These questions are from Brad. He likes to give me at least one really hard question, but it’s good. Makes me think.
1. You’re at a party and a company president mentions that they need someone just like you at their very lucrative and stable company. They want to DOUBLE your current salary. The only drawback is that there is a lot of travel involved in the job. It’s very interesting work, but you’d be gone from home 4 days per week. Do you take the job?
Absolutely. Given that I’ve got nothing tying me down right now, I would love to have a job that included travel- I don’t see that as a drawback at all.
2. A photographer notices you at a restaurant and gives you her card. She is compiling a book of women of all shapes and sizes, and wants you to be part of it. It is a nude book, and not pornography. She is paying $1500 for one photoshoot. Would you go? If not, is there an amount of money that would change your mind?
I’d tell her I needed to think about it, but I’d probably do it. It’d take a lot of talking me into it by my friends, but I’d do it. I have no problem with nudity for the sake of art. There would, however, be stipulations as to exactly how the images would be allowed to be used.
3. You’re walking along the pier and notice something is wrong. You hear shouts from a kid about his pets and look over the side of the pier to see a cat and a dog, both struggling in the water. What do you do? Do you jump in and save one, or call for help? If you jump in, which would you save (it can be only one, sorry)?
Assuming no malevolence on the part of the child caused the animals to be in the water, I’d yell for help, and also jump in. I would not conciously choose which one I would save. I’d save whichever one I go to first, and hope that both myself and the kid yelling for help got someone else to jump in and save the other one.
4. It’s 4:00am and you’re heading home from a friend’s house. You come to a red light and there isn’t anyone in sight. You’re very tired. Do you run it?
Nope.
5. What’s next in evolution on this planet? There were dinosaurs here once, but they didn’t impact the Earth like man. What will happen to us in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years?
Well, this question is sort of hard given my religious beliefs, but based on some basic science I can give you my thoughts on it (but I think that they may come off as a bit “sci-fi nerd”). As you pointed out, humans have had much more impact on this planet than any other species. We force our environment to adapt to us, rather than adapting to our environment. So I think there are a few paths that could be followed- either we’re going to “destroy” this planet and kill ourselves in the process, “destroy” it and find somewhere else to live- space stations, other planets, what have you- or we’re going to learn how to lessen our impact on the world around us. I think in any case, whether we’re gone, or we’re here and have learned to quit killing everything to suit our own purposes- which is why I used “destroy” in quotes- I think that in the much larger, millenia-spanning evolutionary sense, life is resilient. Any plants and animals that haven’t been driven to extinction will flourish again, and I think that Earth has the definite potential to go back to a state similar to what it was before humans forced ourselves upon it.