Constraints can be useful

Last year I binged through the show “ The 100 “ and had the same experience that many others had — it was fantastic at the beginning, but faded as the seasons wore on. There are different theories as to what happened, but I think the lack of constraints hurt them.

Having constraints can be a wonderful thing, as I shared a few years ago regarding the original icons on the Macintosh. Forcing yourself to stay within boundaries can be a challenge, but can often lead to amazing things.

If you’ve not seen the show, it’s set a hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse wipes out the earth. Fortunately, many humans survived aboard a giant spacecraft. At some point, they want to test to see if the earth was habitable or not, so they sent down 100 juvenile delinquents to see if they would survive or not.

Here’s their original trailer from a decade ago:

Having that happen for real seems wildly unlikely, but entirely reasonable. With our known universe, based on Earth, they didn’t do anything for the first few seasons that was impossible. It’s all very improbable, certainly…