My Crackpot Solution for World Peace - #50
For those that are new, the newsletter is divided into two sections: “Hello Friends” and the Essay/Story. Thanks._
Hello Friends!
Have you ever done this?: You’re on a Slack chat on a Friday afternoon, minding your business, when suddenly someone says, “Did you know Mentorship Matters is a diversity program? Like, a mentor in the TV world will take you under their wing for an entire year and introduce you to execs, agents, managers, and TV writers in the biz?” You rush over to their website and see the deadline is March 1st, so the most logical next step is to devote your entire weekend to prepare your materials. Resume, Letter of Interest, a one-minute video introduction, a TV pilot sample. And so you shoot the gun that Friday evening and start writing your Letter of Interest; you text your neighbor to see if they can help you shoot an artsy video on their iPhone; you fix up your resume because that shit’s been collecting dust since last Fall; you find a pilot that you believe shows the best in your abilities.
But. But. BUT —
— you see all the problems in the pilot and realize anybody reading this would toss this thing into the “Pass” pile. Therefore, you think, the most logical next step is to do a “page 1 rewrite” (err, “polish”) and write about 45 pages over the course of 72 hours. And not rubbish, bullshit pages full of fart jokes — I’m talking well-thought-out, fully constructed scenes with characters that (you assume) have clear motivations with their actions in the story — like, that kind of shit. You write on Saturday, on Sunday, on Monday (during lunch), and throw yourself into a tireless sweat on Monday night. Your fingers are racing; your brain is sizzling; your empty Chipotle bowl is smelling. But you’re almost at the finish line and sweet victory is in sight. Midnight is approaching and you can barely keep your eyes open. As you write ‘FADE OUT’ on the page, you hit EXPORT TO PDF and as you take a look at your other materials, you realize “FUCK. I’m not done with my Letter of Interest… nor my video.” You have a Letter of Interest with your friend’s track changes, and you have the footage and script for your video. What do you do? you make ask.
WELL! You simply email the program through their website’s contact box and beg for an extension past midnight. Nobody is of course going to respond at 11:43 PM on a Monday night, so you work through the wee hours of the morning, get as few sleep hours as possible that you know your brain can tolerate, wake up, head immediately to your computer, finish your Letter of Interest and video, and go to their website to submit at 8:35 AM Tuesday morning.
But wait! What’s this!?
“SIKE,” if there was a devilish God of Website Design. You’re on the submission page, but the Submit button has been replaced with a “Submissions Closed” sign. So what do you do? Same play as before, simply email the program through their website’s contact box and beg for a chance to apply. “Per my last email,” is a polite way to start it. You say you’re a good candidate, have all your materials ready, and brush your teeth twice a day, but it doesn’t matter — “Submissions are Closed” it shows on the website. SO WHAT DO YOU DO?
You think, “Fuck it, I’m going to copy-paste the Google doc link to my Letter of Interest into this contact box,” and you do exactly that. You write, “Looking forward to your response!” and hover your mouse over “Send”… click!
You promptly turn off the computer.
And sit there in silence.
…
Enjoy the essay.
9min reading time.
There has always been war and tyranny in lands far and near; evil, crazy people all around the Earth since the dawn of time have disrupted and inconvenienced billions of people: Dictators, Authoritarians, Republicans, and more.
And there are a variety of reasons why they do this. They could hate another group of people based on their religion, their ethnicity, their race… even their preference for what meat to eat (that’s right, I’m looking at you Hindus, Germans, Jews, Mexicans, Americans, Arabs, and, well, fuck it, pretty much everyone when you look at it). This reasoning, no matter how dumb it looks in hindsight, can stir conflict, and with conflict comes unrest. I feel like that’s a straightforward equation:
(+x + -y)/time = conflict
“x” being one culture/ethnicity/race/religion, and “y” being another culture/ethnicity/race/religion.
I’m no expert in global affairs, or foreign policy… or anything for that matter… but! I do think based on my various journeys through Wikipedia and YouTube, I have come to a solution that could cure our predisposition for conflict based on our differentness.
