I've been watching episodes of the old Buck Rogers serial, on TCM. Not regularly, but I've caught a few of the installments of the old Saturday matinee short feature.
The acting and cinematography are not up to Citizen Kane standards - but I've gathered that the 1930s Buck Rogers serial was more of a potboiler, than conceived as a great work of the cinematic arts. Special effects are, all things considered, pretty good.
Yes, they show Saturn appearing out of the clouds of outer space, spaceships sound like they're run by lawnmower engines, and we haven't had control systems that big and unwieldy for decades. But then, today's on-screen science fiction is - no, I am not going to get off-topic.
Where, oh, where does Hollywood keep coming up with these new ideas? And that's yet another topic. Sort of.
The point is, we've got a fairly small number of standard-issue, generic, plug-in-your-character, science fiction "futures" by now. Nothing wrong with that, I think - as long as a writer - and readers - remember that science fiction/speculative fiction/whatever is a quite - mature? - genre by now.
I've been playing with a setting of the Buck Rogers/Star Wars flavor. (Yes - George Lucas knew about B.R., I've got fans in my family) I've mentioned Galaxy Cadet before. I'm fighting my OCD tendencies, successfully for the most part, and trying to remember how much fun I had, decades back, with the Star Trek universe. Pre-movies.
It's a good excuse for me to dust off my ambition to do a readable comic book.
These days, happily, I don't have to try to kid some publisher that it'll be the next [fill in your favorite series]. Yet one more topic.
Many GEICO commercials play with a disconnect between the (once) popular notion that "cavemen" were "primitive" - and what we've been learning about people who lived before some maniac got the bright idea of planting seeds and waiting for them to grow.
For example, about 800,000 years ago people in one place, at least, lived in a place with a distinct kitchen. Granted, it didn't have a GE Energy Star Dishwasher: but the residence had areas for specific functions like food preparation.
The people who lived there most likely looked a bit like the fellow in that picture. We call folks like him Homo Erectus, and around 1,000,000 years ago our ancestors almost certainly looked a bit like that.
I'm not bothered by the idea - but then, I've seen old family photos. I look a bit like my ancestors: but not quite. For example, on the Campbell side, we lost the characteristic 'wry mouth' several generations back.
Change happens.
The more we learn about our distant ancestors, the more like us they seem - in my opinion. As I wrote in another blog, about that stone age kitchen:
"...But - human? Pretty much like me, basically? I don't see why I shouldn't think so. Their brains were between half and two thirds as massive as ours, on average, but that archeological dig shows that they may have thought more-or-less the same way we do.
That artist's impression doesn't look 'human?' I'm not so sure. You're not likely to see that expression in people's photos today, outside supermarket tabloids, but think of him saying something like, "you want three rocks? You carry one!"
For decades after World War II ended, the idea of replacing most of us with superior human beings was 'well known' to have been the work of those nasty German Nazis.
Since by then many people seemed to realize that they weren't on the 'preferred' list, improving the race wasn't a very popular concept. In fact, if you were around then, or your parents were, your skin may have crawled when you read "Nazis" and "improving the race."
It hasn't always been that way.
Right up until the national socialist party in Germany started 'improving' the human race - arguably, until places like Auschwitz and Dachau hit the news - applying modern science and Victorian ideals to weed out inferior classes and pep up the race seemed like a really good idea.
At least among well-bred, educated Englishmen and their cousins in America.
Science fiction written before WWII had quite a number of examples of what the new-and-improved human race would be like:
"...Over all, John comes across as a sort of socialist version of the Nietzschean ideal with a couple of the rougher edges rubbed off. In other words, human morality has no call on him, but he occasionally feels mild guilt. This is supposed to indicate his superior moral plane, but he comes across more as an odious, amoral little tick. Stapledon assumes that human superiority over lesser animals is quantitative rather than qualitative. In other words, we enjoy our position over the animals because we have more of some quantity called intelligence rather than some unique quality; be it sentience, self-awareness, or an immortal soul.
"Or to be blunt about it, morality is something shared between the strong and denied to the weak.
"Because of this, Stapledon's supermen are allowed to rob from, seduce, exploit, manipulate, dispossess, and even murder 'lesser' people when they get in the way of the supermen's plans due to the higher moral need to advance the interests of the master race. This sort of an argument has an unfortunate track record and Stapledon could just get away with this in the '30s. In less than ten years, however, a certain group of would-be supermen put such ideas into practice and the world is still trying to wash the taste out of its mouth...." (Tales of Future Past > Future Man > "Odd John")
'It Can't Happen Here?' Don't be Too Sure
The word "eugenics" still hasn't quite regained the panache it had before the forties: but the idea is back. Phrases like "quality of life" are used: but the same old approach of eliminating the unfit is there. Except now it's for 'benevolent' reasons.
I don't think killing people who don't live up to some standard of physical perfection is a good idea. But then, I'm one of those defective products of conception that aren't living a quality lifestyle. Being used in a medical experiment didn't help - but that's another story. (A Catholic Citizen in America (February 3, 2009))
Defective or not, on the whole I prefer being alive to the alternative.
What's With All the Quotes?
I've started using David S. Zondy's Tales of Future Past website as a reference and resource. Partly because he's done a marvelous job of bringing together vintage science fiction virtual memorabilia and ideas. Partly because he seems to see the world in roughly the same way I do.
I don't want to shock anyone, but I think that the physical world is real, not an illusion; that God exists; that some things are moral and others aren't; and that people have souls. And I want to write speculative fiction?!
Back to Mr. Zondy and making supermen. He wrote an uncharacteristically serious few paragraphs about eugenics:
"...One of the obvious ways of producing your superman is one that was taken so seriously in the last century that it was actually tried. Ever since the basic ideas of Darwin and the mechanism of genetics were understood, the idea popped into the mind of Sir Francis Galton that what can be done to dogs and pigeons can be done to men, so if you want to create Homo Superior, why not simply breed human beings selectively?
"This wasn't just idle speculation, he was dead serious and many a philanthropist, scholar, scientist, businessman, and politician became determined advocates of improving the lot of the human race by making sure that the 'best' of the breed intermarried while the sick, feeble-minded, and generally undesirable were prevented from reproducing...."
"...Needless to say, Auschwitz and the Nuremburg trials put paid to the Eugenics movement and gave the world a very stern lesson of what happens when you stop seeing people as children of God and more as laboratory animals.
"What is even more frightening is that we have been so slow in learning our lesson and so quick to forget it. We've made great strides in medicine, particularly in genetic research, but in doing so we have reached the point where we are in danger of doing far more harm than good. If not to our bodies, then to our souls. Our society is tampering with things such as contraceptives, fertility drugs, genetic engineering, selective abortion, infant euthanasia, in vitro fertilisation, designer babies, and artificial insemination with so little real discussion of the ethics of what we're doing that we face a very real risk of one day turning 'round and discovering that we are not becoming genetic supermen, but moral monsters...." (Tales of Future Past > Future Man > "Eugenics")
Stories where the author has a Point To Make and hits readers over the head with it are as likely to stir my stomach as my heart. Dreadfully earnest stories happen so often that Television Tropes & Idioms has a whole page about being "Anvilicious."
Not that I think there should be no message in a story. Even if it's as basic as 'don't mess with the big guy's wife until you're sure he's dead.' Homer's Odysseus / Ulysses wouldn't have had quite as exciting an ending, if the war hero hadn't cleaned house at the end in a style worthy of Arnold Schwarzenegger's action heroes.
The trick, I think, is finding a balance. How? Having somebody else read the story isn't the daftest approach.
I may drop a few anvils as I go along: but I'll try to be careful about it. Apart from artistic and aesthetic considerations, I don't think it's generally the best way to make a point.
Mutants, Cyborgs and Meddling With God's Handiwork
I think Mr. Zondy is right on at least one point: particularly with the sort of power that people have these days, we should think about the ethics of what we do: not just whether or not we feel like doing it.
On the other hand, I don't have a problem with Man Tampering With Nature. In my view, that's what we do, just by being human. We've come a long way from weaving cloth and knapping hide scrapers: but we were messing with 'the natural order of things' long before we started selecting which seeds to use for the next crop.
Isn't It Different With People?
Even if I didn't feel like it, I'd have to be concerned with cruelty to animals. It's in the rules (A Catholic Citizen in America (August 17, 2009))
I'm even more concerned with cruelty to people. I don't think people should be bought, sold, or killed - even if it's for personal profit or convenience. And the way I view the world, the stakes go up when the person is helpless. But I'm getting off-topic.
