The Probability Broach: Backyard WMDs

A mushroom cloud on a tropical island

The Probability Broach, chapter 13

Deejay and Ooloorie, the human and dolphin (respectively) scientists who built the Probability Broach, fill in the details that Win Bear was seeking about how they came to be in contact with Vaughn Meiss, the murdered scientist from his own universe.

They explain that they wanted to establish contact with Win’s world. They needed help from someone on the other side to do it, because (obligatory technobabble!) “power consumption would fall ten thousandfold if we could establish a resonant field”.

However, they had some misgivings about this. From their perspective, Win’s world was populated by “primitives [who] will gladly murder anyone desiring independence from a coercive state”. Worse, as Oolorie says, “Your culture is ahead of ours only in its ability to wage nuclear war”.

The only exceptions they came across were Vaughn Meiss and his allies in the Propertarian Party, whom Win met early on in the book. Recognizing Meiss as a kindred spirit, they sent him a manuscript explaining the basics of the Probability Broach. Meiss, who’s a libertarian and therefore a supergenius, began constructing his own version.

There was one other thing that Deejay and Ooloorie worried about: namely, what happens if “the field collaps[es] on an occlusion”. To show Win and his friends what they mean, they demonstrate with a desktop-sized classroom model:

POP! A blue flash at the center of the contraption reminded me of high-school tricks with hydrogen. “What you saw,” Ooloorie lectured, “was a few air molecules interpenetrating the theoretical junction between two worlds. When the interface ceases to exist so do they—or try to.”

In other words, if the portal closes while something is halfway through, you don’t get a portal cut, as is common in sci-fi. You get an explosion. And the more mass there is in the portal, the bigger the bang. (Obligatory foreshadowing!)

But, again, they set safety considerations aside and continued their work. Meiss progressed with his experiments, and they were expecting to hear from him—until their side of the portal unexpectedly blew up.

That was due to Win’s interference, as they figure out. While he was examining Meiss’ lab as part of investigating his murder, the (obligatory!) jackbooted government thugs burst in with guns blazing. In the struggle, Win accidentally switched on the machine and stumbled through the portal. But when the goons tried to come after him, the field overloaded and collapsed.

That was the explosion that flung Win into the North American Confederacy, bloody and concussed. But Deejay and Oolorie have unwelcome news for him:

“And recall, my brilliant colleague,” said the fishbowl in the wheelchair, “that the effect is not symmetrical!”

Deejay paled. “Ooloorie, I hadn’t thought of that at all!”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded…

“Oh, Win, you were afraid your world might not still exist. Ooloorie’s saying that the force of the explosion isn’t symmetrical, it depends on the distribution of the interrupting mass… the little bang that tossed you over the hedge was part of a much bigger bang on the other side!”

Win, reasonably, demands to know just how much bigger. They do the math on what would happen if the Broach closed while a person was midway through. They say it depends on how much of his body was on which side of the portal:

“Suppose… it was just his feet?”

“About the same as our explosion here, one to five microtons—about two ounces of pistol powder,” Ooloorie estimated.

“And—uh—if only his head made it through?”

“A thousand megatons, possibly more.” Perhaps her thrashing was a sign that she was upset, too. If the original explosion hadn’t done the job, certainly NORAD would have interpreted it as an attack: World War III, the end of the Earth I knew.

A thousand megatons. For reference, Tsar Bomba, the biggest thermonuclear bomb ever detonated, had a yield of fifty megatons.

The Probability Broach isn’t a bridge for traveling between worlds. It’s a weapon of mass destruction.

The Manhattan Project to enrich uranium for the first atomic bomb was the biggest industrial operation in human history up till that point. It cost billions of dollars and required the labor of over 100,000 people. Even today, coordinated industrial effort on this scale is beyond the capabilities of most countries.

For purposes of his fiction, L. Neil Smith is postulating a far more destructive weapon. And not only is it one that a single individual can build by himself, it’s one that’s easily set off by accident.

This begs a question which Smith never considers: Shouldn’t there be someone whose job it is to be concerned about stuff like this?

Deejay and Ooloorie have built a civilization-ending doomsday device in their lab with zero oversight. Whoever’s funding their research either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. No one asks any questions about what they’re doing, no one raises any concerns, no one tries to stop them. No board of ethics is convened to decide what should or shouldn’t be done with this technology. No safety inspector checks if they’re being appropriately cautious, or if they’re cutting corners. (The only thing that does concern the higher-ups, apparently, is how much it costs to run.)

In our world, if you try to build a homebrew nuclear reactor in your backyard, very serious people are going to show up and ask some questions. In the NAC, there’s no government, so there’s no federal agency that can swoop in to shut you down if you’re doing an unacceptably dangerous experiment. Nor are there any laws dictating how something so destructive should be handled.

