Group Reflection

When thinking of the future our world will take place in, we thought "what if the world was in a flawed utopia?" Eventually, we narrowed down the idea of our world to be one where a near-world-ending conflict, which resulted in the need for a global power to prevent the potential for international conflicts to occur again. For our world, the incident that nearly sparked an armageddon was the assassinations of world leaders around the world, after successful efforts by the UN were made to cool down the tensions, they took the reigns to be the global power, renaming themselves to the "Planetary Council." In the current setting of our world, the concept of borders has been eroded, allowing for a globalized world. Furthermore, the integration of a universal language and the prohibition of religious expression have done a great job to remove cultural and ethnic-based discrimination. Also, due to the strict enforcement of environmental protection policy by the Planetary Council, climate change has been diverted into a stable environment where extreme weather events are significantly reduced, and food is plentiful.

So far, this society seems to be a utopia: world peace, elimination of world hunger, and strides in medical technologies. The main question is where is the "flaw" in this world. The issue with the world is that if one wrong event, world peace may become evaporated, which can cascade into putting the world back in years of food and medical technologies. Social-based discrimination may be gone, but economical-based systemic discrimination is still prevalent. It has existed before HORIZONS program discovered genetic-based scoring, but it exacerbated it. We had the idea that scoring fetuses based on certain genetic features that the technology would try to predict on their potential for being productive in society would be biased against certain traits. Coupled with the fact that the general population is not aware of such a program, this creates a society that is segregated on certain characteristics that are deemed to be "ideal" or "not ideal." This idea was inspired by eugenics programs from history and how it encouraged abortions based on what was seen as "impure." However, it can be argued that eugenics still occurs in the modern world. The ability for us to screen for things like down syndrome has resulted in abortions. In some countries, female fetuses were also aborted due to patriarchal factors. So in our sci-fi world, these forms of eugenics have been taken to new levels, while the people who are born into a lower class find it hard to ascend, mirroring the cycle of poverty that can be seen in the real-world.

From this point on, critical thinking was crucial while discussing education. We decided to create a public and private school class system using concepts and ideas we have learnt in class (as well as via our own personal experiences), although in this timeframe, they are not very different. Initially, it was intended for this new government to support just those initiatives that were seen as "essential" by society's standards; but, the complexity of that plan led to its abandonment. However, the current system continues to illustrate the core idea we wished to convey, which is a single educational system. We somewhat reverted to taking standardized entrance tests. There was a minimum mark you had to meet depending on the program you wanted to enroll in. We did this to highlight how critically important it is that this new government understand and value the value of education.