What About Cyborgs: Those Inhuman Amalgams of Man and Machine?
Don't expect me to be too upset about mixing a human being's original equipment and artificial add-ons and replacements. I'm focusing on the monitor right now with clip-on lenses, My hands and wrists have been surgically altered, quite a few of my teeth have metal parts, I've got two metal hip sockets, and my belly's got plastic mesh in it. Even my brain's been altered, chemically, to clear up some glitches.
And I'm okay with that: I haven't messed with anything that was working smothly in the first place. What's been done to me since about age four has been better described as "repairing" than "tampering."
These models who get surgically altered to match some current fashion: that's dubious, in my view.
It's Just Starting to Get Interesting
I've read that Intel has announced a neural interface, due for release around 2020. (Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 2, 2009)) Some of the obvious applications for that sort of technology is people who've suffered brain injuries from stroke or accidents. That, I think, is a very promising development.
The technology will, of course, be misused. People misuse things sometimes. We've killed each other with rocks. My guess is that somebody's going to use those brain chips in ways that'll make what happened at Auschwitz look like a Sunday social. You think we've got problems with malware now?!
But that doesn't make rocks bad: or brain chips. We've cobbled together rules for how to use rocks, and I'm pretty sure we can do the same with brain chips.
We may not be quite the same as we were when we learned how to knap flint: But I don't think we've gotten any stupider.
If At First You Don't Succeed - - -
As a rule, I think persistence is a good idea. But like just about every other human characteristic, it can be misapplied.
The national socialist party's efforts to clean up their gene pool and make room for a master race had unpleasant consequences. I don't think anybody's going to try that approach again.
But the idea of 'perfecting' humanity is so appealing to many, I don't think it'll go away. I'm also pretty sure that someone's going to try again. And again, and again.
The more spectacular blowouts, like what happened in Germany around the 1940s, may put a moratorium on most efforts for a few decades. But too many people are too convinced that humanity would be so much better - if only 'improvements' were made - that I think we're likely going to see superman projects now and again for the foreseeable future.
Some of what I've read about - like making repairs at the genetic level to eradicate conditions like leukemia - seem to make sense. How they should be implemented: that's where things get interesting.
Meanwhile, superman factories and people who think they've evolved beyond good and evil will provide a writer of speculative fiction a warehouse of material.
I made a list of relatively memorable science fiction movies from the mid-sixties to the present, for another post. (June 30, 2009)
Yesterday, I started writing about space aliens and killer robots: and added to the list. I went back, today, and fleshed it out with brief descriptions of these exemplars of science fiction / speculative fiction in the movies.
"A post-apocalyptic tale based on a novella by Harlan Ellison. A boy communicates telepathically with his dog as they scavenge for food and sex..."
(IMDB plot summary)
"During a future ice age, dying humanity occupies its remaining time by playing a board game called 'Quintet.' For one small group, this obsession is not enough; they play the game with living pieces ... and only the winner survives."
(IMDB plot summary)
With a few exceptions, like Star Wars, the settings aren't all that pleasant. And Star Wars is set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."
Looking for a bright future in science fiction movies? Try the Star Trek franchise, or go back before, say, 1955.
Like "Things to Come" (1936). It's post-apocalyptic - for a while. Then wise scientists build an Art Deco utopia where everybody wears really uncomfortable-looking clothes. I'm not on the same page as the underlying philosophies of that film, and admit that it's not all that realistic. But: "Hell Comes to Frogtown" is?!
I don't think I'll live to see an end to this currently-fashionable notion: that to be taken seriously, you've got to show the future as just simply awful.
It's like that period in country music, where I got the impression that a song's popularity could be measured by the suicide rate of its fans.
Posts I'm setting up for another blog, Apathetic Lemming of the North, reminded me that it's hard to make a 'future' setting seem - well, futuristic.
One's about oxygenated liquid fluorocarbons being used to treat people with some medical conditions. The fluorocarbons aren't injected: the patients are breathing them.
Remember the Star Wars Movie, where a wounded Luke Skywalker is in a tank, with a breathing mask on his face? Forget the face-mask. If they aren't already there, my guess is that ICUs will have tanks, soon, for patients who can't handle being in a gaseous environment.
