Guest
This is the opening scene to the movie “A.I. Artificial Intelligence“ copyright 2001, Warner Bros. This scene is short and in my view artistically beautiful, so I am sharing it with the claim of fair use. I could not find this anywhere on the web and I wanted to be able to link to it. A.I. takes place on a world ravaged by climate change, where most of the greatest cities of humanity have been swallowed by the sea. Over the image and sound of crashing ocean waves, an offscreen male narrator says, “Those were the years after the ice caps had melted because of the greenhouse gases, and the oceans had risen to drown so many cities along all the shorelines of the world. Amsterdam, Venice, New York, forever lost. Millions of people were displaced, climate became chaotic. Hundreds of millions of people starved in poorer countries. Elsewhere a high degree of prosperity survived when most governments in the developed world introduced legal sanctions to strictly license pregnancies. Which is why robots, who were never hungry and did not consume resources beyond that of their first manufacture, were so essential an economic link in the chain mail of society.” We're doing this to our world right now. I wanted to share this clip to remind people that this could really be true some day. In 200 years the humans on Earth may talk about great ancient cities of our world, by then... forever lost. How senseless it would be to destroy so much of our home world for the sake of a perceived economic efficiency. Will we act to avert this crisis? Or will we continue to keep our head in the sand? Our home is at risk, and we cannot afford to settle for the status quo.
