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The Dark Future of Tourism: Hunting Humans
Forget traveling to Mars on a SpaceX ship. In the future the mega rich will hunt humans as a spectacle of pleasure. Could our biggest fears become entertainment for future tourists?
March 13, 2202: It is snowing and bitterly cold outside. A biting wind whips across Paul’s face as he begins to escape — once again — from a horde of wild hunters in a frozen field outside Utah. Covered in blood, sweat, and tears, he successfully manages to lose them by slipping into a gutter. After all, he is nothing but skin and bones. After a long wander, Paul finds a shelter. An abandoned ranch with a built-in charcoal burner. Suddenly, all his sorrows disappear. For the past year, hungry and desperate, the young man had been trying to avoid “the chosen” ones: a group of oppressive mega rich people partaking in the hunting season, a perverse new kind of evil sport intended to reduce earth’s overpopulation. Inside the ranch, Paul pulls out a lighter and bends over to light the burner. As the room starts to light up, he notices a large mirror placed over the fireplace in front of him. He feels a sudden spine-tingling fear invading his entire body. He knows what is going to happen next. His world suddenly crumbles away beneath him as he sees 20 or so people loaded with electromagnetic assault shotguns. He is on the ground long before he can even gasp in terror. Paul was just another target of a new government plan aimed to reduce population size through hunting licenses outsourced to contractors. The contractor’s sole business is to slaughter humans and so was created the death entertainment industry.
The dystopian scenario depicted above — worthy of an episode of Black Mirror — might seem distant, unrealistic and very provocative, yet hunting humans inside terror parks could become a big touristic business for the mega-wealthy in less than 150 years according to University of Central Lancashire’s researcher Daniel Wright. In a series of papers published in the scientific journal Futures, the academic points out several chilling scenarios in which our worst nightmares rise to the surface.
This form of entertainment is not necessarily new in human history. In fact, there are several well-documented…