Neural implants? They're in the research and development stage now: commercially available in maybe 2020.
I set up a post in that blog, to help me keep track of "future" technologies in development: "The Future: Just Like Today, Only Different." It's mostly a link-list, slightly organized.
I'm slogging my way through the introductory sections of "The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF", edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (1994). I'll be getting back to their outlook on culture, science, and humanity later.
Meanwhile, I've been reminded of how much "The Future" (capital letters and all) is part of science fiction. And how views of "the future" are so much a part of western culture. I put together a link page for another blog (Apathetic Lemming of the North, "The Future: Just Like Today, Only Different "), to help me keep track of micro-reviews - and the occasional rant - about up-and-coming technologies, and what "The Future" looked like, back in the day.
In this blog, I see I've done a few posts about "The Future" - at least one of them rambling even by my standards. As a convenience for myself, and you, if you're interested, I'm starting a list of posts that are mostly on this topic:
Science fiction, or speculative fiction, Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon notwithstanding, doesn't always deal with The Future. But quite a bit does.
Including a set of stories I'm hoping to create.
Writers haven't had to think very hard about what The Future (capitalized) would be like, provided that they didn't mind using off-the-shelf settings. During the 20th century, The Future would be filled with gigantic buildings and sweeping elevated roadways with no obvious entrances or exits, electric biplanes and spaceships held together with huge rivets.
Later, a more (sophisticated?) standard-issue vision of the future was a post-(nuclear, bio-weapons, whatever)-apocalyptic wasteland that bore a remarkable similarity to parts of the American southwest and southern California: inhabited by desperate nomads in leather underwear and/or Rambo-styled costumes, mutant frogs, mutant people, mutant things. You get the picture.
Entertaining (or, if required, relevant) stories could be set in variations on any of these.
My intention is to be a trifle more imaginative than that.
Today, the topic's technology, and avoiding anachronisms.
Technology, Change, and Wood-Burning Computers
Nobody (I hope) would write about someone in the far future lighting a fire in a computer's boiler - unless there was a very good reason for using an oddly anachronistic blend of technologies. On the other hand, it's easy to forget just how much technology changes. And, sometimes, doesn't change.
"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;..."
Locksley Hall, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1835)
When Tennyson wrote that, the Kitty Hawk test flight was about 68 years in the future. The poet, in all probability, imagined his "pilots of the purple twilight" to be sailing lighter-than-air ships.
Today, roughly 174 years after he "dipt into the future," we do use lighter-than-air craft for some specialized applications, but fixed-wing aircraft are the dominant air travel technology.
My point is that it's difficult - maybe impossible - to predict with any degree of accuracy what technology will be like more than a few years down the road.
Except for one thing.
It's almost certainly not going to look a whole lot like contemporary technology, or what's on the horizon: with some exceptions.
Dials and punch cards on a spaceship?
"...The dim dials had shown like blazing suns upon his tired retinas before he was able to turn his eyes away. From time to time he had looked out at the black nothing to see the silhouettes of his dials, almost-blackness against total blackness...."
The Lady Who Sailed The Soul, Cordwainer Smith (1960)
I think that's pretty good writing: but one detail jumped out at me: dials?
This story is set in the far future - about 4,000 years from now, given some reasonable guesstimates about the timeline Cordwainer Smith developed.1
A few pages later, we get another look at astronautical technology of the 60th (or thereabouts) century:
"...She broke out a repair robot and sent it out to effect repairs, punching out the papers as rapidly as she could to give instructions...."
The Lady Who Sailed The Soul, Cordwainer Smith (1960)
About a quarter-century after that story was written, I earned about half a degree in computer science. At that time Hollerith Cards and paper tape were the way that programs were stored. It wasn't a particularly new technology at the time: Punched cards had been used to analyze census data for the 1890 American census.
They're not all that common these days, but dials actually do make sense for readouts of cyclic data: like the hands of a clock that rotate once every minute, every hour, and every 12 hours (or, sometimes, every 24), indicating where we're at in the daily cycle.
Other sorts of data are a bit easier to read when presented as a point or points on a scale, as a pie chart, with alphanumeric characters, or as a picture or diagram. (I hope you'll trust me on that: I worked in graphic design for about a decade, and that's part of what I picked up.)
