Word: utopians
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...Season 4 finale airs May 29, is not like a sitcom or a doctor soap. An elaborate sci-fi/fantasy thriller about plane-crash survivors stranded on an island, it has told a single, wildly complicated story involving--deep breath--time travel, conspiracies, a monster made of smoke, a utopian experiment gone bad, ghosts, polar bears in the tropics, philosophy, metaphysics and a mystical set of numbers that may have to do with the end of the world...
...that goal sounds utopian, it nonetheless came closer to being realized last fall. Even as Kokolopori sought the government's formal designation as a protected nature reserve (a move that may come as soon as June), Tusumba was leading the charge to apply the new conservation techniques more aggressively still to a third place: the Sankuru area. So convincing was he that President Joseph Kabila allowed the nearly 12,000-sq.-mi. (31,080 sq km) region to jump the queue and earn the reserve designation first. Adding that...
...Expectations, then, run high amongst the new chosen ones. In their conversations, they imagine all the utopian schemes of ideal-Harvard. It will be full of the most brilliant, friendly, and beautiful teenagers on the planet. The dorms will be capacious old historical structures with presidents’ names etched in the walls. The professors will all be intellectual titans who lavish students with posh research sinecures and emit pleasant fragrances of lilac to boot. A river of candy and diamonds will course mightily through the center of Harvard Yard on alternate Thursdays, and the sex will be plentiful...
...from the point of view of a current student, to look with amusement at the grand designs that the new freshmen have in store. Certainly there is nothing wrong with a measure of overeagerness and naïveté. But is it possible that the thing which places these utopian expectations so wildly off-mark is their existence in the first place? Or, put differently: do the unmoored expectations of Harvard prefrosh reflexively cancel themselves...
...despite the gloom and doom, science fiction also displays an optimistic view of humanity. Arthur C. Clarke in particular created many utopian societies that ceased to view individuals based on race, religion, or nationality and instead regarded all as members of a shared human species. Clarke believed that peace could emerge if the same energies that result in war and genocide were channeled into space exploration and the eventual colonization of new worlds...