2012’s Stupid, Stupid Plan to Save Humanity
Meet your new carpenter.
5. A society of billionaires is doomed anyway. As Oliver Platt explains, the ark plan needed to be funded privately–otherwise, too many people would learn about it, the secret would get out, and complete anarchy would ensue. Actually, I think he’s got it completely backwards. If you want to keep something secret, fund it via the government. Would anyone really know if all that stimulus money and bailout money really went to build a big boat in Tibet? But if you start telling thousands of private citizens, there’s no way it stays a secret. In any case, in order to raise one trillion on the down-low, the ark people sell tickets to plutocrats for one billion euros a pop. As far as I can tell, these rich people make up the majority of what’s left of the human race. That means we’re all as good as dead. Do you think being a successful businessman (or the trophy wife of a successful businessman) prepares you for post-apocalyptic survival? Most of these people don’t have a single practical skill, and haven’t done a day of manual labor in their lives. Not to mention a lot of them are pretty old, and therefore pretty useless. We don’t need oil sheiks on that boat. We need blacksmiths, doctors, and farmers. We also need a lot more women…
So I wrote this whole section about how the ark appears to be entirely populated by the ultra rich. This is true–the movie gives you the distinct impression that only people who could afford the one billion dollar ticket price survive. But then I had a brainstorm: there are less than 1,000 billionaires in the entire world. And of course, not all of them are going to go for this crazy scheme. All in all, I’d say there are no more than 500 billionaires on those arks, tops. Considering they carry hundreds of thousands of people, it turns out that billionaires are only a tiny part of our new human society.
Of course, that raises the question of who does get to be on these arks, if not paying customers. President Danny Glover mentions at one point that only 12 people in the whole US government know what’s happening, so you’d figure that bureaucrats will not take up a lot of those slots. Oliver Platt very briefly alludes to people being selected on the basis of their wonderful genes, but who the hell knows what that means? Maybe they all have perfect pitch or something.
6. Where are all the ladies? At the end of Dr. Strangelove, the titular doctor spells out his plan for preserving the human race in a series of mineshafts:
With the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.
I’m with Strangelove: any serious plan to preserve our species from extinction has to be centered on sex. We must all be Jon and Kate Plus Eight. But more like Jon and Kate and Katie and Katherine and Caitlyn Plus Thirty. After the apocalypse, we’re down to our last 300,000 people (supposedly each ark could hold 100k). That’s not nothing, but it’s a small enough number, concentrated in one small area, so that extinction is still a threat. We need to be fruitful and multiply. The human race needs uteri. But in the movie’s final scenes, we see a bunch of crowd shots of the survivors, and they seem to be distressingly gender-balanced.
So the government seems to have wasted trillions of dollars and screwed up on every possible level. For somebody who’s a hardcore Democrat, he certainly thinks like a Republican.
Luckily for everyone, I have a foolproof plan for saving the human race. Forget those arks. What we need is this Ark:
Think about it: an army that carries the Ark is invincible! Marcus said so! So all we need to do is draft everyone into a giant World Army, and then get the Ark out of its wooden crate. Problem solved.
You’re welcome, President Glover.
pzed on Thu, 19th Nov 2009 3:46 pmanother stupid thing is the manner in which they tried to save animal species. they took the biblical method of taking 2 of each (at least i didn’t observe more than 2 of anything), and flew them by helicopter up the himalayas. if they animals didn’t die by frostbite, their children would likely die off b/c of the accumulated load of genetic defects from inbreeding.
one might also wonder about the wisdom of inviting so many billionaires on board. since the only capital goods that would survive the catastrophe would be what was aboard the arks, what good would it do to have ppl that wouldn’t be able to contribute to humanity’s survival except by buying things? ok, so those rich ppl could pay a lot of cash for things… what is there to buy? would a saudi prince who inherited his wealth be as useful as a lowly but proficient sewage technician or fisherman?
Matthew Belinkie on Thu, 19th Nov 2009 4:30 pm@pzed – I totally agree with you about the animals! That is indeed a very stupid thing I completely missed.
