The Cold Equations
Oh, no
The Cold Equations is an actual classic of science fiction by Tom Godwin — a pilot racing in a very tiny spaceship to carry medicine for a plague finds a stowaway who’s a young girl, and he has to explain to her that she will be outside the airlock within a half an hour, because the spaceship has inadequate fuel, and otherwise he will die and she will die and everyone with the plague including her brother will die.
The girl has to die because of the laws of physics. No one wishes her ill at all. She cries, and accepts this, and says goodbye, and steps out the airlock, and he hears her body hit the side of the spaceship. The end.
“Good physics but lousy engineering,” said Gary Westfall.
Our society crumbles because of good classical economics and lousy social engineering.
Many years ago, when I was a mathematics student I did an advanced course on dynamical systems and biology — more or less predation and disease.
Epidemiology turns out to be fiendishly difficult in the specifics but scary simple in the big picture.
An infectious disease as it spreads through the world is a chaotic system with a large number of adjustable parameters, many of which are exponential somewhere in their range.
Think of it the disease’s spread within humanity as a huge machine taking a huge number of controls. Many of the controls are fixed out of the gate by Mother Nature, and you, humanity, can control some of the others, if imperfectly and with great effort.
Parameters are things like time, infectiousness, incubation period, asymptomatic period, chance of asymptomatic carry, the weather, social distancing, genetics.
Chaotic means that arbitrarily small changes in the initial conditions may result in disproportionately large changes in the end state — “butterfly flaps and six months later there’s a thunderstorm”.
Exponential means, informally, “repeated doubling”. We all know now what repeated doubling means.
Think of a dynamical system like a pandemic as a huge ever-changing rubber sheet with hills and valleys appearing and disappearing over time, and “the current state” is a tiny ball (really a point) wandering around the sheet. (To be accurate, the “sheet” is in umpty-ump dimensions but who can think that way?)
Because the parameters of the machine are chaotic, and because they’re exponential, it’s easy to adjust them a little and then a very deep hole is suddenly created and the little ball falls right into it. Oops.
In this case, the hole where everyone in the world gets exposed to a new disease in a historical blink of an eye. Oops.
Our leaders fucked it up.
(almost) Every. Fucking. Government. Fucked. This. Up.
We’ve known for years that the correct response is this — immediately isolate, track, quarantine, shut things down locally, and track every single person who connected with a victim.
The whole “all Americans come home NOW” jamming the airports! Jesus! Thousands probably died due to that decision alone.
But almost every country fucked this up. They had so worshipped at the teat of commerce that nothing was as important as commerce. So they couldn’t shut down commerce. And when they did, they took half measures.
We fell into a hole — or more precisely, our leaders led us into the hole. Once we have dug ourselves out, it’s important to remember how who brought us to this point.