Apparently, the Broach is considered the property of the scientists who built it, and they can dispose of it how they see fit. If they want to sell it to the highest bidder, they can. If they want to hand out the blueprints to hobbyists and dilettantes who may or may not be able to copy it safely (which is essentially what they did), they can do that too.

I suspect L. Neil Smith just didn’t think through the implications of this, but it’s unintentionally fitting for his anarcho-capitalist world. In the North American Confederacy, anyone can build a WMD and do whatever they please with it. You can cook up chemical weapons, brew biological warfare agents, assemble pocket nukes, or cobble together mad-science superweapons.

Because there’s no oversight and no law enforcement, you just have to trust that everyone has only good intentions, knows what they’re doing, won’t compromise their ethics, and won’t make any serious mistakes. To which I say, have you met humans? It’s only by the grace of the author that this society hasn’t blown itself back to the stone age.

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New on OnlySky: Why the rent is too damn high

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about why the cost of living keeps rising, and a cause that may go deeper than simple greed, mismanagement or inefficiency.

In the last few decades, and especially the last few years, the cost of living in America and other developed countries has been rising faster and faster. In what seems like an especially cruel paradox, luxuries like electronics and fast fashion are cheaper than necessities, like rent, health care and education.

Is it because of capitalists hoarding all the wealth for themselves? Well, yes, but there’s another factor at work. It’s called “cost disease,” and it says that as our economy gets more automated and more efficient, the jobs remaining for humans to do should be getting more and more expensive. The question is what, if anything, we can do about it.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

Imagine the world before the Industrial Revolution. If you wanted to listen to music, you had to buy a ticket to hear a symphony. If you wanted new clothes, you had to pay a tailor or seamstress to sew them. If you wanted a new shovel, you had to pay a blacksmith to make it for you.

When everything was made by hand, there was fairly little difference in productivity, and therefore earning power, among these industries. One person could only produce one person-hour of work per hour, no matter what job they held.

But the march of technology has given rise to a divergence. Assembly lines, robotics, and other innovations have made some industries more efficient, meaning they can crank out more stuff faster for less money. With the rise of the internet, software companies can offer valuable products that aren’t made of anything physical at all. As we consume more and more, outsize rewards flow to these industries—mostly the owners of capital, but the workers as well.

However, jobs that require a human touch haven’t followed this trajectory…

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Non-state violence

Strikebreaking miners being escorted to work by Pinkerton agents, 1884

The Probability Broach, chapter 13

Having discovered a parallel universe (“our” universe), the North American Confederacy expands their efforts to learn about it:

In 198 A.L., Paratronics shelled out for a new reactor. Now a relatively stable hole could be punched through, and larger samples taken, but they told the same depressing story: an unknown, exclusively human, English-speaking people, wearing uniformly drab, tubular clothing, riding in poisonously primitive vehicles. A culture inexplicably bleak and impoverished.

Just as a note, this book was written in the 1970s—the height of disco and punk rock. Say what you will about that era, I don’t think everyone wore “uniformly drab” clothing.

While exploring this alternate Earth, the NAC researchers spot a newsstand that sells a “World Almanac & Book of Facts”:

They deposited a half-ounce silver disk on the counter one midnight, reached with carefully sterilized tongs through the newly widened Broach, remembering the wisdom of Poor Richard before he’d gone Federalist. They learned a great deal, none of it encouraging: the Revolution; the Whiskey Rebellion: a War of 1812?; Mexico; and, horror of horrors, a civil war—three-quarters of a million dead. Financial crises alternated with war, and no one seemed to notice the pattern. World War I; the Great Depression; World War II and the atomic bomb, Korea; Vietnam. And towering above it all, power politics: a state growing larger, more demanding every year, swallowing lives, fortunes, destroying sacred honor, screaming in its bloatedness for more, capable of any deed—no matter how corrupt and repulsive, swollen, crazed—staggering toward extinction.

Don’t hold back, man! Let us know how you really feel.

L. Neil Smith treats history as a catalogue of atrocities, and I can’t disagree with that. Where we clash is his belief that it’s simple and straightforward to put an end to all this bloodshed. Just get rid of the state, and a thousand flowers of peace bloom.

He insists, implausibly, that a lawless anarcho-capitalist society where everyone is heavily armed would be more peaceful than what we have now. It would have no large-scale conflicts and almost no crime or violence.

This is an extreme case of simplistic thinking. To his mind, states wage war—so if we get rid of the state, there’ll be no war, by definition.

Let’s consider a counterexample from American history.

In the early 20th century, coal powered the American industrial economy, and West Virginia was the heartland of coal production. But the miners who dug it out of the ground didn’t share in the prosperity. The mine owners forced workers to labor long hours, for little pay, in horrendously dangerous conditions where deadly accidents like explosions and cave-ins were constant occurrences.

Making it worse, workers in remote regions had little choice but to buy necessities from company stores, which faced no competition and could charge extortionate prices that dragged them down into debt slavery. They also had to live in company housing, where they could be immediately kicked out and made homeless if they didn’t obey orders from their bosses.