Usually, the reason why two different groups of people hate each other is because they don’t actually know each other. It’s all hearsay, made-up ideas — prejudices.
(By the way, he didn’t really say this, but it would have been a sick-ass thing to blurt out if he did.)
Have you ever met someone and started talking to them about a certain so-and-so group of people, and when they hear this, they come across as kind and knowledgeable on how that so-and-so group is, what their customs are, and how they conduct themselves? And when you ask them, “Oh yeah? How do you know so much about them?”, they always go, “Oh, I grew up around them a lot.”
“How do you know so much about Brazilians?” you would ask. “Your name’s John Doe and you seem like the farthest thing from being Brazilian?”
He would then respond, “Well, I grew up around Brazilians,” or, “My family is Brazilian,” or, “I had some Brazilian friends in school,” or, “My teacher was Brazilian.” And so on.
That sense of “knowing” can break prejudice and hate. John Doe doesn’t despise or have apathy toward Brazilians because he “knows of” Brazilians — he holds no prejudices because he knows Brazilians.
I’ll give you my personal case — I feel like some West Coast types feel it’s okay to shit on Southerners: “Oh, people from Alabama are backward-ass cousin fuckers,” or, “Oh, fuck these racist Texans and their cowboy costumes and their horniness for barbecue.” But if you ask one of these West Coast types — these taco-eating, blazer wearing, convertible driving, NIMBY yuppies that allll tawk lyyyyk thisss — if they know anyone in Tennessee, they’d say, “Nope! California is the only ten I see!” And then they would proceed to slap their knee and order Zankou Chicken for lunch.
However, if they tell me, “Hey, I have family in Texas,” or “I have a friend in Texas,” then all is okay and they don’t see my imaginary ten-gallon hat.
But this is between states within the Union.
Tell me, person that is knowledgeable — do you know anyone in Egypt? What about Panama? Switzerland? Swaziland?
Do you know how people are in these places? And I don’t mean from what you learned on TV shows and TikTok — I mean it literally: do you know them? Their customs? Beliefs? How they conduct themselves?
I’m going to assume “no” on all answers.
Now, imagine if you instantly became a CEO, a Senator, the President of the USA — you’re going to make rational decisions based on bullshit, aren’t you? Sure, traveling can fix this, but most people don’t have the means to travel the world (or much less know how to), and for those that do, please admit that this is somewhat a privilege. I say “somewhat”, because, in this day and age, it’s quite easy to travel and for very cheap. It could be that resources just aren’t well known.
So what to do? Every person on the planet can’t travel. Not everyone has access to information, much less the internet. And even if they did, you can’t show a YouTube video of celebrities singing Imagine and expect world peace. So what the fuck do you do?
Solution:
You grab every single person on this planet and put them all in the same place.
…
Now someone hearing this might say, “Don, what are you smoking?… And can I have some of it?”
Yes, it does sound extremely stupid, yet, I do believe that in the far-off future, this will be considered one of the F.W.D.W.T.O.T.B solutions that can save humanity: “Fuck, Why Didn’t We Think Of That Before”.
Let’s set the stage. I got some of this idea from watching a YouTube video a long time ago: What if Everyone Lived in Just One City?
This dude crunches the numbers to see how to fit all 7.4 billion people (2016 data…) into a single landmass.
To make my point, here is a chart from the video. It’s of different city population densities and the amount of landmass it would require to fit the world’s population with said density. For example — if everyone lived in a population density like that of New Orleans, we would need the landmass of the United States to accommodate everybody.
I think Chicago is a decent population density — nothing like Mumbai or Singapore, so it’ll do. Not only that, but Chicago is ranked as #25 on the Life Evaluation of Global Cities according to the World Happiness Report (click here for that report). I think that if Chicago is cool, then a Chicago-like density would be okay. Chart below.
Based on the video from above, to fit everybody in the density of Chicago, the country would be about the size of Iran. Below is Iran superimposed onto the United States.
source: https://thetruesize.com/
To fit everybody within this imaginary country, it would take up the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and a little bit of Northern Mexico, specifically Sonora, Chihuahua, and fuck it, let’s throw in Baja.
