I must have been ten or eleven when I read Children of Mother Earth by Dutch author Thea Beckman. The book describes a utopian society in which in humans and animals exist in complete harmony. They would use a remarkable penal system: when a crime was committed, a dot was put on your forehead. Each offense counted for a certain number of years, and a certain color, so everybody knew what you had done. I remember being very impressed by this, when my father turned to me and said: “That’s the most horrible thing you can do to a person.” In the meantime we have more or less introduced this system in our own world. The Internet.I must have been ten or eleven when I read Children of Mother Earth by Dutch author Thea Beckman. The book describes a utopian society in which in humans and animals exist in complete harmony. They would use a remarkable penal system: when a crime was committed, a dot was put on your forehead. Each offense counted for a certain number of years, and a certain color, so everybody knew what you had done. I remember being very impressed by this, when my father turned to me and said: “That’s the most horrible thing you can do to a person.” In the meantime we have more or less introduced this system in our own world. The Internet.