These conditions, by any reasonable accounting, were little better than slavery. It’s no surprise that coal miners sought to unionize so they could bargain for better pay and working conditions. (Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones, was one of the labor movement’s most indomitable organizers.)

When the mine owners got wind of this, they launched a brutal crackdown. They hired armed private guards from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency to serve as spies and strikebreakers. These hired goons forced striking miners and their families from their homes at gunpoint. There were beatings, armed skirmishes and shootouts. Most infamously, they rolled out the “Bull Moose Special“, an armored train with machine guns which they fired into a tent colony of striking miners, killing at least one.

The conflict between workers and owners kept on escalating until the point of open warfare, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain—the largest armed uprising on American soil since the Civil War. Over ten thousand miners clashed with a private force of two thousand private militiamen. They exchanged gunfire for days, racking up dozens of casualties on both sides. The strikebreakers even hired private planes to drop bombs on the advancing miners.

The battle ended in a defeat for the unions when the U.S. government sent in federal troops to dispel the insurrection. But it wasn’t the state that forced the mine owners to treat their workers so cruelly in the first place. It was the predictable outcome of unchecked selfishness.

Smith doesn’t even gesture at an explanation for why this kind of violence doesn’t occur in the NAC all the time. Even if it were true, as he insists, that abolishing government makes us much wealthier… why wouldn’t the property-owning capitalist classes of that world just capture all that surplus for themselves while continuing to pay their workers poverty wages? Was it out of the goodness of their hearts?

Even more baffling is his claim that only our world, and not his anarcho-capitalist utopia, suffers “financial crises alternat[ing] with war”. There are no financial crises in a completely unregulated economy? No recessions? No depressions? No Ponzi schemes? No bubbles that inflate and burst? Does Smith think the state causes bank failures?

In reality, a laissez-faire market would regularly see bank runs, panics, busts and crashes. That’s supposed to be how it works in a free market—the good actors thrive and the bad ones go out of business. It’s just that, when you’re dealing with banks, “go out of business” means that people lose their life savings. That’s what the Great Depression was, so it’s puzzling that Smith treats it as something unique to our world.

The Battle of Blair Mountain and other anti-union violence (like the Ludlow Massacre) shows that not all violence can be blamed on the state. The capitalist class through history has been equally willing to shed blood in service of their real or perceived interests: working their employees to exhaustion and breakdown, forcing them to labor in deadly conditions without relief, and when they protest, hiring other men to kill them.

Even when it would be a trivial expense to treat their workforce better, they’ve repeatedly shown that their greed is limitless, and they’re willing to commit any evil to keep feeding it. As Smith puts it: “swallowing lives, fortunes, destroying sacred honor, screaming in its bloatedness for more, capable of any deed—no matter how corrupt and repulsive”.

Image: Pinkerton detectives escorting strikebreaking scab miners to work, via Wikimedia Commons

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New on OnlySky: Will you be immortal by 2039?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the human desire for immortality, as embodied in one man’s obsession.

Bryan Johnson, an ex-Mormon entrepreneur turned biohacker, believes we’re on the brink of inventing medical technologies that will halt or reverse aging. To ensure he stays alive until that day comes, he’s living by a strict diet, exercise and sleep protocol he invented himself. The benefits of those practices are hard to argue with, but he’s not stopping there. In a bid to bring the advent of immortality that much closer, he’s using his own wealth to fund a bewildering variety of medical treatments – from blood transfusions to genetic engineering – which he’s willingly testing on himself as the guinea pig.

Is there any scientific validity to any of this? Is Johnson advancing the cause of anti-aging research, or just making himself a laughingstock for no discernible benefit? Or, worse, is he putting his own health at risk in the service of a foolhardy quest?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

The base of Johnson’s protocol is a strict diet, sleep and exercise regimen which he follows with religious exactitude, like a medieval monk who abides by a book of hours.

He wakes up at 4:30 AM and completes a vigorous hour-long exercise routine. He eats a vegan diet (the same meals at the same times every day, with barely any variation), consuming his last meal of the day at 11 AM. He avoids alcohol, caffeine and other recreational drugs. He goes to sleep promptly at 8:30 PM every night.

He undergoes a battery of regular medical tests and measurements—from weight and body composition, to grip strength and VO2 max, to regular MRIs and blood tests—aimed at assessing his overall health and gauging his biological age, as opposed to his chronological age.

Johnson’s intention is to buy time through a stepping-stone method (and I do mean buy; reportedly, he spends $2 million a year on all of these treatments). Even if none of the therapies he’s currently using will prolong his life indefinitely, the idea is that they’ll extend it enough that other, more effective anti-aging therapies will be invented in his lifetime, which he can use to extend his life still further, and so on.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Blood sacrifice as forgiveness: Who made that rule?

