"Soylent Green, Part II" Topic

Here's an incredibly depressing topic for you people.

After listening to Heston's final words in "Soylent Green" . . .

YouTube link

. . . I could not help but wonder:

When he says "you've gotta tell people" and "we've gotta stop them, somehow", "next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle, for food", do you think anything would have come from his discovery?

Would the general population have rebelled (after revolting) against the privileged ones, only to revert to cannibalism again, but without the orderly methods that brought about Soylent Green?

Would it degrade further, as gangs fight and kill other gangs for food (similar to the last days of Easter Island/Rapa Nui)? That would make for a very morbid game, wouldn't it?

What are your thoughts on that, based on the situation at that very moment (not based on today's situation)?

Dan
YouTube link
TMP link
TMP link

Don't forget the human version of CJD!
I think that heston didn't get it, humans had become just another recyclable product.

There were already food riots in the movie IRC

And C.H.U.D.'s would rule the world…

Guns seemed to be sparse in the movie. The older folks eeems toi have acred. The younger ones seeemed to have been mostly concerned with surviving. Hard to say. The Police were over worked and understaffed. A rebellion would have had some success even if only locally.

Thanks,

John

We're going to go the way of Easter Island. It's written in the stars.

John: "A rebellion would have had some success even if only locally."

But the question is, would things be any better after a major or general uprising?

Dan

"Well, ya know. It kinda sucks that it's people and all…

"Still, we HAVE been eating it this long, and with a little lemon juice and some black pepper…"

I guess it depends on the 'actual' breakdown of the human bodies into 'food/soylent green'.

If the bodies were dissolved by yeast or bacteria or pond scum into 'nutrients' or whatever…how it that different than 'creamating folks and using their ashes as 'fertilizer' for growing soy beans????? (shades of 'circle of life talk' between Simba and his dad about the antelope and the grass????

If we'ere talking about running them thru the 'meat-grinder'….or freeze-dryer….that might be a different story….or not???

Slishfully,
Sgt DWW-btod

read Harry Harrison..

"Make room make room" has city vs country water wars, congressional filibustering in the face of disaster, millions of people without health care, acidified seas.
and he was writing about 1999.

oh. wait.

Nov 25th "The Road" comes out in the theater I just got the book have not started it yet but I think thats what the story is about (sounds very drepressing)
Loved Soylent Green not sure if the government would breed people I guess it would depend on how bad it got and how much you wanted to survive.

IIRC at the end of Soylent Green Heston's character is in a church full of the downtrodden… and maybe a few police/paramedics… I doubt his rants fell on anything but deaf ears. So things just continued as they were.

I'd expect there'd be some sort of mass sterilization product to reduce human population… if they were sensible.

It was the film *Soylent Green" that stopped me eating a MacDonalds. I realised I had never seen a lorry delievering supplies to MacDonalds.

What they probably do to process "product" to make Soylent Green is probably the same thing they do to turkey necks to make "ground turkey".

Realistically, you can't effectively breed humans for food. Takes years (at 3 meals a day) for them to reach breeding size, ditto for slaughter weight unless you accept Swift's modest proposal. Feed to weight ratio in the hundreds, compared to 2-3 for chickens, 3-5 for pork, 8-12 for cattle, all of which can be fed on biomass indigestible to humans. Humans are like deep water fish – once you've devoured the existing stock, they take awhile to replenish (but it is a two birds with one stone sort of solution to too many mouths). Rats or cockroaches would be more effective renewable protein sources if you stupidly ate all of your breeding livestock before resorting to cannibalism or killing off the food competition (yes, I just said you should kill and eat your fellow man *before* you run completely out of food – welcome to dystopian survivalism).

Harrison's novel (check the date) was a tract in favor of the (then) newly available cheap, safe, and effective birth control – which certain religious groups still oppose. The math states that livable environment is finite, man's reproductive capacity less so, and there will be a rather ugly bit of aftermath if the two numbers attempt to overlap. Overpopulation is an inevitably self-correcting problem.

Personally,I would think that with a complete breakdown of any health care, malnutrition and pollution,coupled with a dense population as depicted in the movie,that some sort of virus would take care of quite a few of those extra mouths.Black Death,the sequal?

"Nov 25th "The Road" comes out in the theater I just got the book have not started it yet but I think thats what the story is about (sounds very drepressing)"

Nope- Not to spoil it, but it's a pretty undescribed disaster that resembles a massive firestorm across the USA ( Asteroid near miss in atmosphere? ), and the cannibalism there is all done by democratic, grass-roots movements – no government involved. :)

It is sort of self-correcting

You might want to give the latest edition of The Economist a read

What Rubber Suit Theatre said. It's interesting to me, having grown up in the '60s, that you never hear the term "overpopulation" anymore, even though it's still a huge problem in many areas worldwide.

Yeah, in the 60's and 70's everything was about overpopulation. Now, not a lot.

Dan, with the state of the planet I doubt much of anything would change.

Thanks,

John

Here's how they manufacture Soylent Green (Or rather what they could show): YouTube link
If that factory is like any other meat processing plant, they use everything: Meat, offal, bones. There would be no waste whatsoever.
On the other hand, cannibalism is a very deadly practice. It's the reason we suffer from the scourge of Mad Cow disease and probably others we don't know about yet. I'm fairly sure that some form of Mad Cow wiped the Anasazi here in North America for example.

If you take Soylent Green as a metaphor for redistribution of wealth, then I think you have Heston leading a popular uprising that leads to continued promises to phase soylent green out once the crisis is over. Which of course never happens.