evident. However, in an event such as COVID-19, in which we are bound to our couches at home, TV remotes, or computer mice in hand, it becomes extremely obvious that social contact is necessary.

At this point in time, we are both fractured from society as a whole, but are more connected than we ever were, thanks to the existence of a very helpful tool: the Internet. Modern technology has made it possible to talk to, play with, or see almost anyone you know. Most people end up online as a result of seperation in the real world, causing more socializing to occur, more friends being made, and generally, a higher usage of computers. Although connectivity is so easy, simple methods of communication can also distract us from work, or other things that are more important than chatting online.

Despite this pandemic tearing us apart in terms of social connection, it also brings us together in a more convenient, albeit less healthy way of being with the ones we love.