Art of the Crucifixion

“Under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.”
—Hebrews 9:22

I’ve been an atheist for a quarter-century, and there’s something I’ve never understood about Christianity: Why is the crucifixion so important to them? Why do they believe it’s needed for God to forgive sin?

Is there a rule that says so? If so, who made that rule and why?

If someone wrongs me and regrets it, I can simply forgive them. I don’t need anyone’s blood to be spilled: not mine, not theirs, and certainly not the blood of an unrelated third person. It makes no sense to demand such a gory ritual as the precondition of accepting an apology. That doesn’t undo the misdeed; it just creates a new, separate harm.

So why does it work differently in Christianity? How do Christians justify this cruel doctrine, when no ordinary, decent, moral person would ask or expect this in objective reality?

It’s not that Christians never address this question—it’s that they act as if they’ve answered it, when they haven’t. Many Christian apologists claim to have an explanation, but end up merely reiterating the idea as if it were self-explanatory. Here’s an example:

Why did the sacrificial system require a blood sacrifice?

…A “sacrifice” is defined as the offering up of something precious for a cause or a reason. Making atonement is satisfying someone or something for an offense committed. The Leviticus verse can be read more clearly now: God said, “I have given it to you (the creature’s life, which is in its blood) to make atonement for yourselves (covering the offense you have committed against Me).” In other words, those who are covered by the blood sacrifice are set free from the consequences of sin.

But again—why blood? They don’t come anywhere near justifying this. Why does God want blood to be spilled, rather than some peaceful means of atonement?

This article starts off better. It gives a clear statement of the problem, pointing out that blood sacrifice is violent and irrational:

For example, I forgive people all the time without requiring that they shed blood for me. And I’m really glad that people forgive me all the time without asking that I open a vein or kill my cat for them.

So if I can offer forgiveness without the shedding of blood, and so can other people, what is going on with God? …I mean, if God is the one making the rules, and sin is a serious affront to His holiness, then why did He decide that blood would appease Him? Why not require … I don’t know … spit? Or hair? Yes, I like the hair idea.

Why didn’t God simply say “Without the cutting of hair, there can be no forgiveness of sins”?

This author at least tries to give an explanation:

Instead, the blood was for the enactment of the Mosaic Covenant. The author of Hebrews could not be more clear. He says that a testament, or will, is not put into effect until the one who wrote it dies (Hebrews 9:16-17). My wife and I have Wills, and as is the case with all Wills, they do not go into effect until we die. A “Last Will and Testament” has no power while we live.

…Whose “Last Will and Testament” was this? It was God’s! It was God’s covenant to the people.

It’s true that the Bible proposes this answer, in the referenced verse of Hebrews 9:16-17: God made a “testament” with humanity, and a last will and testament only goes into effect upon the creator’s death. However, this is just a play on words. It doesn’t reflect any underlying principle or rule.

A will is a species of legal document, but in general, legal documents only require mutual agreement. If I sign a contract with someone, no blood needs to be spilled and no one needs to die. It goes into effect when we both sign on the dotted line, that’s all.

My “last will and testament” isn’t anything special or different than any of the other choices I make during my lifespan. There’s nothing about my death that gives it special force or added power. It’s called that because it’s the last choice I can make that goes into effect; that’s all.

The author goes on to suggest a second explanation, that death is the gateway to freedom from a past life of sin:

So the redemption enacted as part of the Mosaic covenant was the redemption of the slaves from Egypt. The death of the calves and goats symbolized the death of the Israelite people to their former life of slavery in Egypt.

Through the Mosaic covenant, the people of Israel died to their old identification as slaves to the household of Pharaoh (i.e., Egypt), and were raised again to a new identification as members of the household of God. This is why the water and the blood was sprinkled not just on the book of the covenant, but also on all the people (Hebrews 9:19).

…God’s holiness did not demand that Jesus be put to death. No, it was the devil that demanded death and blood (cf. Hebrews 2:14-15). Sin was the certificate of ownership which the devil held over the heads of humanity.

By dying, Jesus cancelled this debt of sin so that the devil could no longer have any claim upon us. This happened because just as all sinned in Adam, and so became slaves to death and the devil, so all died and were raised to new life in Jesus, and so were liberated and redeemed from our slavery to death and the devil.

This explanation has the same basic problem. It treats a metaphor as if it were a binding rule.

You can speak of a momentous change in metaphorical terms, by saying the old person is “dead” and someone new has taken their place. But to claim this requires a literal blood sacrifice is stretching the metaphor to hyperliteral absurdity. You can also describe a change by saying you’ve turned over a new leaf, but that doesn’t mean you have to go out into a forest and flip over fallen leaves to make that change effective in your own life.

A person doesn’t have to die, either symbolically or literally, to be freed from slavery. No one died because of Abraham Lincoln’s issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was still effective. Obviously Union soldiers did die to make those words a reality, but that bloodshed wasn’t a necessary ingredient of the proclamation itself. It was only required because the South resisted and had to be subdued by force. If the Confederacy had peacefully surrendered and freed its slaves voluntarily, the result would be the same.

