I was kind of bored driving down to San Jose recently, so I decided to come up with a cure for all diseases everywhere, mostly because I was tired of playing "slug bug" with myself.

I figured I'd be able to maybe get started on the beginnings of a way to go about starting to address the issue, but as it turns out I came up with four perfectly workable solutions over the course of an hour and a half. I can only conclude that the rest of you are incredibly lazy.



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Here are my four different ways to end disease and suffering for all time.

Rats

Over and over again, I read about a treatment for AIDS or cancer that has a phenomenal success in laboratory rats, but when it finally gets around to the human-testing stage, it all falls apart. Similarly, treatments have been shown to increase the intelligence and extend the lifespan of rats, and us two-leggers don't appear to be getting a piece of that.

Apparently rats are incredibly easy to cure and enhance. So I'm thinking, why not help the rats help us? Let's pour all our effort into curing rats of every disease and every affliction, extending their lives, enhancing their intelligence and otherwise making them superior to us in every way. Then, presumably, these superintelligent rodents will be grateful enough that they'll turn their mental prowess to the task of doing the same for us. Unless they just lock us in cages and make us run mazes.

Placebos

Is it just me, or are we ignoring the implications of the placebo effect? If sugar pills and saline injections have some efficacy against practically every affliction known to man, maybe we're wasting our time with all this "reproducible results" and "scientific integrity" folderol.

Perhaps, instead, we should be trying to develop the best placebo possible, testing one placebo against another – giving some subjects a placebo and others a placebo placebo – in order to determine the very most convincing nonsense we can muster. I suspect that a few years from now we'll be getting glowing pills the size of walnuts, administered by doctors with monocles and German accents, because the delivery is so darn convincing we'll quickly get better.

Time

Some people have their bodies frozen, in hopes that they'll be revived someday, after death has been eradicated. Others just freeze their head, assuming that by then growing a new body will be easy and/or peasy. I figure, as long as we're assuming that future generations are going to have ludicrously unlikely technology, we may as well go all the way and assume that they're not even going to need your head.

Let's just assume that they'll be able to look back into the past and pluck your unique vibrational frequency from the timestream to revive you. They might not want to revive dead people without permission, though, so you'll need to register at my new site, please-pluck-my-frequency-from-the-timestream.com, for a nominal fee so they'll know in the future that you want this done. That way you can go to your death assured that it will merely be a minor setback.

Warcraft

I can already think of one place where all disease, and indeed death itself, is only temporary: World of Warcraft. And yet, social convention holds that such miracles aren't worth much, because Warcraft isn't "the real world."

I say our priorities are screwed up. Why not just pick the better world, the one where all suffering is impermanent and you never age, even if you stop paying the subscription fee, and call that the real world? Then our characters in the game can laugh at the losers who are obsessed with such unimportant trifles as raising children, going to work and possessing working genitals. Sure, people will still get incurable diseases, just not real people.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a panacea, a panentheist and a panjandrum.

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