Darwin's remote

I was talking to a friend today about airplanes being equipped with life-jackets and not parachutes when I suddenly realized what an awesome sight it would be if there were actually ejection doors below each passenger's seat. You could have an additional ejection button mixed somewhere between those buttons for light, fan, air-hostess and TV channels. And every now and then, peeking from above the top of the chair in your front, you would see a head here and a head there disappear and you would open your little notebook and add 1 to the running count of people incapable of operating remotes being sacrificed at the cruel hands of Darwinian selection. If you are so inclined, you could go ahead and figure out if on average those who sit in the business class appear to be more successful at following simple instructions and conclude if things like money and a more rounded upbringing equip a person with the intelligence necessary to navigate remote control buttons. One could do similar statistics for age and who knows, maybe the airplane cabins under this novel sifting system would be much quieter places than they are now. You could then correlate your results with other data. An example would be whether it is more common for those who have to be told twice to stow their tray tables and straighten their seats while take-off and landing to also take advantage of the new and revolutionary unexpected jettisoning procedure. But all these statistics aside I really do think that the now dour and colorless airplane cabin which appears such a drag will be a much more exciting place to be. Airlines can probably conduct studies and accommodate more people, knowing that a certain percentage of people on average would rather have a shorter trip. Who's going to be a sure victim? Me. I had a television for 3 years and I could never turn it on and watch the cable. No exaggeration. I only watched it either if it was already on or if one of my roommates, who would surely have survived this Darwinian pitfall, was there alongside me. But then I am a man very aware of my own limitations. When in the vicinity of a remote I do flinch a little and I do suffer from performance anxiety but I never am quite so bold as to take liberties with its operations. My very conservative nature when it comes to collections of buttons might just be enough to save me in this evolutionary paradigm. But then there is nothing shameful about cowardice and ineptitude. If it was not for the ability of certain mammals to live scared in burrows, they would never have survived to become the dominant specie after the extinction event which killed off the dinosaurs (KT boundary).