I saw a thing yesterday about how human beings are running 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than they did a hundred years ago.
And this is good information to know if you’re writing time-travel or transmigration stories.
Your character is like "Holy shit, they’re burning up! They’re all sick." And it’s like, "No, they’re not ‘sick’-sick. Not to the point where if you were triaging the situation you would drop everything and treat them as an immediate priority."
"They’re just existing in a near-permanent malaise. Every moment of their life is lowkey uncomfortable. To the point that if you suddenly exchanged bodies with one of them, the consciousness of their pain would shock you."
EXCERPT: It had been a lifetime since he’d felt pain.
Like, he understood emotional angst and that terrible sense of emptiness that can strike now and then. But physical pain had been a distant memory for a long time.
Darkstar looked at the blood welling up from his finger. The red pushing up through a slit in the skin. Almost beautiful in the sheer humanity of it.
And then the pain.
Oh. Shit.
The pain.
The human brain~ he thought. She is one tricky bitch.
Because the brain likes to lie to itself. Likes to take the pain memories and minimize them as small as possible. To the point that a person could have whole swatches of things they don’t remember.
So as he’d gotten more and more invincible, the memories of physical pain had disappeared. To the point, that staring at the cut on his finger, he couldn’t help wondering "Can I die from this?"
And it seemed ridiculous.
He’d seen people doing onsite first-aid before. (Though they usually cringed away from him, his aura overpowering in its nearness.) He’d watched some doctor shows on TV. (Like House-level of actual reality.) He knew how fragile the human body was. (They always came apart in his hands. One little squeeze too hard… It was good that he had Dr. Zee to fix things when he broke them. Otherwise he’d lose his fucking mind.) Humans were so delicate that a single cut could result in a deadly infection.
He stared at the cut and thoroughly recognized that he was a mortal being.
Something he’d missed for so long was returned to him in the most unexpected of ways.
He stared as the blood trickled and flowed and eventually dripped over the edge of his finger to speckle the kitchen floor.
/EXCERPT
Being afraid of infection and taking your or someone else’s temperature and finding out the baselines are completely different from expected.
We run cooler because our immune systems are not being overworked.
People before were exposed to different diseases without immunities or antibiotics, and as a result their brains would set their body’s regulatory settings to ones different from a species optimal baseline. So like, you’d fall into a pond, "catch a chill," and spend the rest of your life nearly dying every time you caught a cold.
Our brains decide the settings, then if you go swimming and you come out of the water, your body would have the whole time tried to maintain a certain temperature for your blood and organs and your extremities. You dry off with a towel and you "warm up" to your body’s preset temperature setting.
And if your body’s optimal settings haven’t been messed with, you’d run cooler like modern people.
And maybe I’m wrong, I imagine if your body temperature baseline is higher than the modern setting, you would be extra cold in winter. More likely to go hypothermic if you don’t wear warm enough clothes.
And like, the way the world is heading–into the New Dark Ages–there are going to be more and more people with dysregulated temperature settings. As medical care ceases to be accessible, more and more people will be exposed to the kind of viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms that leave permanent damage to the human brain.
It’s sad.
As kids, adults would have us drink out of the garden hose. We would watch kids movies where the kids would make and sell lemonade using water from the garden hose. It was both normalized and introduced to children as "something kids do."
Children learn from what they see. And if no one explains why something is problematic or criminal, a child might not ever consciously absorb that what they see is a wrong thing. They just don’t know any better.
Which means that there needs to be edutainment content. More correct examples people can point to.
At the very least, when a show has someone doing something dangerous, another character could point out how dangerous it was. So the character can have the realization that they could have hurt themself or even died.
I’m sure it would bring satisfaction to the viewer to be able to see some personal growth in the character’s they’re watching.
~Harper Kingsley
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