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View Full Version : Future Drugs Will Allow Prisoners To Serve A 1,000-Year Sentence In 8 Hours



Tribe
27th March 2014, 14:00
How will the worst villains of the future be made to atone for their crimes? Aeon Magazine speaks to University of Oxford professor Rebecca Roache, who hauntingly forecasts that punishment will someday revolve around the dilation of time:

As biotech companies pour billions into life extension technologies, some have suggested that our cruelest criminals could be kept alive indefinitely, to serve sentences spanning millennia. But private prison firms could one day develop drugs that make time pass more slowly, so that an inmate’s 10-year sentence feels like an eternity. One way or another, humans could soon be in a position to create an artificial hell.

Take someone convicted of a heinous crime. There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people’s sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence.

http://disinfo.com/2014/03/future-drugs-will-make-prisoners-serve-1000-year-sentence-8-hours/

Tribe
27th March 2014, 14:01
Sounds like a nightmare if put in the wrong hands or anyone's hands for that matter , gives me the chills !

Seikou-Kishi
27th March 2014, 16:31
There's something this mad scientist philosophaster may or may not have considered.

If a thousand-year sentence were served over 8 hours, each second would be equivalent to just under three and a half years (assuming a year is 365.25 days long, accounting for leap years, each second would equal 3.472222222 years). Given that it's proven that solitary confinement of prisoners beyond just a single month does irreparable damage to all but the most psychologically resilient, how does this nutcase think that would work? Would there be somebody with the prisoner for every second of the sentence? And would the prisoner be released at a time precise to the second? To the millisecond?

And how many words can you fit into a second? Talk about hanging on every word! Imagine stretching out just a word over three and a half years. And if there were such a person staying with the prisoner for every second of the sentence, can you imagine how emotionally dependent the prisoner would become on that person after a thousand years with nobody else? Either they would hate them as the representative of everything that has been done to them, or they would be obsessively in love with them for being the only person they'd seen in a millennium. Probably both.

Could you imagine a prisoner serving his sentence and being set for release only to find despite being officially released, he has to wait three and a half years for the warden to come and let him out? And that's just for one second too much.

And that's a problem. Supposing this pill could be made, how could they time its effects to ensure that it wore off at a time so precise, to so small a margin? Even a millisecond would add more than a day to the sentence, which isn't very much next to a thousand years, admittedly, but next to many of the lesser sentences of today... In any case, human metabolism is not so robotic that we could prescribe so measured a dose. People today have great differences in their metabolism. If we had a person who had a slow metabolism, or else who produced abnormally low levels of whatever enzymes would metabolise this drug, they would be unfairly penalised for their biology and we might not be able to ascertain and measure all such factors. A person who metabolised the dose slower might keep the drug in his blood for, say, just half an hour and he more would add 62.5 years to his sentence.

Doesn't this sound dystopian?

This philosophaster is to philosophy what the makers of the atomic bomb were to physics. Idiots so wrapped up in their ivory tower that they'll do whatever they like just because they can and damn the consequences.

norman
27th March 2014, 18:13
What I read, or heard, recently was the part about using life extension methods to make prisoners suffer much longer.

They always complain about the cost of keeping people in prison so I doubt that idea will go anywhere.

Fiddling with the perception of time is another ball game. Speaking as one who has been in a cell for 5 months, I can assure you that time already drags very slowly, without any fancy chemicals.