However, I disagree about the billionaires. Remember, based on the data I got from Forbes, I expect there are only 500 or so billionaires on the arks, out of hundreds of thousands of people. Yes, these plutocrats will probably be dead weight in the post-apocalyptic world, and their money will be completely useless. But the fact remains that Oliver Platt and the gang needed their billions, PRE-apocolypse, to make the whole plan work. By taking the 500 billionaires along, they paid for thousands and thousands of NON-billionaires to survive.
So yes, the Saudi Prince is a lot less useful than the plumber, but taking the Saudi Prince made it POSSIBLE to bring the plumber. I can sort of buy it.
pave on Fri, 20th Nov 2009 2:05 amalso how did no one else on the planet see it coming? where are the tweeters? is woody harrelson the only conspiracy nut around? grr.
Mads Ejstrup on Fri, 20th Nov 2009 5:10 amTo make the ark plan even more stupid the have built them in the Himalaya. I know that there is not many earthquakes in the Himalaya but they a mountains created by a collison of two tectonic plates. Given the nature of the disaster there is a great chance that the Himalaya would become quite unstable.
Brian on Fri, 20th Nov 2009 12:27 pmYes, why have only one place to build your wonderful arks? (Other than the fact that China is about the only country left with any serious ability to fabricate such a thing.)
They had to keep it secret or all we would have done is endlessly debate what to do and who should pay for it. (case in point: health care “crisis”)
What I loved is how all the people that had tickets for the damaged ark were just standing around behind the glass doors. I’ve seen less patient folks at airports, no way they were going to just wait for their boarding call. Especially considering the price of tickets.
And of course the exotic animals were doomed, but did they save any chickens or cattle? Or grain? What are all these people going to eat when the MREs run out?
Finally – the world is trashed, hours away from total devastation, and dude in India can still make cell phone calls? I guess there’s a map for that.
undead astronauts » china welcomes the end of the world (the movie) on Mon, 23rd Nov 2009 11:47 am[...] that bit out of the way, i’m going to critique the movie a bit. at overthinking it, the blogger notes a really critical piece of engineering stupidity. a major plot point for the [...]
Tom P on Tue, 24th Nov 2009 11:44 am4. Why can’t you start the engines until the door closes?
This is in movies way more often then it should be and it annoys me every time. Thank you for pointing it out.
M Chan on Tue, 1st Dec 2009 1:24 amI finally saw this movie today. I distinctly remember a part of the movie explaining that while seats were sold for 1 billion Euro a pop in order to finance the project, the vast majority of people saved were, in fact, ordinary people. The leaders hired geneticists to select the 800,000 (100K per ark) people who would best repopulate the human genetic pool. So it’s not just about how rich you are, but who your parents are (so to speak).
Also: among vehicles that can’t start without the hatch closed: most commercial aircraft and the space shuttle.
M Chan on Tue, 1st Dec 2009 1:27 amP.S. Also, interestingly enough, the movie also heavily implied that all the rich people were assigned the same ark (the so-called green ticket) which ended up being the ark that was damaged. If Oliver Platt had his way and all those people were left behind, then ironically none of the people who financed the project would have been ultimately saved.
Matthew Belinkie on Tue, 1st Dec 2009 4:54 am@M Chan -
Okay, the bit about hundreds of thousands of people being chosen for their genes raises way WAY more questions than it answers. How, exactly, do you go about finding the most genetically perfect people on Earth? Who gets to decide the criteria? Where do you get everyone’s DNA, and how can you analyze it quickly enough? And more importantly, how are these people told? “The bad news: the world is ending. The good news, we’ve stolen your semen, and we’re very impressed.” And how can you POSSIBLY stop these lucky few from leaking the truth to someone? I believe the billionaires keeping it a secret, because they are douches.
And wait a minute: isn’t this EUGENICS? Isn’t there something really creepy about picking who get to survive based on their DNA?
I can definitely understand why the screenwriters decided to skim over this as quickly as possible.
- Matt
Aart on Tue, 1st Dec 2009 9:45 amI stumbled on this site by coincidence. Just wanted to say that I like the kind of perspective you give on films. And thank you for convincing me to watch 2012 after all. It sounds too horrible to pass up.
Charlie on Sat, 5th Dec 2009 2:02 pmZeppelins? Do you know how inefficient that would be? A zeppelin requires a HUGE mass to carry a very small amount of people…