Neither slavery nor debt is a fundamental aspect of a person that requires radical surgery to remove. It’s a status imposed on them by others, and it can be removed the same way. If God is more powerful than Satan, he could have just cancelled that “debt of sin” without any death or bloodshed, the same way a president might cancel student loan debt. So why didn’t he?

It’s obvious where this idea actually comes from. It’s derived from the ancient religious notion of the scapegoat.

In this primitive theology, God is a hot-tempered tyrant who’s enraged by human disobedience. Once he’s angered, he has to take that anger out on someone—and his punishments are so indiscriminate, there’s often collateral damage.

To protect themselves from God’s wrath, ancient societies believed that they could perform a ritual to magically transfer the guilt from wrongdoers into an animal. That animal was either slaughtered or driven out into the wilderness, taking the punishment on people’s behalf and satisfying God’s hunger for vengeance (as in Leviticus 16:21-22).

Because of moral progress, we now understand that scapegoat theology makes no sense. Guilt isn’t a substance that can be moved from one being to another. However, Christianity is frozen in place as a derivation of this idea. All the philosophical ink spilled by theologians is an attempt to put a rational gloss on that ancient and bloody superstition. They’re casting about for a sophisticated explanation where there isn’t one. They’re seeking profundity that doesn’t exist.

The Probability Broach: Blue sky

Blue sky with clouds

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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The Probability Broach: The myth of the lone genius

The statue of The Thinker

The Probability Broach, chapter 13

Win Bear’s appearance in the North American Confederacy has proven that the Probability Broach works. It can establish contact with parallel universes and transport people and things between them. The scientist who built it, Dr. Dora “Deejay” Thorens, rushes off to tell her lab partner—who, it turns out, isn’t human:

Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet first conceived the Probability Broach in 192 A.L., when Deejay Thorens was a mere calf whose present position was occupied by another landling. Unfortunately, she’d been looking for a way to get to Alpha Centauri, and was particularly disappointed since her mathematics had seemed flawless.

We already met talking chimpanzees and gorillas in the NAC, and now Smith adds talking dolphins and porpoises. As with the primates, there’s no mention of humanity genetically modifying them to uplift them to intelligence. In fact, the text says they were intelligent all along, and we just never noticed until we had a society advanced enough for them to want to join it.

This raises some uncomfortable questions about what human-cetacean relations were like before this revelation. How do they feel about being hunted for meat by humans, or trapped and drowned in fishing nets, or fatally beaching themselves while fleeing from our sonar? What about dolphins being abducted from the wild and forced to perform tricks in aquariums—do they consider that slavery?

Do they have any hard feelings about all this? Did humans have to pay reparations? Smith never addresses the issue, although it does remind me of one of the best stories The Onion ever published.

“I’m gratified to meet you, Mr. Bear. You and your counterpart from this continuum are a welcome though scarcely necessary confirmation of my hypotheses.” This Telecom was different, a wheelchair with a table model TV on the seat, a periscope sticking out of the top. Ooloorie guided it remotely, moving her “eyes and ears” around, peering critically over the shoulders of people who were her “hands.” There was no screen at her end, a tank of salt water twelve hundred miles away. The periscope cameras translated what they picked up into an auditory hologram, super-high-fidelity wave fronts that, to her, were “television.”

Cetacean scientists have a mildly condescending attitude toward humans. The text tells us that they consider us hasty and clumsy, always intruding on their pure serene contemplation of the universe by turning it into experiments and machines.

Given that history I alluded to, it would make more sense if they disdained humanity for being a bunch of cruel, violent savages. It could be a realistic issue for the NAC utopia to confront if dolphins only agreed to work with us reluctantly, while retaining a deep suspicion of our motivations. But maybe Smith would have considered that too on-the-nose as a piece of social commentary.

I told my story to the two scientists. Deejay listened with barely suppressed excitement. Ooloorie mostly in absorbed silence. “It grieves me to hear that Dr. Meiss is… is no longer…” struggled the porpoise. “He had an unusual mind for a landling and accomplished, by himself, much of what it took dozens to do here.”

As the text explains, Oolorie’s experiment accidentally established contact with Win’s world. While surveying it, they were able to communicate with Vaughn Meiss (whose murder kicked off the plot of the book). They gave Meiss enough insights that he could begin constructing his own Broach, which was a feat that impressed them.

This section, especially Oolorie praising Meiss as being able to do “by himself” what normally takes “dozens”, is an insight into how libertarians believe that science works. Like everything else, they have an unrealistic view of what a single person can achieve.

In the real world, science is a massively collaborative process, as in the famous quote about standing on the shoulders of giants. Great insights and revolutionary discoveries almost never spring from the mind of a single individual. It takes teams of dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people working together, each one contributing a part to a greater whole.

