Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2011. The world population figure (more than 7 billion) and the remarks on US health insurance reflect 2011.
I found some time to watch In Time, a film that takes things to an extreme: money has disappeared and the currency is time left to live. It’s a society in which humanity is genetically programmed to live 25 years. If you want to live longer, you have to earn more time by working. A society where the rich live forever and the poor live in fear of dying as their time runs down, because prices rise without warning for the sole purpose of controlling the planet’s population.
The film’s key line is: “For a few to be immortal, many must die.” Believe me when I tell you there is nothing futuristic about this film, because it’s what society is living through right now. Imagine for a moment that the time shown on the characters’ arms is people’s bank account, an account that some burn through quickly while others build it up at the expense of other people’s misfortune and hardship.
Another thing the film shows that resembles reality is that the planet has plenty of time to go around, but if everyone had time, the system would not be sustainable. In our society today there is more than enough money to prevent millions of deaths in countries where average life expectancy is 28 years.
A mission to Mars or a rocket to the Moon costs 10 times more than the money needed to provide food and infrastructure for the whole of Africa. Of course, for developed countries to enjoy the socio-economic standard of living we have, we need to make the most of those countries’ natural resources. There are more than 7 billion of us and we consume the planet’s natural resources beyond what it can bear, so for those resources not to become scarce, and for wealth to be shared out in the first world, people in the third world must die. Nobody takes their lives; they are simply left to their fate in a country that has wealth, which we exploit, while they live in poverty without the means to cure outbreaks of diseases that are very common in the first world but deadly in those countries.
If anyone thinks it’s futuristic that a person with money lives and a poor person dies, we need only look at the US healthcare system, where many people die at the very doors of hospitals because they have no health insurance.
In some countries, a person who loses their job also loses their health insurance. If a member of their family then needs an organ transplant and they can’t pay for it, that person’s fate is death. They simply ran out of time (money).
Are we sure In Time is a futuristic film?
Featured image: Smith's Clock Establishment No 7½ Bowery New York., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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