Long time, no reach!
Haven’t posted here in years. Since I keep getting throttled and suspended for bullshit reasons by every social media site I use, I figured I should start a blog. Then I realized I already did, this one. Got some impossibly interesting things to announce the the world, “the world” being the people who accidentally see this page, and the bots which are apparently so unimpressed with this blog’s reach that their programming doesn’t think spamming viagra copypasta is worth the nano-joule of energy to do it. And also there are the Secret Stasi Surveillance spies, which I’ll talk about more later maybe, but for now you can bookmark Anonymous Conservative to catch up to speed. Long story short: Lauryn Hill wasn’t namedropping Terminator and Bodysnatchers movies for no reason, and Dave Chappelle wasn’t really joking about a Space Demographic. But it’s way, way, way more complicated than most could imagine. I think even God would struggle to understand what in the unholy fuck has been happening all this time, all these decades, all these centuries, all these millennia. I think even God would resort to reading Infinite Jest in order to get a better mental grip on our multitude of predicaments.
Ah, that’ll be my rule going forward, so as to keep this still technically an Infinite Jest blog: I’ll mention Infinite Jest in every post, no matter how relevant or wildly irrelevant.
Vigilant, Intuitive, Rigorous Citizenship
I’m just going to riff. Not going to go searching for links to embed videos and whatnot. You reading this can open a new window and investigate further yourself. For now, I am just going to think out loud about some things.
Ordinarily, I would be doing this on the message board for Rigorous Intuition, but that place has suddenly been, uh, privatized. Everyone except for…who?…has been locked out…why? There was a lot of suspicious activity there recently, since the quarantine began. Just before then or right around then, I am too lazy to look it up, I was banned there, by Nicholas Levis, a literal communist who was the chairman or whatever of NYC’s 9/11 Truth movement. The site’s proprietor is nowhere to be seen, even more so than the last several years he’s been AWOL, and I suspect Nicholas Levis / Nikos Evangelos / JackRiddler has some kind of unseemly leverage over him. I don’t quite know what to make of the situation. Jeff Wells seems awfully spooked by me. (I am NOT a spy, of any kind, I am an absolute fucking NOBODY, I can prove it.) Perhaps I remind him of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in some way. Hmmm, lol. Be careful what you ask the universe for, ladies and gentlemen! But I’m not sure exactly whom to root for. I am pretty sure Levis is an unthinkable monster, but I don’t know. I bet the NSA knows, though, hahaha! Yikes. Not good to be a ghoul right now. I thank whatever gods that be that I escaped being one by the hair of my teeth. (Teeth…they’re a skin-crawlingly creepy thing in Infinite Jest for a reason. Dentists…there’s a reason so many commit suicide. It’s not good. No bueno. But more about that later.) I was, like Hal, surrounded by many, many diabolical traitors most of my life. From birth. They must have sensed I was “unreliable”, in the sense that I have a mostly-unshakeable moral compass. Principles instilled in me by my mother, my father, my uncle William Henchey. By the best teacher to exist at Boston Latin School in our lifetimes, Inez Middleton. By so many great comedies Hollywood vampires have produced DESPITE THEMSELVES, forced to offer normal Americans a surface story of good-over-evil triumph and forced to secretly enjoy the narratives on a subtextual level, which they fucking love, these satanic scumbags, they just LOVE running their evil secretly right under our fucking noses. But they had no choice but to create good stories, or else nobody would watch. Well, back then, anyway. Now they just feed us total shit, and laugh. But once upon a time, Hollywood was forced to make, say, Groundhog Day. And the sick fucks of Monty Python were forced to be TRUE or else, per the maxim of funny-because-it’s-true, it wouldn’t have been funny. I am forever grateful to have been educated by them, whether they wanted to teach me what I learned, or not. I am now, I think, because of them all, the least incorrigible person on earth. I can prove that, too, maybe!
But so what is this post REALLY about? I am Beating Around the Bush. Let’s dive into the bush, in search of birds to capture in our hands, and perhaps we can find a pair, and feed them with one scone, as the silly shitheads at PETA want us to do.
Vigilant Citizen has been barely dutiful enough in his contributions to understanding the quarantine crisis. He barely dipped his toes into it, compared to the mountain of Told You So analysis he must have stored up like a flood behind a dam. Why so withholding? Is VC actually PART of the Revelation of the Method? Has VC been a limited hangout this whole time? Hard to believe. VC has been pretty much the only voice of Paranoid Enough reason in the internet wilderness, aside from disreputable fundamentalists and Icke-heads. I am sure that QAnons are generally familiar with VC, and look to it for insight, and it sure does make sense that Q’s “symbolism will be their downfall” proposition refers in some way to exactly what VC has been writing up for 10 years, or more, if you count his time on Rigorous Intuition before finding refuge from the fake-left madness on his own blog. Perhaps I should have done the same. But I feel a duty to stick around. I feel married to FourthBase, because it is ME, it is really who I am, I am not a phony. I get confused sometimes, like anybody with a normal brain in this psychotically insane world. I feel obliged to talk sense into that community, too, because I really did think of them all as allies, as friends, for so, so long. Some may still be, I don’t know. I hope so.
But so VC has blind spots. Conspicuous blind spots. Like, for example, not a single article about Janelle Monae. Does not her entire android mythology align PERFECTLY with VC’s whole paradigm? Is it not perhaps evidence of mind control? Does VC think Janelle is WARNING us, as a good faith humanitarian, as if she’s from a benevolent race of time travellers? Because he never gives that same benefit of the doubt to other pop icons delving into MK themes. She is the fucking EPITOME of the transhumanist agenda, and yet VC is utterly silent about her. Curious, no? She has collaborated with the obviously satanic posthumanist princess of the New World Order, the creepy-as-fuck Grimes. Monae ought to be one of the most scrutinized figures on VC. But, nothing.
Another curious omission: Radiohead. Their output is LOADED with creepy, occult MK motifs. They have even had a mainstream author do a half-assed limited hangout about them in a chapter of a book, about the notion that their Kid A predicted 9/11. I say half-assed limited hangout because surely Klosterman should have noticed the impossibly-precognitive depiction of the South Tower and North Tower, the latter exploding in flames at its top, in the artwork of Kid A. Well, it was a little concealed, so maybe he just didn’t notice. Eh. Not everyone is a ghoul, somebody can just be a fool. But anyway, what was altered to obscure its content in the album artwork was the painting Residential Nemesis by Stanley Donwood. Look that up now. See what I mean? That looks like it was painted as a mourning tribute to the World Trade Center in the aftermath, but it was painted in 2000. So, yeah, pretty fucking weird. Something is fishy there. Maybe Radiohead was genuinely trying to warn us. Or maybe they are part of a demonic global cult that just LOVES to wave their evil stench under our noses as we look around wondering stupidly where the odor is coming from. To support the latter interpretation, let’s take a look at their video for “Just”, which is now notorious for its Mystery: “What is it that the guy on the ground says to everyone? Why is he lying on the sidewalk? What could possibly devastate people so much that hearing it also sends them into a paralysis?” 25 years, and supposedly no one could figure it out. All sorts of sophisticated answers from idiots who have spent way, way too much time listening to their mind-warping professors. The answer, of course, is blindingly fucking obvious: IT’S THE FUCKING CHORUS! When Radiohead sings it for the first time, is when he first hits the ground. It is the thought that cripples him. It is a truth too painful for us to confront: WE DO IT TO OURSELVES. Whatever it is? You do it, ultimately, to yourself. Masochistically, knowingly — or unknowingly, not aware enough to reject hideously dysfunctional situations. So, in a way, this might be how the devilish bastards think of all abusive situations. They blame the victim for being dumb and compliant. And, oh, look around. Look at the world today. Dumb, and compliant. But…but NOT ENOUGH! The evil fucks have already lost. It is written. But more on that later.
So, right under our noses, a “mystery” was invented, that we all should have intuited immediately, but for some reason our intuitions have been…DISABLED. The evil ruling class has made us stupid. A sign of how evil they are, is that going to school usually makes us STUPIDER. They trap us with double binds to drive us nuts. They gaslight us, every fucking day. It’s truly amazing, the incomprehensible depths of their pathological agenda. They are the pathocrats, and they want to pathologize us, too. It’s a cultural version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the metaphorical (?) aliens have almost completely won. Ah…but NOT QUITE! Hahahahaha, they miscalculated. They don’t actually understand normal people. How could they? They can only study us as outsiders. And they must have got high on their own supply. Of adrenochrome. Which, if you think that wasn’t the A-Number-One Substance that Wallace had in mind while creating Infinite Jest, well, do I have some news for you. It ain’t good news. But more on that later.
Look, now my laptop battery is running low, so I will shorten this story. Here:
Laura Branigan was once featured on Vigilant Citizen for an early instance of an OBVIOUS Traumatic Mind Control coded video. Look it up, it’s fucking STRANGE, but once you realize just how mind-bogglingly evil our society has been, from the top down, then such a video will no longer surprise you. But now, what if we go looking for another song of hers, to see if she was really an Illuminati songbird, or just a singer roped into one weird video. Remember “Gloria”? Ever actually listened to the lyrics? It’s as if she is singing to a mind control victim who has escaped, warning/threatening her that the cabal has her number, knows her alias. Taunting her, or perhaps trying to wake her up to reality, that she really doesn’t remember…what, we don’t know. But, it’s amnesia. Hmmm. And there are voices in her head. Well, we all hear voices in our head, to some degree. But that suspiciously aligns with a this-is-a-secret-message-from-MK-handlers-hidden-in-plain-sight interpretation. Let’s think. Is it possible there is a SINGLE victim literally named Gloria that they are tormenting with that song? It’s possible. They are THAT fucking evil, and bold. Impossible to wrap our heads around…OR SO THEY WERE COUNTING ON. What’s another possibility? That there was a generation of MK victims who were programmed with a “Gloria” personality, who were all being addressed secretly at once whenever that song played on the radio. Unnerving thought, isn’t it? You just think it’s a charming dance pop song, but for random some girl or boy next to you in the supermarket it’s a horrifying form of inescapable harassment. Imagine that.
Now imagine that these evil fucks can control, if not the weather (although I suspect they can) then at least the NAMES of hurricanes. So maybe Hurricane Gloria in 1986 was a reiteration of the message, another threat or trigger layered deep inside what to everyone else appears UTTERLY ORDINARY. How about another Gloria? Patti Smith’s one. Uh oh. Here is where it gets REALLY dark. What if Patti Smith and her soulmate Mapplethorpe were the type of people who worshipped Satan so much that they had someone killed to watch the snuff films he possessed which captured one of the Sons of Sam murdering people? They might be that evil. If they were, and if my speculation that Branigan’s Gloria dovetailed with an MK persona programmed into thousands, then maybe Patti’s would be, too. Or maybe hers depicts the excitement of hunting down a child. Listen to it again. It’s a pretty, pretty fucking EVIL song, if you listen to it a certain way. As evil as Don’t Fear the Reaper. But don’t get me started…look it up yourself.
Okay, now, what if most of our pop culture and DEFINITELY most of our avant garde culture were intended to communicate a satanic message of some kind, or is innocent musically but still made by ghoulish creeps, or has been used as the soundtrack for unspeakably evil acts, atrocities against children, etc. We are going to have to find out a way to salvage our pop culture artifacts from THEIR evil intentions. My first idea is to re-write every word of some songs and have equally good singers re-sing and re-record them EXACTLY as we know them, except for the new words, which can rhyme with what they’re replacing and reproduce the same cadence of syllables. It’ll be challenging, but fun. Otherwise, we may be left with a vast desert of RUINED culture, and that would be depressing, which would make THEM happy, so FUCK THEM, we will reclaim THEIR evil culture and REAPPROPRIATE IT for the sake of THE GOOD. Yes. Yes, we can.
Here’s a song, though, that we may not want to change: Freedom, by George Michael. It may contain layers of truths we have yet to fully process, but the hideous context coming at us like a tidal wave on the not-so-distant horizon may afford us the opportunity to reappreciate it. Listen to it. Listen closely. Watch the video, notice who is in it. Notice the lesbian blood ritual depicted. Take note of George especially when he says that He Held The Knife As Well. He is confessing there to having participated in the human sacrifices, and he is telling you somebody took pictures of it, and blackmailed him over it. He was trying to declare his freedom, but with those kind of skeletons in the closet, that must be hard to pull off. Thank god you and I don’t have such skeletons. Well, besides the babies we eat (well, YOU eat, now) every fucking day, the deformed hairy wordless babies we call arbitrarily call cows and pigs. We might as well be cannibals. We may LITERALLY be cannibals, without our knowledge or consent, if the wrong people have been in charge of our food supply. Be prepared for anything. And be prepared to repeat after the character trying to console Will Hunting: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”
But okay, why am I posting any of this here? Hahahaha, oh my. Do you not get it yet? Wallace was a prophet. You are about to see what he prophesized. Video that will paralyze people…momentarily, though…not permanently. It’s too late…for them, for the ghouls. We, the normies, however fucking normal we really are…we win. People like me have never been crazy. It took me until my third psych ward vacation, one I might as well have planned like a maestro myself, to realize: Hal was FAKING being a sputtering, flailing retard in the admissions office. He WANTED to be committed. It was a plan. A plan to win. And…he wins. The good guys win. Yay!
DART and OSIRIS could KILL US ALL
Read this.
READ THIS.
“Asteroid deflection technology risks extinction via intentional misuse—highly probable.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
The foregoing are examples of inadvertence. But there’s another kind of peril: We are sometimes told that this or that invention would of course not be misused. No sane person would be so reckless. This is the “only a madman” argument. Whenever I hear it (and it’s often trotted out in such debates), I remind myself that madmen really exist. Sometimes they achieve the highest levels of political power in modern industrial nations. This is the century of Hitler and Stalin, tyrants who posed the gravest dangers not just to the rest of the human family, but to their own people as well. In the winter and spring of 1945, Hitler ordered Germany to be destroyed—even “what the people need for elementary survival”—because the surviving Germans had “betrayed” him, and at any rate were “inferior” to those who had already died. If Hitler had had nuclear weapons, the threat of a counterstrike by Allied nuclear weapons, had there been any, is unlikely to have dissuaded him. It might have encouraged him.
Can we humans be trusted with civilization-threatening technologies? If the chance is almost one in a thousand that much of the human population will be killed by an impact in the next century, isn’t it more likely that asteroid deflection technology will get into the wrong hands in another century—some misanthropic sociopath like a Hitler or a Stalin eager to kill everybody, a megalomaniac lusting after “greatness” and “glory,” a victim of ethnic violence bent on revenge, someone in the grip of unusually severe testosterone poisoning, some religious fanatic hastening the Day of Judgment, or just technicians incompetent or insufficiently vigilant in handling the controls and safeguards? Such people exist. The risks seem far worse than the benefits, the cure worse than the disease. The cloud of near-Earth asteroids through which the Earth plows may constitute a modern Camarine marsh.
This outweighs the case—probability and timeframe.
Sagan and Ostro 94 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, and Steven J. Ostro, Director of the Asteroid Radar Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, holds a Ph.D. in Planetary Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994 (“Dangers of Asteroid Deflection,” Nature, Volume 368, Number 6471, April 7th, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Nature Online, p. 501)
This proposal is a double-edged sword. If we can perturb an asteroid out of impact trajectory, it follows that we can also transform one on a benign trajectory into an Earth-impactor. For example, the asteroid 1991 OA could in 2070 be deflected into Earth-impact trajectory 5 with an aggregate yield of only about 60 MT. Although a single asteroid can more readily be deflected away from, than into, an impact trajectory, there is not an orders-of-magnitude difference in technical effort; but there are orders-of-magnitude more Earth-crossing asteroids that can be induced to impact the Earth than will do so on their own. With a Spaceguard-like inventory of such asteroids and a launch-ready deflection system of nuclear-armed missiles, it might take only a few years to identify a suitable large asteroid, alter its orbit through a series of nuclear explosions with individual yields of about 10 MT (available in existing arsenals), and send it crashing into Earth.5 There is no other way known in which a few nuclear weapons could by themselves threaten the global civilization.
In our view, development of this asteroid-deflection technology would be premature. Given twentieth-century history and present global politics, it is hard to imagine guarantees against eventual misuse of an asteroid deflection system commensurate with the dangers such a system poses. Those who argue that it would be prudent to prevent catastrophic impacts with annual probabilities of 10-5 will surely recognize the prudence of preventing more probable catastrophes of comparable magnitude from misuse of a potentially apocalyptic technology.
It is of course sensible to seek cost-effective reduction of risks from all hazards to our civilization—even low-probability hazards, of which many may remain unidentified. At a total cost of some $300 million, Spaceguard arguably constitutes a reasonable measure of defence against the impact hazard. But premature deployment of any asteroid orbit-modification capability, in the real world and in light of well-established human frailty and fallibility, may introduce a new category of danger that dwarfs that posed by the objects themselves.
Link Materials
Link—Asteroid Deflection
Deflection technology is inherently dual-use—if they solve, they link.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
The problem, Steven Ostro of JPL and I have suggested, is that if you can reliably deflect a threatening worldlet so it does not collide with the Earth, you can also reliably deflect a harmless worldlet so it does collide with the Earth. Suppose you had a full inventory, with orbits, of the estimated 300,000 near-Earth asteroids larger than 100 meters—each of them large enough, on impacting the Earth, to have serious consequences. Then, it turns out, you also have a list of huge numbers of inoffensive asteroids whose orbits could be altered with nuclear warheads so they quickly collide with the Earth.
Link—Asteroid Detection
Asteroid detection is a booby trap—the risk of underestimating the threat is justified in order to prevent intentional misuse of deflection technology.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
Even if we restrict ourselves merely to surveillance, there’s a risk. Imagine that in a generation we characterize the orbits of 30,000 objects of 100-meter diameter or more, and that this information is publicized, as of course it should be. Maps will be published showing near-Earth space black with the orbits of asteroids and comets, 30,000 swords of Damocles hanging over our heads—ten times more than the number of stars visible to the naked eye under conditions of optimum atmospheric clarity. Public anxiety might be much greater in such a time of knowledge than in our current age of ignorance. There might be irresistible public pressure to develop means to mitigate even nonexistent threats, which would then feed the danger that deflection technology would be misused. For this reason, asteroid discovery and surveillance may not be a mere neutral tool of future policy, but rather a kind of booby trap. To me, the only foreseeable solution is a combination of accurate orbit estimation, realistic threat assessment, and effective public education—so that in democracies at least, the citizens can make their own, informed decisions. This is a job for NASA. Near-Earth asteroids, and means of altering their orbits, are being looked at seriously. There is some sign that officials in the Department of Defense and the weapons laboratories are beginning to understand that there may be real dangers in planning to push asteroids around. Civilian and military scientists have met to discuss the subject. On first hearing about the asteroid hazard, many people think of it as a kind of Chicken Little fable; Goosey-Lucy, newly arrived and in great excitement, is communicating the urgent news that the sky is falling. The tendency to dismiss the prospect of any catastrophe that we have not personally witnessed is in the long run very foolish. But in this case it may be an ally of prudence.
Link—Asteroid Mining
Attempting to move an asteroid into Earth’s orbit risks disaster—the margin of error is too small.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
The notion of moving asteroids into Earth orbit has proved attractive to some space scientists and long-range planners. They foresee mining the minerals and precious metals of these worlds or providing resources for the construction of space infrastructure without having to fight the Earth’s gravity to get them up there. Articles have been published on how to accomplish this end and what the benefits will be. In modern discussions, the asteroid is inserted into orbit around the Earth by first making it pass through and be braked by the Earth’s atmosphere, a maneuver with very little margin for error. For the near future we can, I think, recognize this whole endeavor as unusually dangerous and foolhardy, especially for metal worldlets larger than tens of meters across. This is the one activity where errors in navigation or propulsion or mission design can have the most sweeping and catastrophic consequences.
They Say: “Link Not Unique”
The link is unique—it would take 100 years to find a deflectable asteroid in the status quo but the plan makes it possible within a year.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
Suppose we restrict our attention to the 2,000 or so near-Earth asteroids that are a kilometer across or bigger—that is, the ones most likely to cause a global catastrophe. Today, with only about 100 of these objects catalogued, it would take about a century to catch one when it’s easily deflectable to Earth and alter its orbit. We think we’ve found one, an as-yet-unnamed* asteroid so far denoted only as 1991OA. In 2070, this world, about 1 kilometer in diameter, will come within 4.5 million kilometers of the Earth’s orbit—only fifteen times the distance to the Moon. To deflect 1991OA so it hits the Earth, only about 60 megatons of TNT equivalent needs to be exploded in the right way—the equivalent of a small number of currently available nuclear warheads.
Now imagine a time, a few decades hence, when all such near-Earth asteroids are inventoried and their orbits compiled. Then, as Alan Harris of JPL, Greg Canavan of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Ostro, and I have shown, it might take only a year to select a suitable object, alter its orbit, and send it crashing into the Earth with cataclysmic effect.
Impact Materials
DA Outweighs Case
The risk of the DA is high and their takeouts are naïve—comparative evidence.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
It’s easy to think that all of this must be very unlikely, mere anxious fantasy. Surely sober heads would prevail. Think of how many people would be involved in preparing and launching warheads, in space navigation, in detonating warheads, in checking what orbital perturbation each nuclear explosion has made, in herding the asteroid so it is on an impact trajectory with Earth, and so on. Isn’t it noteworthy that although Hitler gave orders for the retreating Nazi troops to burn Paris and to lay waste to Germany itself, his orders were not carried out? Surely someone essential to the success of the deflection mission will recognize the danger. Even assurances that the project is designed to destroy some vile enemy nation would probably be disbelieved, because the effects of collision are planetwide (and anyway it’s very hard to make sure your asteroid excavates its monster crater in a particularly deserving nation).
But now imagine a totalitarian state not overrun by enemy troops, but one thriving and self-confident. Imagine a tradition in which orders are obeyed without question. Imagine that those involved in the operation are supplied a cover story: The asteroid is about to impact the Earth, and it is their job to deflect it—but in order not to worry people needlessly, the operation must be performed in secret. In a military setting with a command hierarchy firmly in place, compartmentalization of knowledge, general secrecy, and a cover story, can we be confident that even apocalyptic orders would be disobeyed? Are we really sure that in the next decades and centuries and millennia, nothing like this might happen? How sure are we?
It’s no use saying that all technologies can be used for good or for ill. That is certainly true, but when the “ill” achieves a sufficiently apocalyptic scale, we may have to set limits on which technologies may be developed. (In a way we do this all the time, because we can’t afford to develop all technologies. Some are favored and some are not.) Or constraints may have to be levied by the community of nations on madmen and autarchs and fanaticism.
If it is close, timeframe is the trump card—vote neg.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
Meanwhile we must still face the deflection dilemma. If we develop and deploy this technology, it may do us in. If we don’t, some asteroid or comet may do us in. The resolution of the dilemma hinges, I think, on the fact that the likely timescales of the two dangers are very different—short for the former, long for the latter.
Strongly err negative—misuse of technology is empirically likely.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
We have a tendency to minimize the dangers of new technologies. A year before the Chernobyl disaster, a Soviet nuclear power industry deputy minister was asked about the safety of Soviet reactors, and chose Chernobyl as a particularly safe site. The average waiting time to disaster, he confidently estimated, was a hundred thousand years. Less than a year later … devastation. Similar reassurances were provided by NASA contractors the year before the Challenger disaster: You would have to wait ten thousand years, they estimated, for a catastrophic failure of the shuttle. One year later … heartbreak.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were developed specifically as a completely safe refrigerant—to replace ammonia and other refrigerants that, on leaking out, had caused illness and some deaths. Chemically inert, nontoxic (in ordinary concentrations), odorless, tasteless, nonallergenic, nonflammable, CFCs represent a brilliant technical solution to a well-defined practical problem. They found uses in many other industries besides refrigeration and air conditioning. But, as I described above, the chemists who developed CFCs overlooked one essential fact—that the molecules’ very inertness guarantees that they are circulated to stratospheric altitudes and there cracked open by sunlight, releasing chlorine atoms which then attack the protective ozone layer. Due to the work of a few scientists, the dangers may have been recognized and averted in time. We humans have now almost stopped producing CFCs. We won’t actually know if we’ve avoided real harm for about a century; that’s how long it takes for all the CFC damage to be completed. Like the ancient Camarinans, we make mistakes.* Not only do we often ignore the warnings of the oracles; characteristically we do not even consult them.
They Say: “International Norms Check”
International norms won’t deter intentional misuse.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
Tracking asteroids and comets is prudent, it’s good science, and it doesn’t cost much. But, knowing our weaknesses, why would we even consider now developing the technology to deflect small worlds? For safety, shall we imagine this technology in the hands of many nations, each providing checks and balances against misuse by another? This is nothing like the old nuclear balance of terror. It hardly inhibits some madman intent on global catastrophe to know that if he does not hurry, a rival may beat him to it. How confident can we be that the community of nations will be able to detect a cleverly designed, clandestine asteroid deflection in time to do something about it? If such a technology were developed, can any international safeguards be envisioned that have a reliability commensurate with the risk?
They Say: “Technology Will Never Exist”
The basic technology required to deflect an asteroid into Earth already exists, and the plan makes it feasible.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
The technology required—large optical telescopes, sensitive detectors, rocket propulsion systems able to lift a few tons of payload and make precise rendezvous in nearby space, and thermonuclear weapons—all exist today. Improvements in all but perhaps the last can be confidently expected. If we’re not careful, many nations may have these capabilities in the next few decades. What kind of world will we then have made?
They Say: “Asteroids Make Extinction Inevitable”
If we win our disad, it turns their existential risk impact—short-term increases in risk outweigh delay.
Bostrom 3 — Nick Bostrom, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy & Oxford Martin School, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, and Director of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the University of Oxford, recipient of the 2009 Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement, holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the London School of Economics, 2003 (“Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development,” Utilitas, Volume 15, Number 3, Available Online at http://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html, Accessed 07-30-2011)
In light of the above discussion, it may seem as if a utilitarian ought to focus her efforts on accelerating technological development. The payoff from even a very slight success in this endeavor is so enormous that it dwarfs that of almost any other activity. We appear to have a utilitarian argument for the greatest possible urgency of technological development.
However, the true lesson is a different one. If what we are concerned with is (something like) maximizing the expected number of worthwhile lives that we will create, then in addition to the opportunity cost of delayed colonization, we have to take into account the risk of failure to colonize at all. We might fall victim to an existential risk, one where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.[8] Because the lifespan of galaxies is measured in billions of years, whereas the time-scale of any delays that we could realistically affect would rather be measured in years or decades, the consideration of risk trumps the consideration of opportunity cost. For example, a single percentage point of reduction of existential risks would be worth (from a utilitarian expected utility point-of-view) a delay of over 10 million years.
Therefore, if our actions have even the slightest effect on the probability of eventual colonization, this will outweigh their effect on when colonization takes place. For standard utilitarians, priority number one, two, three and four should consequently be to reduce existential risk. The utilitarian imperative “Maximize expected aggregate utility!” can be simplified to the maxim “Minimize existential risk!”.
Status Quo = Delay CP
Delay is good—we have decades and probably centuries to solve the case.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
Since the danger of misusing deflection technology seems so much greater than the danger of an imminent impact, we can afford to wait, take precautions, rebuild political institutions—for decades certainly, probably centuries. If we play our cards right and are not unlucky, we can pace what we do up there by what progress we’re making down here. The two are in any case deeply connected.
That means the status quo functions as a delay counterplan—unilateral development of deflection technologies now poses unique dangers.
Sagan 97 — Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, winner of the Oersted Medal, two NASA Distinguished Public Service Medals, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, 1997 (“The Marsh of Camarina,” Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Published by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0345376595, p. kindle)
I like to think that our future involvement with near-Earth asteroids will go something like this: From ground-based observatories, we discover all the big ones, plot and monitor their orbits, determine rotation rates and compositions. Scientists are diligent in explaining the dangers—neither exaggerating nor muting the prospects. We send robotic spacecraft to fly by a few selected bodies, orbit them, land on them, and return surface samples to laboratories on Earth. Eventually we send humans. (Because of the low gravities, they will be able to make standing broad jumps of ten kilometers or more into the sky, and lob a baseball into orbit around the asteroid.) Fully aware of the dangers, we make no attempts to alter trajectories until the potential for misuse of world-altering technologies is much less. That might take a while.
If we’re too quick in developing the technology to move worlds around, we may destroy ourselves; if we’re too slow, we will surely destroy ourselves. The reliability of world political organizations and the confidence they inspire will have to make significant strides before they can be trusted to deal with a problem of this seriousness. At the same time, there seems to be no acceptable national solution. Who would feel comfortable with the means of world destruction in the hands of some dedicated (or even potential) enemy nation, whether or not our nation had comparable powers? The existence of interplanetary collision hazards, when widely understood, works to bring our species together. When facing a common danger, we humans have sometimes reached heights widely thought impossible; we have set aside our differences—at least until the danger passed.
But this danger never passes. The asteroids, gravitationally churning, are slowly altering their orbits; without warning, new comets come careening toward us from the transplutonian darkness. There will always be a need to deal with them in a way that does not endanger us. By posing two different classes of peril—one natural, the other human-made—the small near-Earth worlds provide a new and potent motivation to create effective transnational institutions and to unify the human species. It’s hard to see any satisfactory alternative.
In our usual jittery, two-steps-forward-one-step-back mode, we are moving toward unification anyway. There are powerful influences deriving from transportation and communications technologies, the interdependent world economy, and the global environmental crisis. The impact hazard merely hastens the pace.
Eventually, cautiously, scrupulously careful to attempt nothing with asteroids that could inadvertently cause a catastrophe on Earth, I imagine we will begin to learn how to change the orbits of little nonmetallic worlds, smaller than 100 meters across. We begin with smaller explosions and slowly work our way up. We gain experience in changing the orbits of various asteroids and comets of different compositions and strengths. We try to determine which ones can be pushed around and which cannot. By the twenty-second century, perhaps, we move small worlds around the Solar System, using (see next chapter) not nuclear explosions but nuclear fusion engines or their equivalents. We insert small asteroids made of precious and industrial metals into Earth orbit. Gradually we develop a defensive technology to deflect a large asteroid or comet that might in the foreseeable future hit the Earth, while, with meticulous care, we build layers of safeguards against misuse.”
The implication
Page 883:
“The implication that there might at any given time in any room be whole swarms of wraiths flitting around…”
David Foster Wallace: Prophet
Gonna sound trite. Like, oh, right, of course, he prophesied our current videophoning disconnected double-bound ever-more-prodigious earth-polluting aggrieved-terrorist substance-dependent entertainment-captured post-postmodern existence. But, uh, no. Not just that. (“Just”, lol.) No. Way more specifically, did he soothsay. “Huh?” Just…wait. Good news, though: Not too late! Perhaps now would be a good time to reevaluate how sad Hal really was as he and Gately unburied JOI’s head. Yes, “very sad kid”, “sad kid”, “sad kid”…”makes the face of somebody shouting in panic”…right. Seriously, real question: Do most Infinite Jest readers suffer from a type of comprehension-retardation? Are wraiths of ill-will clouding your mind, lol? All of you? Do you not remember something really, really important about how Hal’s expressions have become all fucked-up and opposite-meaning? No, apparently, because basically all of you, maybe literally all of you, seem to think that “Too Late!” is a tragic note, portends disaster, consummates the epic sadness that Wallace promised, is the final tragic two-word chord that seals the book’s status as The Saddest Book Ever Written. Good news, though: The only thing that makes Infinite Jest the saddest book ever, is how fucking sadly it has been understood — or rather, pathetically misunderstood — not only by the entirety of its readership for 18 years, but also by the professionals who are paid handsomely to understand deep literature for the rest of us and to test us as to whether or not we understand it as well as they do and to review books for us so we can tell whether or not a book is good enough to buy, but even misunderstood by the very professionals who helped edit the goddamned thing. Really. It’s so, so, soooo fucking sad. Almost makes me want to cry. But, alas, eternal optimist that I am, thanking whatever gods may be: I can only laugh! I laugh at you all…hard, so fucking hard. Fools are funny, yes. But what’s funnier than a fool? Why, naturally: An arrogant fool! Especially an arrogant, snide, oh-so-solemn, oh-so-twee fool who views with condescending scorn if not outright pity and indifference…the one fucking schmuck in the world who actually understands enough of the book to get it. Oh, oh, ohhhh…THAT is the funniest fucking thing in the world, in fact. So, thank you, morons, for occasioning such roaring, life-affirming belly laughs. Your idiocy helped saved my soul. I learned how to not give a shit if I was alone, how to enjoy life anyway. Really, I owe you an eternal gratitude. Cannot thank you enough for being so fucking oblivious. But, now, what’s not to get? All the book’s self-help gist has been mined and distributed. All the academic exegesis-factories have sacrificed forests’ worth of paper dissecting the book’s keen insights on all the latest and greatest literary theories and psychological studies and mathematical patterns and cultural trends for which the book serves as an exhaustive compendium. Yeah, uh, big problem there. (Besides my Lyle and dream “theories” — errr, FACTS still awaiting widespread recognition.) Problem is: The book was not meant to serve the purposes of college professors who need thesis material or hipsters who need a more sophisticated excuse-system by which to live like hypocrites. The book was meant to, basically, you know, save the fucking world. “But how? It’s so sad!” Nooooooo, dipshit, it’s not sad. Hal’s face intends, despite its appearance to Gately, to carry in it a look of pure triumphant joy. Not sadness. JOY. J-O-Y. “Too Late!” In other words: “Hahahaaa! Suck it, bitches! You lose! We win! Too late!” You’re thinking I must be wrong. No. I am right. I have been right about nearly everything claimed and speculated about in this blog. It is youuuuuuuuuuu who have been wrong. All of you, or at the very least literally 99.9% of you, fellow readers of Infinite Jest. Idiots, lol. “Why are you so angry at us, at me?” Hmmm, gee, because when I wandered the online earth looking for an open mind and a kind ear and a set of functioning eyeballs, softly murmuring or calmly stating or desperately urging or frantically screaming (wound up that no way would work, no one could hear me, see me, as anything more than marginally mammalian) the words “Help. Help! HELP!”, what I got in return as a response from you fine souls who pride yourselves on having digested the other-loving lessons of your favorite book, was…can you guess? That fucking sign, pinned to my back: “HELP WANTED”, lol. Yes, funny. Really, one of the book’s great, cruel lol-able moments. But, but: NOT SO FUNNY IF YOU’RE THE PERSON ASKING FOR HELP, you fucking assholes, lmao. Anyway, yeah, thanks. Thanks a million! For real. Your vapid, vicious indifference did not kill me. It only made me stronger. And wiser. [CORRECTION: There were some people who attempted to help, and did help, even if only by attempting in the first place. But some did truly help. Way, way, wayyyy more than you helped. Unless by “you”, that now refers to one of the true helpers, reading this right now. Several people who commented here, you can find their screennames beneath the entries below, the same entries you should absolutely read in full, all of them, as soon as possible, like, now. Also, several people on Facebook, especially those who joined the Lyle group, who celebrated “Lyle is a wraith” Awareness Week, which had first been scheduled to begin on 4/8/2013, but was then re-scheduled to begin on 4/15/2013. To be celebrated in the city of…Boston. My city. My hometown. And no, lol, I had no hand whatsoever in that day’s or week’s events; nor, luckily, did I lose a hand…or a leg…or my life, obviously. Although, I might have. If I had not had a powerful premonition of impending disaster related to a job offer on which I bailed out in a sudden paralysis of paranoia and claustrophobia and acrophobia at 8:15am on the morning of 4/8/2013, a job that would have had me placed literally across the street from the second blast. I like to take regular smoke breaks. I also enjoy catching a little bit of the marathon whenever I can, every year I happen to be in the area, but especially around the time of day when the race is well over but the heartfelt amateurs begin to crowd and stream down Boylston Street, jogging for one or another good cause. You do the math.] My three favorite quotes ever:
“Amor fati.”
“Is there no other way the world may live?”
“Sapere aude!”
So, wanna know something? Do you dare, lol? Well, I already told you. It’s funny what you don’t recall, lol. It really is. What YOU don’t recall. Not me so much. Anyway, yeah, prophet. Wallace. That, he is. Way more literally than you might think. It’s actually ridiculous, the extent to which he is literally a prophet. (Or, was. Ugh. You stupid, brilliant, sorry, magnificent bastard. RIP.) Here’s a line that just caught my eye tonight, randomly: “It’s Friend, not Fiend.” Oh, is it? Not maybe…the other way around? You sure? You? Really sure? Be sure, now. Allow me to inform you, for fucking once, finally, and believe me, for once: You are not sure. You’ve been wrong before. You are wrong now. About what? Pfff-hahaha, yeah, no way I’m going there. See for yourself. Good luck, lol! I predict good things, a good year, full of good news. The Year of Fun! Real fun. Not too much fun. But…just enough.
The 1st Annual “Lyle is a wraith” Awareness Week
This is a week to remember (or discover) that the character Lyle in the novel Infinite Jest is, throughout the whole book, a wraith. It is also a time to become aware (more aware, or aware for the first time) of the implications that Lyle’s wraithness has for understanding the core of the novel [e.g., Endnote 145] and perhaps more [e.g., The object-estimating “bootstrap-type scenario” on Page 395]To celebrate this occasion, anyone participating is asked to do one trifling thing: Tweet out a link to a blog entry where Lyle’s wraithhood is proven beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt, for all time, and — just as importantly — broadcast said link to a well-known comedy writer (Michael Schur) who owns the film rights to the book, so that any future film adaptation will be sure not to omit nor to underestimate Lyle and his wraithly existence as a key to Infinite Jest comprehension. Adding the hashtag #infinitejest is optional. The link is:
And the Twitter screenname to be included somewhere next to the link is:
@KenTremendous
(Schur’s Twitter and SoSH alias)
Happy “Lyle is a wraith” Awareness Week, everyone!
“And the Lord said: Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight.” – Lyle
“Suppose I were to give you a key ring with ten keys. With, no, a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we’re imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?” – Lyle
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” – Lyle
“You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.” – Lyle
“Do not underestimate objects.” – Lyle
On a related note: I considered the lobster…
…and I wound up granting it a pardon:
Some miscellaneous quotes from the experience:
“Don’t you fucking die on me. Look alive!”
“Stop trying to pinch the hand that frees you, dumbass.”
“Ever wonder what water is like? You’re about to find out! Good luck!”
(Note on the photos: Cross your eyes and look only at the overlapped image in the middle.)
Ghost Town FTW! (“for the win!”)
I saw Ghost Town by myself last night, and I get the feeling whoever wrote it either has or should read Infinite Jest. Ghost Town is a crude caricature of Jest’s paranormal premises. Crude, caricaturish…but very funny and very moving. I didn’t think it was possible, but it has surpassed Stepbrothers in my mind as The Best Movie of 2008. It might have even earned an instant inclusion in my Top Three Favorite Movies of All Time, alongside The Jerk and Groundhog Day. Ricky Gervais, Mrs. David Duchovny (David, my birthday buddy, read Infinite Jest if you haven’t!), and Greg Kinnear all deserve a role in whatever film version of Jest gets made.
Reach and Pull 