This principle holds true even for people who are usually hailed as the rare geniuses who make great strides on their own. For example, Albert Einstein only nailed down the math for general relativity with help from his friend Marcel Grossman.

Thomas Edison, whose mythological status as a self-made man inspires libertarians possibly more than anyone else, had a large research team that worked under him, especially Lewis Latimer, who made critical contributions to the invention of the light bulb.

But libertarians dislike the idea of anything being collaborative. A goal that can only be accomplished by people cooperating makes them philosophically queasy. Instead, their ideology compels them to believe that all progress comes from geniuses working alone.

In Atlas Shrugged, for example, all of Ayn Rand’s protagonists possess a superhuman degree of competence. All they have to do is sit in an armchair and think, and they can come up with a brilliant idea that would never have occurred to anyone else. John Galt, the one ubermensch to rule them all, is so superhumanly competent that he can make devices which violate the laws of thermodynamics.

L. Neil Smith takes up the torch of this idea, depicting all progress—both in his anarcho-capitalist utopia and in “our” world—as owing to a few rare and exceptional geniuses. The only way TPB differs from Atlas is that it makes its everyman character, Win Bear, the point-of-view character, rather than one of the ubermenschen.

It’s no coincidence that libertarians keep doing this, and it’s not just because they’re allergic to the idea of cooperation. It feeds into their belief that these exceptional individuals aren’t just smarter than the rest of us, they’re better than the rest of us—and therefore should be allowed to do anything they please, without any pesky laws or other restrictions holding them back.

Image credit: Erik Drost, released under CC BY 2.0 license

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The Probability Broach: What have the Romans ever done for us?

The Roman-built Aqueduct of Segovia

The Probability Broach, chapter 12

We’ve previously seen that in the anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy, everything is cheap and everyone is rich. There’s no hunger, no poverty and no homelessness. In this chapter, L. Neil Smith makes his most direct attempt at explaining how this can be.

His character Ed Bear narrates that all it took was getting rid of government and all the taxes and other burdens it imposes. When they did that, people immediately became much wealthier, with no downsides. The advanced technology they have is a distant second-place explanation for their prosperity:

“Things aren’t unnaturally cheap. Win, we simply don’t tolerate a parasite that takes half your income and then builds more taxes into everything you buy! You people have been trying to get by on a quarter of your productive capacity—an eighth, when you count the costs of regulation—while the State eats up the rest! It’s a wonder you’ve survived at all!”

Last week, I responded to the preposterous claim that government “eats up” more than three-quarters of people’s productive capacity. If that were true, government spending would have to account for a large majority of GDP. It simply doesn’t.

Smith claims that “the costs of regulation” count for a significant fraction of the costs we pay. And it’s true: Regulation does create costs.

Safety gear makes window-washers more expensive to hire. Sanitary rules make restaurants more expensive to run. Trucking companies have to have rest periods every fourteen hours or so, forcing them to hire more drivers (rather than just buying cheap amphetamine pills). Pollution rules mean that chemical manufacturers can’t dump their waste in the nearest river. Pharmaceutical companies have to run large, expensive clinical trials to make sure that drugs work and are safe before they can sell them.

But he avoids the obvious followup: What are the costs of non-regulation?

You can’t just look at one side of the ledger and assume all the money you spent on compliance is wasted. What dollar value do you place on having clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, healthy food to eat that isn’t tainted or adulterated, and roads that aren’t littered with the smoking wrecks of unsafe vehicles? What’s the monetary value of workers not being killed on the job, or consumers being able to trust that the products they buy won’t poison them, or burn their house down, or do nothing at all?

L. Neil Smith describes government as a “parasite”, which is a telling analogy for how he sees the world. A parasite saps its host of energy for its own benefit, providing nothing in exchange.

This description only works if government is, literally, worthless – if it does nothing valuable, provides no services, confers no benefits. If government creates any value, then abolishing it isn’t a straightforward, no-brainer conclusion. It’s a matter of comparing the harms it inflicts to the benefits it provides, to see whether it’s a net positive in people’s lives. Smith doesn’t want to do that kind of cost-benefit analysis, so he insists every dollar paid in taxes just vanishes into a black hole.

But this is obviously false, whether he wants to admit it or not. Government does do useful things: roads, bridges, canals, water pipes, sewer systems, trash pickup, schools, fire departments, post offices, trading standards, stable currencies, and all the other infrastructure that our civilization depends on.

These things are built and maintained by tax dollars, with government as the coordinating mechanism to channel and focus the collective power of society. No single person could fund it all themself, and if millions of sovereign individuals tried to collectively organize these projects without hierarchy, they’d get bogged down in endless arguments over what should be done and who should do it. In Atlas Shrugged, I called this the “Hume’s Meadow” problem, after a thought experiment by the great skeptic.

