Best Animated Movies Ever

Best Animated Movies Ever No 6

WALLE (2008)

Would Cockroaches Really Survive a Nuclear Apocalypse?

 The 2008 film "Wall-E" depicted Earth as a post-apocalyptic wasteland with nothing on it but the abandoned remnants of human society and a forlorn, trash-compacting robot. The titular robot’s only living company is a surprisingly adorable pet cockroach named Hal, Pixar’s nod to the popular myth that cockroaches will outlive us all.

Despite Hal’s sympathetic portrayal, many people think cockroaches are pretty gross.

But the creepy crawlies do have a reputation for resilience, likely contributing to the belief that they could even survive a nuclear bomb and subsequent radiation exposure.

Media reports have suggested that the cockroach myth stems from rumors that insects thrived in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But School of Population and Global Health professor Tilman Ruff, a Nobel Laureate who studies the health and environmental consequences of nuclear explosions, says he has yet to see any documented evidence that there were cockroaches scuttling through the rubble.

“I’ve certainly seen photographs of injured people in Hiroshima that have lots of flies around, and you do imagine some insects would have survived,” professor Ruff says. “But they still would have been affected, even if they appear more resistant than humans.”

US TV series "Mythbusters" tested the cockroach survival theory in 2012 when they exposed cockroaches to radioactive material. The roaches survived longer than humans would have, but they all died at extreme levels of radiation.

School of Biosciences professor Mark Elgar says the results of the "Mythbusters" test are incomplete because they only looked at how many days the cockroaches lived after exposure. They didn’t look at the cockroaches’ ability to produce viable eggs, thus ensuring the continued survival of the species.

“There is some evidence that they seem quite resilient to gamma rays, although they are not necessarily the most resistant across insects.”

“You could argue,” professor Elgar adds, “that some ants, particularly those that dig nests deep into the ground, would be more likely to survive an apocalypse than cockroaches.”

Previous tests of insects subjected to radiation found that cockroaches, though six to 15 times more resistant than humans, would still fare worse than the humble fruit fly.

Professor Elgar says the feral American and German species of cockroach—the ones you might recognize from your kitchen nooks and crannies—have given the rest of the species a bad rap.

“I think our view of cockroaches is informed by our frequent interaction with the American and German cockroaches, which have spread throughout the world,” professor Elgar says. “Their habit of basically acting as an unpaid house cleaner horrifies people.”

There are more than 4,000 species of cockroaches, however, including native Australian cockroaches marked by iridescent colours and patterns.

“Some of the Australian bush cockroaches are really lovely looking insects, which might change people’s perspectives,” he says. “The Mardis Gras cockroach, for example, has got these lovely yellow patterns on its plates and bright blue legs with little black spots.”

Cockroaches breed quickly, lay large numbers of eggs and are harder to kill with chemicals than other household insects—all traits that could contribute to the popular belief that they could withstand anything, even a nuclear bomb.

“They are quite well defended. If you try and squish a cockroach it usually gives off an unpleasant smell that acts as a pretty effective deterrent for anything attempting to capture them,” professor Elgar says. “They’re flat, so they can escape into places you can’t easily access.”

Cockroaches feed off the detritus of other living organisms, however; so professor Elgar questions whether they would be able to thrive without humans and other animals. “For a while they’ll be able to eat dead bodies and other decaying material but, if everything else has died, eventually there won’t be any food. And they’re not going to make much of a living,” professor Elgar says. “The reality is that very little, if anything, will survive a major nuclear catastrophe, so in the longer term, it doesn’t matter really whether you’re a cockroach or not.”

Nuclear explosions affect living things in a range of ways, from the impact of the initial blast to the ionizing radiation released into the air.

All organisms are affected by ionizing radiation because it permanently damages DNA, the complex molecular chains that determine who we are and what we pass on to others.

“It knocks the electrons off atoms and changes the chemistry of things,” says professor Ruff.

Low and prolonged doses of ionizing radiation can lead to diseases like cancer and increase the risk of a range of chronic conditions, particularly cardiovascular disease. High doses can kill cells.

Nuclear explosions are also especially damaging because radioactive substances can accumulate and recycle through the environment—in freshwater systems, the ocean, and the earth.

They also concentrate up the food chain, so animals at the top of the food chain may contain levels of radioisotopes thousands of times higher than in their environment. So even if an organism is less susceptible initially, it’s still part of an ecosystem that has been damaged.

“The evidence from a disaster like Chernobyl is that every organism, from insects to soil bacteria and fungi to birds to mammals, would experience effects in proportion to the degree of contamination,” professor Ruff says. “There’s less biological abundance, less species diversity, higher rates of genetic mutation, more tumors, more malformations, more cataracts in their eyes, shorter life spans, and reduced fertility in every biological system.”

In the past, scientists theorized that the more complex an organism, the more likely they were to be affected by nuclear radiation. So humans would fare worse and insects would do better.

But professor Ruff says that focusing on a single species misses the complexity of the biological environment and how we relate to one another, as well as interactions between multiple stresses at the same time.

“There’s all sorts of factors we have to look at. There are environmental factors. There are chronic exposures, effects across generations, and food shortages, for example,” he says. “The magnitude of effects of a nuclear explosion is far greater than what you might see in carefully controlled experiments and laboratory conditions.”

So, everything points to the conclusion that no, cockroaches ultimately wouldn’t survive a nuclear apocalypse.

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02

BnL Corp. in “WALL·E” (2008)

Title: BnL Corp., Buy n Large Corporation Type: international conglomerate, worldwide leader in the fields of aerospace, agriculture, construction, consumer goods, corporate grooming, earth transport, electronics, energy, engineering, finance, food services, fusion research, government, hydro-power, infrastructures, inventions, media, medical science, mortgage loans, pet care, pharmaceuticals, psychotherapies, ports and harbors, real estate, repairs, retail, robotics, science/health, space, storage, super centers, super grids, travel services, utilities, and watermillsSlogan: “Happiness is what we sell!”

Movie: “WALL·E” (2008) by Andrew StantonLogo Author: unknown / film crew Typeface: unknown sans-serif

03

WALL-E's Indictment of Liberalism

The lead character in the Pixar film “WALL-E” is both an acronym (Waste Allocation Load Lifter—Earth class) and a lonely robot with a personality. While Pixar has mastered the art of animation, it is the implicit message this film conveys which makes it much more than a mere cartoon.

Some conservatives have written the film off as anti-capitalist propaganda. If the intent of capitalism is to cater to the basest instincts of the human heart, requiring us to indulge our every whim and desire, leading to a dependence on government, then I guess I, too, am an anti-capitalist. However, capitalism can only arrive at that end when all of the restraints of personal responsibility are removed. In this sense, WALL-E is a brilliant exposure of liberalism’s flaws.

WALL-E is the story of what results when a liberal vision of the future is achieved: government marries business in the interest of providing not only “the pursuit of happiness” but happiness itself, thus creating gluttonous citizens dependent on the government to sustain their lives. The result is a humanity consisting of self-absorbed, isolated individuals with no affection for others, who thus defy what it means to truly be human.

The movie begins 700 years after the last human has been forced by undisciplined consumerism—and the waste in its wake—to leave the planet. An army of robots (WALL-Es) then sets out to clean up man’s mess. One might immediately surmise that the creators of the movie received their inspiration from Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Not so fast. While in the storyline humans certainly have laid waste the planet, and the government’s answer to the crisis is the removal of humans (which is also Al Gore’s solution), 700 years after the last human has left the planet it becomes quite clear that the earth needs humans just as much as humans need the earth. After all, in the Bible we learn that humans were created as caretakers for the planet: “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15).

WALL-E exposes a fundamental flaw in the liberal worldview. In their well-intended desire to lift people out of despair, liberals often fail to factor in the depravity of the human heart. Offer a man the opportunity to get something for little or nothing and the ultimate end will be a man who believes himself entitled to everything for little or nothing. The Buy ’n Large metaphor in WALL-E is not an attack on capitalism. It’s an attack on the government’s co-opting of the entrepreneurial initiative of its citizens, micromanaging it through mandated outcomes and compulsory taxes to the point that there is no longer an incentive for individuals themselves to produce.

As the government usurps the role of producer, it creates citizens who are fat and lazy consumers, entitled and dependent, with no sense of their own responsibility to make any contribution at all to their well-being. In WALL-E’s world we’re all consumers, and an economy with only consumers and no producers cannot be sustained, no matter how many “tax rebates” the government provides to encourage even more consuming.

Rather than deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed, contemporary government derives its powers through the seeming benevolent control of the governed to which we readily consent because it feels so good. Liberating ourselves from our addiction to government benevolence requires the hard work of personal responsibility, a lesson that for the most part isn’t being taught in our public educational institutions or in the decisions handed down by our judicial system.

If the explicit message of WALL-E is an exposure of liberalism’s ultimate end, the implicit message is the essence of conservatism. Conservatism derives its name from its fundamental tenet: to conserve, to maintain the status quo, which often requires a returning to the practices and policies of an earlier time.

Liberals recoil at the notion that something earlier or older could possibly be better. After all that’s why most liberals would rather be known as progressives. But progress devoid of an historical orientation, based only in our fascination with the novel and a rejection of all things classic, may take you into a promising future but ultimately brings you back to earth and the reality that what has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

Additionally, WALL-E is an appeal to return to our humanity, to free ourselves from captivity to an ever encroaching technology. Human beings need real conversation, not communication mediated through an electronic device. In this sense WALL-E is an Orwellian depiction of the future we are even now living, one where there is a whole lot of communication taking place but very little conversation, and no love. In the process, the robots have become what humans ought to be—relational and loving—and humans have become robots, disinterested and unaware that anything at all is occurring outside of their limited technological universe.

Resisting the siren song of technology will require all out war against it, not just merely a passive resistance. It means tuning out, turning off, shutting down, unplugging. It means, in essence, being unavailable. It means that when you reach out and touch someone you actually do. The personal liberty promised by the gadgets bequeathed to us by the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have in reality enslaved us to an anticipation of the next personally liberating device.

WALL-E is a call to an armed resistance against two very real enemies. First, government control of every aspect of our life and second, our own depraved hearts which are so easily lulled into a technologically-induced passivity. The second threat creates the opportunity on which the first threat capitalizes. Conquer the second threat and you’ve eliminated the first. We have met the enemy, and he is us.