I'll accept that idea that some of the instrumentation on that interstellar spaceship used dials. But add something like Hollerith cards to the mix, and my willing suspension of disbelief had to be hauled back to the tracks and tipped back in place.
The lesson? Don't assume that technology is static. As a rule, Cordwainer Smith does a pretty good job with keeping descriptions of future tech to what the stuff does and what it looks like - with just enough of the 'how' to keep the reader convinced.
I think that's a good idea.
Sometimes Technology Doesn't Change - All That Much
Not too long ago I ran into an article that mentioned a valve that was dug up in Italy. It was, as I recall, made of brass (or was that bronze?): nothing at all unusual. The metal is in very common use, and the design was a simple, effective one that's been common for years. The valve was 'obviously' something fairly contemporary.
Until an someone noticed that it was the wrong size. Long story made short, the valve was of Roman manufacture, and somewhere in the dozen-plus centuries that had passed since a plumber had installed it, standard sizes for valves had changed.
Technology Will Change - People, Not So Much
Although I'm pretty sure that we'll continue to add technological enhancements and implants to our basic design, like reading glasses and pacemakers, there won't be all that much change to what human beings are for the next thousand years or so. Not successful change, at least. I'm pretty sure that from time to time someone will get the bright idea of improving on the basic design. But that's another topic.
Technology, I think, will continue to be something used by human beings. That puts some very definite constraints on one part of future tech: the interface. We've already gotten to the point where our telephones are about as small as they can be, and still have buttons that (many) people can push. They'll probably get thinner, but I think we've got the keyboard down to a minimum size.
I'll admit to a bias. I have a little trouble with some of the smaller keyboards today: but my daughters don't. (Note: Human beings come in two basic models, which is yet another topic.)
So, my guess is that fifteen or so centuries from now the analog of a computer keyboard might be a bit of open space where you'd use some sort of sign language, and the analog of television might be data loaded into your sensory cortices. Whether it's a 'pay per view,' a government service (or requirement), or something else would depend of what sort of society is envisioned.
But the bathroom plumbing? My guess is that Julius Caesar wouldn't have any trouble using it - although his plumber might understand it a bit better.
As associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Iris Wagman Borowsky, authored a study that hit the news yesterday.
"Challenging the notion that risky behavior reflects a youthful sense of immortality, a new study has found almost 15 percent of American teens believe they will die before age 35 -- a perspective strongly linked to risky behavior...."
"...The interviews revealed that nearly 15 percent of the teens believed they had just a 50-50 chance of living to age 35...." (Forbes)
The good news is that 85% of teens in America don't think they'll die young. Still, it's not good when one in seven make decisions based on the assumption that they've got something like 20 more years left to work with, instead of around 60, on average.
The Forbes article gives an overview of how the study was conducted, and a relatively brief discussion of why so many kids might have such a distorted view of their life expectancy, why it's a problem, and what might be done about it.
Forbes quotes Dr. Borowsky extensively. One of the things she said relates to this blog's topic.
" '...Positive media messages also play a role. These are all things that might prevent the development of a pessimistic view among youth.'..." (Forbes)
"Positive media messages" - let's look at that, in terms of how people view the future.
And the Future will Bring: Disease, Destruction, Dementia and Death?!
I was born during the Truman administration, and most of my teen years were spent in the sixties. I remember the trailing edge of a era when science and technology were presented as wonderful tools that would make the future brighter.
And I noticed when popular attitudes toward science and technology were getting back to the Mary Shelley mindset. Technology, industrial tech in particular, started being viewed as a Frankenstein monster that would turn on its creator.
As for the future: Our civilization was doomed by an impending ice age when I was in high school; by the time I graduated, a butterfly expert named Paul Ehrlich had quite a few people convinced that a sizable chunk of humanity would die horribly in the seventies and eighties, and that there wasn't anything we could do about the coming famine.
We got disco instead: which, although probably not one of the greatest achievements of western civilization, didn't actually kill all that many people.
And those are just the memorable ones. With the Cold War still going on, I suppose all those germ warfare or post-nuclear-holocaust movies with rampaging mutants, fiery explosions, and armor-plated dune buggies were almost inevitable. Quintet has an almost nostalgic air about it now, with it's future ice age setting.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not criticizing the movies, although they're not exactly in the same class as Citizen Kane. As entertainment, they're junk food for the mind: fun, diverting, and not a health problem, if taken in moderation.
