There’s Method acting, and then there’s this: Robert Downey Jr., having repeatedly saved the world on-screen, wants to do it for real. Tuesday night, as per Variety, the now-former Tony Stark made an uncannily Tony Stark-like announcement: He’s launching a new organization called Footprint Coalition, which will use advanced technologies to repair our broken home planet.
“Between robotics and nanotechnology, we could clean up the planet significantly, if not totally, in 10 years,” Downey told the crowd at Amazon’s Re:Mars conference. But don’t thank him: Thank the geniuses who gave him the intel, prompting his latest post-MCU project. “God, I love experts,” he joked. “They’re like Wikipedia with character defects.”
Downey’s 20-minute talk didn’t include specifics about the collation, which will begin in earnest in April, but he did extensively mention AI technology, which tends to give people the creeps but, if used for good instead of ill, could be something that extends humanity’s future. “I have this quiet sense of crisis,” he said, adding that he, more than most, has contributed to the planet’s various ailments. “I’m a one-man carbon footprint nightmare colossus.”
Downey’s presentation comes not long after our current president doubled down on his already aggressive anti-environmentalist stance, which comes after the latest doomsday prediction from those who actually study the planet’s health. (Also of note: Unlike Downey, Trump hates experts.) This most recent report names 2050 as around the time when society as we know it collapses into what sounds like a straight-up Mad Max scenario, though probably without a one-armed Charlize Theron. But hey, if a star of Ghosts Can’t Do It can’t be bothered to save us, we can clearly turn to at least one of the guys from Air America.
(Via Variety)