Let’s pick this area for our “super society”. Why?
Not looking at any factors except environmental, it’s quite nice. No tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, monsoons, shit like that. Sure, the occasional earthquake, heatwave, and deep freeze will rattle some bones, but that other shit is much more dangerous. And it’s sunny and fresh, unlike North Dakota.
Of course in this super society, we would have some metropolitan areas.
Those of us living in Los Angeles think we live in a big city, however, most of us never think that it can get even bigger. Below is a panorama of the Tokyo Metropolitan area which is the home for 38.14 million people.
Tokyo Metro: 38.14 million people (2016). For a high-res photo, click here.
For perspective, here’s a Los Angeles panorama that is home to 3.967 million (2019).
Los Angeles: 3.967 million (2019). There’s no point in having a high-res photo, you get the idea.
If you still can’t wrap your head around it, then below is Macedonia superimposed on the Tokyo Metropolitan area — they’re both about the same size.
Macedonia on the Tokyo Metro area.
Now here’s Macedonia superimposed on Los Angeles.
And you thought your commute was bad.
So far, that’s the plan: an Iran-sized superstate off the West Coast sunny part of North America with about a couple dozen Tokyos thrown in there.
Everybody on this map needs to squeeze into the green area.
I know you must all be having questions:
**How the fuck are you going to get everybody to this new land?
**Great question! — You get every cruise ship and shipping boat in the world and make it into one big migration. Especially with cruise ships! We don’t need those floating petri-dishes entertaining Midwesterners in cargo shorts. No, we need to call Disney and Norwegian and say, “Hey! Rev up those margarita mixers because you’re gonna start saving humanity!” One-way tickets from China to Cali — let’s get rolling, people! I’d say, if it was highly coordinated, we could honestly finish the Great Migration in about a year.
The world population, about 8 billion people, divided by 365 days in a year would be around 21,918,000 people needing to be moved every day by boat.
Fuck it, we’ve done crazier shit.
(Okay, fine, if we spread it over 5 years, it’ll be 4,384,000 people per day arriving.)
**But then, once they start arriving here, where are they going to live?
**Ha! Plan ahead! We’ll have a Master Plan by the time people start setting afoot; we assemble a League of Architects to come together to engineer and design vast regions of this superstate. It’ll be a sprawling utopia because fuck it, we’re starting fresh. And when those Swedes and Aussies arrive, toss them those tractor keys and tell them to get building: there are roads to pave, apartments to build, parks to plant. Let’s get rolling, people! No experience needed! Here’s a fucking hammer Vlad, Jose is waiting for you at the shipyard — chop-chop!
Do you know how many trips to Home Depot this would take
**What would happen to all the land that people left behind?
**Simple! The Eastern Part of the United States can all be repurposed into farmland, Canada will be where monks go to sit on rocks, and Mexico will be for partying and Spring Break.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world will slowly turn back into its old self again, before us pesky humans went about messing it up. Cities would eventually crumble, and plants and animals would make their return to their ancient lands. It wouldn’t take long — below is not in-game footage of the next Last of Us. It is a thriving ecosystem of forest fauna and flora in the abandoned city of Chernobyl.
Drone footage of Chernobyl in 2019 (source)
If shit can grow in radioactive Europe over 30 years, then something must be able to grow in Times Square.
**Okay — what good would come of this plan?
**We got everybody in the same place. Every ethnicity, every religion, every variable is in the same place; they’re mixing — like a melting pot.
No need for a military. We’re in the same place. Who are we going to invade? Ourselves?
No need for prejudice. We’re all in this together. Someday everybody’s skin will look coffee-ish and the walls of identity would fall.
No need to disturb nature. Rainforests would rejuvenate; the birds will come back.
No need for greed or hunger. A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world.
But, but, but… what kind of government would it be?
…
**What… — What would it be like?
**Hmm.
Hmmmm…
…
Like that stereotypical picture whenever you think of world peace.
This writing was partly inspired by Andreessen Horowitz’s blog post “IT’S TIME TO BUILD”. Go give it a read!