What if?
What if we what-if-ed more?
Projecting the future with kids, parents, and partners is effortless. What if I don’t get this project done for work? I won’t get paid. What if my son doesn’t brush his teeth? I’ll be paying for extra visits to the dentist. What if my daughter drives too fast over McFarland Hill? She might hit the ice and slip off the road. What if I have this drink? I’ll be wakey-wakey at 1 AM staring at the ceiling. This kind of what-if-ing is the source of ninety-nine percent of my anxiety.
But there’s another what-if-ing that I like to do that makes me unbelievably curious about the world. It’s thinking about the near future or Black Swan events that may change everything about how humans behave or evolve.
I think AI is a bit of a Black Swan, I mean we kind of knew it was coming, but the amount of change is staggering. Still, the AI conversation is super fun and many of us are starting to see changes already as a result of AI implementations in writing, data analysis, drive-thru fast food, or medicine. I even spent some time trying to get to know myself with AI. I told it all the important things about my character (me) and asked it why my character (me) reacted in a particular way to a particular situation. (Listen, I don’t always know why I do the things I do.) It was, enlightening to say the least, and hauntingly accurate. Anyway, back to the what-ifs, what if we upload our minds so that future generations can remember and learn from our mistakes? How benevolent is that? Lavie Tidhar wrote a what-if short story* based on this concept, The Smell of Orange Groves and I loved every minute of it.
Here’s another what-if. I recently attended a lecture about how the damaging repetition of stereotypical portrayals of females in literature and film, and how this is a result of the patriarchy. So, if you’d gone to an all-female college like I did, it felt a bit like Women’s Studies 101. Though I think women’s studies are vitally important, I found my mind wandering to another conversation I’d had on the sidelines of a soccer field with a sexual reproduction scientist from our local genetics lab. (Doesn’t everyone have one of those?) He asserted females will be able to reproduce with females soon.
That’s hot stuff. Holy game changer, Batman.
What if females were able to reproduce with females? My besties and I would have totally had babies together, the whole group of us.
What if females were able to reproduce with females? We would still wear make-up. I have zero doubt.
What if females were able to reproduce with females? The traditional concept of a family would evolve to include a wider range of family structures with children biologically related to two mothers, further normalizing and legally recognizing diverse family models.
What if females were able to reproduce with females? Reproduction rights and female healthcare would live exclusively under a feminine domain.
That’s cool.
Now, since my writing mentor recently accused me of having ADHD, I’m going to change the subject (Goddamit. It’s dyslexia, Susan!).
Bar Harbor, home of that genetics laboratory I mentioned, is most notably home to Acadia National Park. So, compared to the rest of Maine, Bar Harbor (really the whole of Mount Desert Island) has a bustling economy. In the summer months, we welcome travelers arriving by sailboat, motorboat, motorcycle, airplane, cruise ship, bus, and car. I’m sure I’m missing a mode of transportation. Anyway, we’re busy. We do loads of commerce. We also struggle with what to do with all the cars.
There are annual gripe sessions about traffic and parking where someone always says the following. “What if we put in a toll at the head of the island?” and “What if we ban cars from coming over the bridge onto the island?” For various reasons, these are not great ideas, given the unlikely approval for a municipal toll on a state road that accesses federal lands or devising some method for preventing cars from coming onto the island - ie: bridge removal.
But- what if there’s a solution that lies somewhere between all cars and no cars? What if we invigorated our local bus system and encouraged our visitors to park their cars for their whole visit and ride a bus to their destination (I’m thinking about Kevin Costner out in a cornfield right now). We’d need to have those buses going all the time. We’d need to explain how we’re doing this for the comfort of residents and visitors. We’d need to say, we want to try it a different way.
What if we all started what-if-ing instead of wtf-ing?
Yeah, yeah. ok. Maybe it’s unrealistic to ban the WTFs, but my friend
sent me this, which is only reinforcing my quest for unreality. All silliness aside, I think she means we have to think big in order to make small changes.Do you have what-ifs that you think about?
*The Smell of Orange Groves was suggested to me by speculative fiction writer Cara DiGirolamo who is a treasure trove of deep knowledge about language.