Photoshop project

Not sure how we were going to turn this in but I guess it wouldn't hurt to throw it up on the blog anyway.



Reflection:

I was already somewhat familiar with photoshop before I began the project. My bigger concern was where to start. I'm more of a words guy so I'm not used to getting a point across in a single image. Even political cartoons have to use at least a few words to clarify their meaning.

I've always thought there was beauty in chaos. When you have a flood of information coming at you, patterns can emerge. We've heard that in plenty of movies before. But the ultimate form of chaos is a black hole.

Nothing can escape a black hole once it's in range. But as it approaches, everything is collapses under the enormous gravity and eventually is destroyed. Obviously, Earth needs one of these things.

Or at least, that's what some people thought about the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. A bunch of scientists decided to build this huge machine that could duplicate particles that only existed in the trillionths of a second after the Big Band. There was an enormous amount of scientific value to this thing.

The problem was that there was a small chance the LHC could spawn a tiny black hole on the border of France and Switzerland that could swallow the Earth.

Granted, this chance was small. And it was never explained whether the chance of the LHC ending the world was much greater than the chance the world could come to an end at any given time. But still, it makes you think.

However, I started to think that humans are playing God again. All this technology could eventually bring about the end of our species, if not the world. The best example I could think of was from 2001: A Space Odyessy.

In Stanley Kubrick's film, astronauts are left in the care of HAL 9000, the most advanced computer of its day. With their every need satisfied, HAL had time to start considering his existence.

The text I chose is his relative innocuous greeting to the head astronaut. Every morning, even as HAL contemplates eliminating his charges, he maintains a warm façade. This hadron collider, while not a super computer, is still a very aesthetically pleasing machine. And like HAL, the scientists that work with it value it much more than a common data processor.

But eventually HAL concluded that the astronauts had to be killed. For a supercomputer to come to such a conclusion is an unexpected and highly unlikely event, much like the possibility of Earth being consumed by an artificial black hole.

The message I wanted to convey was that it’s very dangerous to covet sophisticated technology. The power to play God as HAL did in the movie or the risk scientists take of possibly destroying the earth through discovery (like nuclear weapons) should not be entered into lightly.