Somehow, none of this reasoning makes an impression on L. Neil Smith and libertarians like him. They have a blind spot to all the ways that government improves their lives. They believe these valuable institutions just spring up out of nowhere when we need them.

Then they look around, wonder what government has ever done for them, and grumble that their tax dollars are going to waste. It’s Monty Python’s “what have the Romans ever done for us” skit, except it’s not being presented as parody, but as a straightfacedly literal argument in political theory.

In the very best case for an anarcho-capitalist, private companies would step in to provide the same services. They’d own the roads, the bridges, the sewers, and so on. But even if that happened, why wouldn’t these for-profit businesses squeeze people for at least as much revenue as the government takes in taxes?

Free-market competition isn’t going to help here. It’s not as if you’re going to have multiple road networks (or multiple sewer pipes!) connected to your house. And even if that somehow happened, why wouldn’t the companies that owned them conspire among themselves to fix prices so that they could all make more profit? There’s no law against that in this world!

After their lunch, Ed and Win follow up on the next lead in their case:

Laporte University, Ltd. is the local push-back-the-barriers joint where Bertram’s people shared facilities. The Confederacy draws no distinction between applied science and pure research. Those who can, do. They also teach. Those who can’t, maybe they wind up in Congress like back home.

Dora Jayne Thorens didn’t belong in Congress, unless you prefer the delicate way they put things in Victorian novels. A six-foot platinum blonde with a figure that should have won her a staple through the navel, she was also chief of paratronics research.

Win is the one narrating this leering paragraph, and I’d say the text was trying to depict him as a crudely sexist ogler, except it seems clear this is the author’s predilection being expressed through the character.

There’s no plot reason she had to be a beautiful woman (I puzzled over “a staple through the navel” until I figured out it meant she looks like the centerfold model of a man’s magazine). It’s just that Smith wants to populate his utopia with gorgeous blondes for himself to write his drooling fantasies about.

“Mr. Bear?” She looked at Ed, and then at me.

“We’re both Mr. Bear, Ed and Win. Did you lose this felt-tip recently?”

“I’ve got a deskful just like it. Is this what detectives do these days? It’s certainly service.”

Win says he found the pen in a desk drawer in the United States of America, and a light dawns. Dr. Thorens runs off, shouting to her colleagues that they’ve done it.

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New on OnlySky: Abortion bans don’t stop abortion

I have a new column this week on OnlySky about the effect of abortion bans. They don’t decrease abortion – they increase it.

It’s been three years since the Dobbs decision that allowed red states to pass abortion. It was always obvious that wealthy, privileged people wouldn’t be affected by this – they can just travel to where abortion is legal. But you might have guessed that poorer and working-class people, who can’t afford the time or the expense, would be unable to access abortion care.

However, that expectation would be wrong. The data shows clearly that America’s overall abortion rate has gone up, not down. Blue-state shield laws, which allow providers to mail abortion medication to red states, have made these bans far less effective than their authors would like. This is a victory for personal liberty and reproductive rights, and a resounding defeat for the religious right lawmakers who spent decades trying to reach this point.

Of course, this is hardly good news. The flip side is that, while abortion hasn’t gone down, maternal mortality has gone up. This is exactly what we should have expected from laws that make doctors afraid to treat women in the throes of a pregnancy-related medical emergency. That’s not an accident, but their entire purpose.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

What this shows is that the religious right has tried their utmost to deprive women of autonomy—and they’ve failed.

Let’s not forget, they’ve spent a staggering amount of time and energy getting to this point. After their leadership made a political decision that fighting desegregation was a lost cause, the religious right reorganized around banning abortion. That’s been their all-consuming obsession for decades.

They’ve lobbied, marched and picketed. They’ve preached countless anti-choice sermons calling down hellfire on America. They’ve poured billions of dollars into getting anti-choice politicians elected. They’ve tried to frighten and shame women, squeeze clinics out of business with onerous regulations, and chase doctors out of practice through harassment, intimidation and outright violence.

This was supposed to be the moment of their triumph. The overturning of Roe was the culmination of their dreams. They thought it would be the start of a new era of glorious theocracy, where their particular version of religious dogma would reign over the land.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Robots do nothing

A black and white photo of a factory assembly line

The Probability Broach, chapter 12

Over lunch, Ed and Win Bear are debating the merits of their respective governmental systems. Win protests half-heartedly that his world isn’t all that bad:

“We must be doing something right, the U.S. is the most prosperous—”

“Slum in your world.”

“The poorest American’s rich, compared to other countries!”

“And the poorest Confederate’s rich, compared to most Americans. All your taxes and regulations freeze old wealth, and make new fortunes impossible—except for those with political pull. The rich fend off the law, while those below get picked clean by your IRA.”

“IRS, though I’ll concede there isn’t much practical difference.”

First of all, how does Ed Bear know anything about Win’s United States? He’s never been there or even seen it. He might argue on behalf of his own society about why it’s better, but how can he feel qualified to criticize someone else’s?

