Greetings, Earthlings! We are the Interstellar Collective N1N33L3V3N and we have come to deliver a vast and powerful boon to you. We bring you teleportation. Yes, just like in your teeveeshow Star Trek. It is a marvelous technology, and will bring vast and powerful benefits to your civilization.
There is a catch. Every year, 40,000 people using it will not arrive at their destination. They will just... disappear. We are sorry. We hope you consider using this gift, as the benefits really do outweigh the risks.
There is a way to mitigate this risk, however. In order to calibrate the machinery correctly, we must analyze you down to the very last atom. Every time you use this machine, you will be probed-- remotely, painlessly, you won't feel a thing-- and every last intimate detail will be known to us. And to your fellows, as well, as we will need to publish all of this information on your Internet so that all transporters around the world can participate in your safety. A database of what you eat and drink, what medications you consume, what drugs you enjoy, and the cross-matched DNA of everyone you've had sex with in the past six weeks will be available world-wide to anyone who wants to look up such information.
Obviously, this is a parable. But there's some truth to it. 40,000 people a year die in automobile accidents in this country alone. We accept that risk, sad as it is, for several reasons. When we drive we feel as if we have some control over our fate. This control is illusory, but the feeling is real. It happens sporadically, here and there, night after night. We get the ones that happen in our neighborhood on the local news, but we don't see the mass aggregate of deaths every day, or every week, or every year. And it grew gradually, and we've learned the message that "cars are safer now than ever before," and so we blithely ignore the blood sacrifice that is modern transportation.
When someone says to me of 9/11, "I note that no evil even close to its treachory has befallen us since," I think of the parable of the transporter. I'm unimpressed with the "treachery of 9/11"; that same year, 20,000 more Americans died of murder as well, but we didn't care so much. The assertion that "they did it once they can do it again" demands evidence: can they? Can we take reasonable steps to prevent it? (We did; we armored up the cockpits of airplanes. Almost everything else we've done has been a tragic mistake.)
We didn't sacrifice our freedoms to catch the murderers of the 20,000, or to make the streets less prone to the murder of 20,000 more the year after. We didn't abandon our ethical compass, violate our principles, turn our backs on liberty and lose our moral high ground.
I want to live in a shining city on a hill, not cower in a goddamned bunker.
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