BEING AWESOME

I just finished watching the movie "The man from Earth", it's a low budget sci-fi indie movie but it completely blew me away. The plot follows a small group of University professors having a spontaneous get together/goodbye party for one of the professors, John Oldman, who is leaving the school. John poses the hypothetical question: How would a 14 000 year old paleolithic man be like if he walked the earth today? Given the expertise of the professors in the room (anthropologists, biologists, archeologists, psychologists etc), his question sparks an extremely interesting discussion. But as the conversation continues he starts insinuating that he is the 14 000 year old man.

The movie is great, I definitely recommend it to any who likes to challenge their beliefs, and their brains. And even more so if you're in to sci-fi books and the likes. However good the movie might be, the idea behind it is what fascinates me. It's mind-boggling. There are so many things I would like to ask a man who is that old, just imagine how much he (or she for that matter) could teach us, not to mention the awesome camp fire stories of hunting mammoths, dining with the ancient Romans and painting with Van Gogh. Imagine the amount of knowledge he has had time to acquire during his lifetime, the things he has seen, the people he has met and places he has visited. I can't grasp the implications of such a life span, my mind is still to limited, but it fascinates me.

He is a man whose life has stretched further in time than that of most (if not all) civilizations known to us, he has lived through the shifts in culture and experienced so many religions. Seeing as our society today is highly effected by the evolution of the Abrahamic religions starting more than 3000 years ago, and that our culture and traditions are a strongly linked to that history, I can not even begin to grasp what kind of insights a 14 000 year old man might have. He has experienced the evolution that has shaped our society and religions. Talk about "thinking outside the Box". And I find it hard to believe that a hypothetical person like him would conform to a religion, he "knows" what they're all about, he has experienced them all and probably worshiped hundreds of gods during his life. He has seen all the atrocities performed in the name of religions throughout human history – not to mention the Abrahamic ones. And he as lived long before all the prophets of our "modern" religions, he might even have met them. It would be hard to imagine that a man like that would idolize people like many of us do the prophets (or Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan).

I feel like I could keep discussing and pondering this subject forever, but I only have another couple of decades so I wanna have time for a few other things as well. Although it is worth thinking about, a lot.

To conclude, what would you ask him, if you had one question?

Answer with a comment and watch the movie!

- Philip