But I think there's a tendency for movie-makers to make their fictional futures grimly dreary. Maybe they don't want their colleagues to think they're producing or directing escapist fantasies.
It's not all doom, gloom and vile frogs in the movies since the seventies, of course.
The future of The Star Trek movies, whatever one may think of them, carried through the largely optimistic view of times to come that I think helped put the original television series on America's cultural map.
Ecological Disaster, Cancer Everywhere, Humanity is Doomed?!
The parents of today's teenagers were, for the most part, growing up when those movies were released. From somewhere in the sixties up to the present, doom and gloom weren't limited to the movie theaters. Actually, in some ways the fictional futures of Judge Dredd or Bladerunner were downright cheerful, compared to what we were told is coming.
The 'everything causes cancer' craze has been over for quite a while, replaced partly by lists of foods that cause heart attacks, and foods that prevent heart attacks. Just to keep things interesting, the lists kept changing.
It didn't matter anyway, because the coming ice age and/or nuclear Armageddon had been replaced by global warming and acid rain, and human civilization was doomed. Never mind civilization. Humanity itself may be extinct soon.
I'm overstating it, but that sort of 'and we're all gonna die' refrain seems to run through quite a few American sub-cultures.
No wonder one out of seven teens think they've got a 50-50 chance of lasting another two decades. Under the circumstances, they could be seen as optimists.
Deadly Plagues? Nuclear Armageddon? Humanity Reduced to a Handful? Been There, Done That
Like The Omega Man, I'm immune - to the hopelessness that's a characteristic of so much fiction. I think it helped, being an avid reader with a pretty good memory. After a while, I noticed that the dire predictions weren't panning out.
As a wannabe author, I'd probably reject the gloom-and-doom future on aesthetic grounds. It's an approach which may have been over-worked.
Besides, although I'm no Trekkie, I'd rather write about a fictional future that was more than one more devastated Earth.
My settings, for the most part, will be somewhere in 'The Future.' To do a plausible job of describing - and showing - these settings, I'll need to do a little research. That's nothing unusual. Telling a story that's set in an unfamiliar time and place means that the author needs to either learn about the setting: or make up details and hope that no reader spots it.
Since 'The Future' for the early 21st century isn't here yet, I have to make up the details - but want to make them plausible. One way to do that is to look at past predictions, and learn from their work.
About eight decades back, people - some of them - seemed quite sure what The Future would look like.
People in The Future didn't wear clothing with quite that sort of style, but many women in western countries do wear pants now, we have portable radios and telephones: and quite a few of us wear our cell phones, beepers, and other communications equipment on our belts.
That was Then, This is Now
Here's something that people may be viewing around the year 2085:
Some of the vehicles look practical - although I'm a bit dubious about the mini-car with two micro-cars inside - and something like them might be in common use not too long from now. Some of the designs might even be the 2085 equivalent of the Volkswagon bug.
Since my stories will be part text and part graphics, I need to design a plausible 'future world.' And, I want to avoid making these fictional futures look too much like either knockoffs of contemporary visions of the future, or 2009 fashions with futuristic flourishes.
These days it's important to have a "privacy policy" available: so here's mine.
I do not collect information on individuals visiting this blog. If you leave a comment, I'll read what you wrote: but I don't keep a record of comments, apart from what Blogger displays. (In other words, the only record of what you write or who you are will be what people see at the bottom of the post.)
I do collect information about how many hits this blog gets, where they come from, and some technical information. I use the WebSTAT service for this purpose - and all that shows is which ISP you use, and where it's located.
You can stop most of Webstat's data gathering by disabling cookies in your browser. I don't know why you would, but some folks do.
I'm also an AdSense affiliate, so Google collects information on what I've written in each post: but that's mostly my problem.
I'm also considering starting an affiliate relationship with DAZ Productions. You should be able to keep DAZ and Commission Junction, their provider of affiliate services, from collecting information by - again - disabling cookies in your browser.
And you can keep DAZ Productions from finding out anything about you, by not buying any of their products.
Again, I don't know why you would: but some folks do.
The people who lived there most likely looked a bit like the fellow in that picture. We call folks like him Homo Erectus, and around 1,000,000 years ago our ancestors almost certainly looked a bit like that.