Friday, September 07, 2007

Question of the Weekend....

The set up

You are a truck driver. You are carrying a load of highly flammable liquid when you realize that your truck is accelerating and your brakes don't work. You crash through a guard rail and are headed towards a large cities natural gas supply. If you hit the gas depot the whole city will blow-up killing millions of people. You need to crash the truck before you hit the gas depot.

There are six buildings between you and the gas depot. You must crash into one of them to save the town. You are going to fast to serve and avoid them all. If you jack knife the truck you will blow up all six buildings but if you hit any one head on you will only kill the people in that building.

Each building has 2500 people in it.

Building one: Red Cross Relief Center: Housing families misplaced by the civil war in Africa's Sudan. Many people are leg less due to landmines and extremely poor.

Building Two: School for special needs children. Almost all of the children have severe mental and physical disabilities.

Building Three: Half way house for recovering drug addicts.

Building Four: Minimum Security Prison for Women

Building Five: Church with an extremely devote following of Christians.

Building Six: Nursing Home with a small research center doing ground breaking work on dementia. There are only 5 researchers on site at the time.

What building do you crash into and why?

If you had to rank the buildings 1-6 what would be your order? Why?

I love questions and how they make us challenge assumptions and values. I will post my answer to these questions on Monday morning. Love to see what you all have to say in the mean time...

Have a great weekend:)

10 comments:

Unknown said...

Brian ...
You need to find a religion!
I am praying for you....
In God we can Trust

Maggie Moo said...

Building 6 because there are only 5 people in it. Dementia isn't an infectious disease so I would feel ok with that.

Next I would choose building 1 for reasons that won't make me popular. I've said that we need to help our nation before helping others, and this goes hand in hand with my feelings on that.

Building 3 would be next then building 5. No reason just had to pick them and last would be building 5. They may be annoying but I'm pretty sure they aren't doing significant harm to society by being alive.

the Book of Keira said...

I'd start with building six because people with demetia are fun and we shouldn't cure fun.

Then, I'd knock off the church full of christians because they would be the most forgiving.

Then building four because they HAD their chance and blew it.

Then building two because although it's awful, it may also be a blessing in disguise for some.

Then building three because these people fought for themselves and can still have a future.

Then building one because these people have lived horror first hand and have grown stronger for it and I think the world needs more people willing to take a stand.

Where in this list is the building full of Republicans?

Ma said...

this is never going to happen - I hate driving large vehicles.... I don't even drive small one's anymore, unless you count my bike
and seriously you think too damn much... stick to the beautiful poetic stuff you posted earlier please - that's the stuff that makes me smile!
:)

Natty said...

building 3 dammit ...addicts are addicts dammit..drugged up so they will feel no pain ...woohoo..lol

Rocketstar said...

6 - They are on their last legs anyway...
5 - Hey, they all get to go to heaven, they should happy.
2 - A lot of resource consumption for ... ?
1- same as 2
4 - had to rank you at some point
3 - these folks are sick, not damaged

Is their an option to hit the city gas depot, at least then you wouldn't be "choosing" which die.

Sarah said...

ick. i can't rank them all. it's hard enough choosing # 6 to crash into.

Brutus said...

If I were this truck driver, I would not know anything about the 2,500 people in each building. I would probably not even know what each building was for. Except the church which would be recognizable as a church. So unless it was a Sunday morning, I'd take out the church because it would probably be empty. If it was Sunday morning... I'd take the building the farthest to my right. I would not and could not judge the worth of one building's inhabitants over another's so if I could not make any assumptions about which was least populated, I'd just pick one and the farthest to my right is as arbitrary a criteria as any. If I play by Brian's rules, I'd go for building six because most of them are pretty much done for anyway and researchers are a dime a dozen. Hey Mags, there are 2,500 people in every building - building six has 5 researchers and 2,495 other people, presumably not as valuable to society as researchers.

lauren said...

Building five - If they are truly devout Christians, they will welcome the chance to give up their lives to save the lives of so many others, in addition to the fact that they'll be that much closer to meeting their maker.

Following that, buildings 6, 2, 4, 3 and 1, for various reasons, including the the potential for those in each building to contribute something worthwhile to the world after experiencing an event like a truck full of explosives crashing into a nearby building.

Brianinmpls said...

Thanks everybody for the wonderful comments:) I love my blogger buddies.....And explanining why I really missed her and saving me a lot of typing my answers where the exact same as Laurens...welcome back:)