What A Fool Believes

A lot of people seem to hate April Fools day. Today I saw many people on social media lamenting its arrival, and the many half-assed jokes they'd be dodging over the next 24 hours. But personally, I enjoy it. True, many of the hoaxes and pranks are bad. But in a world where goofy broad comedy rules, it's nice to have a premise that forces everyone to use a deadpan delivery that we normally don't see outside of The Onion.

But today I realized that there is a modern problem with April Fools. I realized when reading an article about a Japanese Virtual Reality simulation of trying to save a cat on a plank: I couldn't figure out if it was a joke. Yes, it sounds like a joke. But then, we live in a world where there's a game called Goat Simulator. It started out as a joke, but then became quite popular. There's also a game where you play a slice of bread trying to get toasted. That wasn't even a joke. So when products are so light-hearted, how can we even tell which are real?

We already passed the point of Saturday Night Live commercials becoming real products, now April Fools pranks too. The trouble is that it's so easy to make things that we can now make them on a whim.

Surprisingly, for all my musings on the future, I never suspected this. Sure, people have speculated about what would happen if we perfected nanobots, microscopic robots that could do incredible work in their teeming millions. Even if that didn't lead to an apocalypse of nanobots consuming all resources as they endlessly reproduce themselves, giving everyone god-like powers of creation could be devastating. I wouldn't be surprised if some people used the new technology to carve entire mountains into sculptures of their own genitals, but that would just be one aspect of a bigger disaster. What I didn't expect was a long period of time where advanced humans leisurely produce one odd creation after another. But that looks like where we're going.

This is yet another way Star Trek lied to us. Their replicators and holodecks have the characters incredible powers of creation, yet only ever used them tastefully. Sure, we all speculated about what was in Riker's secret holodeck files, but generally everyone used their powers responsibly. Of course, I can see how unrealistic that is now. If you had the power to make a giant pink rhinoceros when you feel like it, you probably will.

At least this answers one question I have had about the future: if humanity does survive for millennia, what are we going to do with all that time? I mean, once we've cured all the diseases and figured out all of science. I guess we're just going to fill out time doing weird, frivolous stuff. And I guess writing an article about April Fools Day that somehow links to the destiny of the human race is a good start.