On top of that, this feels like a Gish Gallop, where one party in a debate throws out dubious assertions too rapidly for the other side to counter them all.

Taxes freeze old wealth? Including progressive tax systems, which tax the rich at higher rates and use the revenue to fund safety net programs for the poor? How does that preserve old wealth?

This is a bald-faced assertion that programs whose goal is to decrease inequality actually increase inequality. I’d argue the point, but there’s nothing to argue. Smith doesn’t even try to justify it; he just makes the assertion and leaves it hanging. It’s like Ayn Rand asserting that regulation makes coal mining more dangerous (somehow).

Now, I’ll grant it’s true that there’s such a thing as a regulatory moat: big companies that lobby for government licensing and burdensome regulations in order to suppress competition. The big players can afford the costs of compliance, while smaller competitors can’t. But the solution isn’t to have no regulations at all!

In fact, Smith’s own argument proves the point: large corporations will do anything they can to shut out competitors. In our world, laws restrain them from doing that, however much they might want to. In an anarcho-capitalist world, nothing prevents them from using dirty tricks or outright violence. They could hire an army of Pinkertons, or whatever the NAC equivalent is, to threaten competitors with a gun duel if they don’t leave town. Under the anything-goes customs of this society, that’s perfectly allowable.

This goes back to the common libertarian misunderstanding that a free market is a self-sustaining state of nature. Actually, markets require laws and regulators to protect their existence and keep anyone from tipping the playing field too far in their own favor. Just as a sports game needs rules and referees to keep from degenerating into a brawl – and it doesn’t invalidate this point that referees are occasionally corrupt or unfair – markets can only exist when authorities uphold the preconditions for free and fair commerce.

“Tell me, how long does an American work to buy a car?”

“He can’t, any more. We used to spread it over a couple of years, why?”

“Win, a Confederate hoverbuggy represents about three weeks’ earnings—don’t look at me that way! How about a home?”

“Nowadays, forget it. Ten years ago, maybe five years’ wages. Actually, you’re talking a forty-year mortgage, even with—”

“I paid my house off in six months. And Win, this meal you’ve kindly provided is an expensive one. Meep’s got decorators to pay, after all. We could’ve eaten under the corner for the same price in copper!”

It’s also cheap because the NAC has no food safety inspections or labs analyzing ingredients or safety, of course. Getting rid of those undoubtedly saves money. But who do you call if you get sick from that cheap lunch?

It’d be one thing to argue that we have too much regulation, which creates inefficiencies that make goods more expensive without adding adequate value in return.

Smith isn’t arguing anything so modest. He’s saying that if we scrapped all government, the payoff period of a mortgage would fall from thirty years to six months, and the cost of a car would fall from several years’ earnings to several weeks.

In other words, he expects us to believe that state-imposed overhead makes up something like 98% of the cost of a house or a car. And he generalizes this to all goods, claiming that taxes and the cost of regulations accounts for a huge majority of the prices we pay for everything.

There’s an easy, back-of-the-envelope way to check this. If it were true, government spending would have to account for a massive majority of GDP. (Because all that money the state steals from hardworking citizens presumably goes somewhere, and isn’t just put in a pile and burned.)

The real value, as of 2023, is around 36% for the United States. That’s broadly in line with most industrialized countries. Even if you assume that all this taxing and spending creates no value (a dubious point we’ll discuss next week), it’s clearly not the case that it overwhelms the economy to the point of crowding out all else.

“How come everything’s so fucking cheap? Don’t your workers have to eat? Or is everything automated?”

“Automation doesn’t help: it always takes more people to create and maintain the machinery, and a healthy economy’s real problem is chronic labor shortages. Things aren’t unnaturally cheap. Win, we simply don’t tolerate a parasite that takes half your income and then builds more taxes into everything you buy!”

Wait, what?

It’s hard to understand Smith’s argument, but he seems to be saying that automation doesn’t make the economy more productive, because it takes the same amount of labor to maintain the machines that make stuff as it would have to make that stuff by hand.

This is screamingly, unbelievably wrong. An assembly line with industrial robots can’t make cars faster than if each employee was a blacksmith hammering out the parts?

Of course automation makes us more productive. Why else would anyone bother with it? Why have we been inventing labor-saving technologies since at least the Roman era? This is an elementary failure, not just of political understanding, but of basic reasoning.

My best guess is that this bizarre assertion is the fruit of Smith’s ideologically driven one-reason worldview. He doesn’t want readers to conclude, incorrectly in his opinion, that the North American Confederacy is superior only because it has more advanced technology. (Because then a different society with the same technology would be just as good to live in.)

He wants readers to conclude that government and taxes are the only source of evil, and that every other good or bad thing about a society traces back to whether it has them. But to flatten a society down to the point where that’s the only thing that matters, he has to do violence to elementary logic.

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