The Probability Broach, chapter 13

The North American Confederacy’s scientists explain to Win Bear how their breakthrough came about. Like many great scientific achievements, they stumbled across it by accident, while they were trying to create wormholes for space travel:

In 194 A.L., Paratronics, Ltd., attempting to reach beyond the limited range of ion-drive spaceships, stumbled upon the Probability Broach. Peering through a microscopic hole in the fabric of reality, they expected to view deep space from some vantage point other than their own solar system.

Instead, their first photograph showed:

NO PARKING

Reorienting themselves ninety degrees produced:

THE SILVER GRILL
FINE EATS SINCE 1935

This was not Alpha Centauri. Nor could it be the Confederacy, which hadn’t used a Christian calendar for two centuries.

Realizing that they’ve stumbled upon a parallel universe, the Confederacy’s scientists study this strange new world:

Microprobes went into the hole: air, soil, and a few tiny insects came back for analysis. The atmosphere on the other side was filthy with hydrocarbons and other chemicals, the water similarly dirtied. One source was quickly identified as crude internal combustion vehicles. But why didn’t anyone drag their owners into court?

This is one of those passages that raises more questions than it solves.

It’s Smith’s attempt to show that his anarcho-capitalist society can deal with commons problems like pollution. No EPA needed—if someone is pumping toxic chemicals into your water or air, just sue them!

However, he still hasn’t dealt with the fact that in an anarchist society without laws or government, all legal systems have to be voluntary, by definition. What if the polluter just ignores your attempt to sue them? What if they’re a major employer in the region and the judge is in their pocket?

Or what if the source of the pollution is hundreds of miles away—do you have to pay out of your own pocket for a full scientific study to track down the source and identify the guilty party? What if you can’t afford that?

Also, what can’t you sue for? Any fire that burns wood, charcoal or natural gas releases lung-damaging particulates and toxic chemical compounds; that’s not scientifically controversial.

If you can sue your neighbor for driving a polluting car, can you also sue them for lighting a bonfire or a barbecue grill in their backyard—or even for cooking inside their own house? How far could someone with a grudge take this? Could they drag their neighbor into court every time he so much as looks in their direction?

Something Smith doesn’t appreciate is that laws can increase your freedom from harassment, by defining what is and isn’t a valid cause for complaint. Rather than the utopia of freedom he wants us to envision, a no-rules world where everyone has an unlimited right to sue for anything, no matter how trivial, might be more like a neighborhood with an oppressive, overbearing HOA.

Investigations proceeded slowly. Boring holes through reality is expensive: the university’s lights didn’t quite dim whenever they switched on the Broach; the comptrollers just felt that way. Even thermonuclear fusion had theoretical limits, and the Probability Broach approached them.

This chapter raises a vital question which Smith barely glances at: who pays for blue sky research in the North American Confederacy?

Is “scientist” a career in this world? If so, where does the funding come from that makes it possible? Who pays for basic research that’s often expensive, that comes with no guarantee of success, and that doesn’t have an immediate practical benefit in sight at the outset?

In our world, most basic research is funded by governments. There are good reasons for that. Governments, because they channel the productive power of an entire society, can fund science on a scale that a single wealthy individual or even a corporation couldn’t afford.

More importantly, governments aren’t commercial enterprises. They’re not constrained to make money in everything they do (and shouldn’t be!). They can afford to take the long view, funding research that doesn’t turn an immediate profit, but that ultimately benefits all society by expanding the knowledge base that makes further discoveries possible.

Thermonuclear fusion, which Smith mentions in this paragraph, is a classic example. Smith doesn’t explain how the North American Confederacy invented it or who funded the research, but it will never happen because of someone tinkering in a backyard shed. Building a working fusion reactor is a colossal project. If the real world ever manages it, it will be thanks to the efforts of an international alliance of nations that contributed billions of dollars for its construction and was willing to plug away at the problem for decades.

In general, a for-profit entity will only support research that serves a commercial purpose. A corporation might invent new pharmaceuticals or research better materials, but they’d never build something like the Large Hadron Collider, just on the off chance that a useful discovery might come from it.

But the paradox is that we owe many of our most valuable breakthroughs to pure curiosity-driven research that wasn’t undertaken to serve a commercial purpose.

Marie Curie didn’t envision nuclear reactors when she studied rocks that emitted a mysterious glow. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek didn’t anticipate germ theory, antibiotics or vaccines when he looked at pond water through a microscope. The scientists who studied unusual repeating DNA sequences in obscure bacteria didn’t know initially that it would turn out to be the most flexible and powerful gene editor ever found.

In fact, a purely capitalist society wouldn’t just lack the motivation to do fundamental research, they’d be positively disincentivized. Scientific progress depends on openness—on scientists freely sharing their methods and their results with each other, so they know what’s been tried and what doesn’t work, and so they can replicate, build on and refine other people’s discoveries. This would never happen in a world where competition and profit are supreme. For-profit corporations don’t help their competitors design better products. Their incentive is to hoard knowledge, not to share it.

This is why it’s important to organize a society where not everything needs to serve the profit motive. Antibiotics, space travel, nuclear power, GPS, the internet and CRISPR, among others, all came about because some people had the time and the freedom to imagine, to think, and to engineer without expectations of an immediate return.

Smith wants us to believe that the whole infrastructure of discovery can be easily replicated in a world where every university is for-profit and every scientific lab has to turn a quarterly profit. This is debatable, to say the least. If every scientist had to justify their research activities to shareholders, it’s extremely likely that most experiments would never be run, and the few that were would be forced down narrow, predictable channels. Imagine how many crucial discoveries would never be made if all science answered to the money men.

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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach