Belmont Club: Earth vs. the Flying Saucers

Recently the WHO and World Economic Forum have been making headlines about the need to prepare for "Disease X," which is a hypothetical pandemic. How, one might ask, does one prepare for something that doesn't exist yet? Well this anticipatory preparation has been happening for some time and it is part of the phenomenon of the inevitable future.

“Disease X,” according to the World Health Organization, “represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.” ... Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells Fortune that those in the medical and public health professions “have always conducted thought experiments and tabletop exercises to prepare for pandemics.”

Public policy is now significantly shaped by Doomsday scenarios like Global Warning, the Next Pandemic, and, to a lesser extent, the End of Democracy. They are futures so terrifying they cannot be allowed to happen, thus triggering the Precautionary Principle. The principle asserts "a need by decision-makers to anticipate harm before it occurs" where expected harm (EH) equals the magnitude of harm (M) multiplied by the probability of occurrence (P). For sufficiently large M even low values of P, EH=M*P can be high.

Inevitable futures can be so frightening that we run into each other in our efforts to escape it. What could be more terrifying than the End of Democracy? Apparently climate change. Time magazine writes that democracy may be bad for the planet because voters don't care about what really matters: climate change. Take India.

India, which will hold general elections this spring ... is squarely in the center of the climate challenge. Parts of India are particularly vulnerable to the effects of rising global temperatures, think of heat waves and flooding, and its rapidly developing economy means that it emits a growing share of global greenhouse gas emissions. But, while the major political parties there have issued platforms acknowledging the need to act on climate change, the issue isn’t expected to feature prominently in the campaigns. Analysts expect the election to center on the controversial tenure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as well as coalition-building and traditional bread-and-butter issues.

Take America, whose MAGA voters worry more about the border and supermarket prices than global warming. The fools! EH is too important for policy to be left to the voters. The experts must step in even at the cost of forcing the population to comply, as was often the case with Covid. The problem of course lies in the difficulty of estimating M and P to calculate expected harm EH. To see how hard it is to calculate probabilities, let's go back to the 1950s. In 1956 Maj Donald Keyhoe wrote a book predicting earth would soon be at war with aliens from outer space. It became the basis of the movie Earth vs the Flying Saucers. The probability of space aliens can be estimated by the famous Drake Equation:

N = R x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

Unfortunately nobody knows the value of its key parameters, so P is not accurately estimateable. The alien invaders so soon to appear have not shown up in the last 70 years. That doesn't mean they never will. Whether there will ever be a day when earth squares off vs the flying saucers is uncertain, but one thing for sure is that the mere possibility increased the Pentagon's budget of Black Money. The NYT recently wrote: "Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles."

But these covert programs, instead of being specifically about UFOs or flying saucers, are more generally about creating a framework to collect and analyze data about what we do not understand; to turn the unknown unknowns into known unknowns, instead of immediately acting on our guesses. Improving our understanding of the unknown, in this case Disease X, is probably a better approach than assuming the worst. But openness and discovery requires a completely different institutional culture than bureaucratic reaction. Governments are not in the business of thinking out of the box. On the contrary, they are in the business of pigeonholing everything they come across. Bureaucracies are like a band with a limited repertoire. There is one piece they have been itching to play: The Twilight of the Gods. And they will play it, by golly.

For this reason the phenomenon of the inevitable future will continue to dominate politics as the panicked public rushes from pillar to post in their efforts to avoid disease X. Then perhaps history will demonstrate that the actual threat was disease Y. But the band got to play.