What Earth-like world would maximize the amount of good a single person could achieve?
This is a question I am struggling to come up with moderately plausible solutions to for a piece of fiction I am slowly poking away at. I’d love some suggestions. Here’s a more complete description:
Suppose all the worlds in a huge space of possibilities exist and most ones that could support human life do. You have the ability to pick out one of these worlds by describing it and then to visit it. You happen to be a utilitarian and so with this great power you want to select the world in which you can do the most good. So what does a world which has been going through a huge amount of suffering, but could be corrected by one person, look like? You can describe the geological, environmental, and, to some extent, physical constraints of the system but not the social ones except in so far as they are determined by the above. (So you can’t just say “Here’s an Earth where a Hitler rules forever over a population of 100 billion in constant fear and torture.” You have to come up with a world that would cause Hitlers to exist.) The world does not have to resemble Earth except so as to be habitable. Flora and fauna can be specified to an extent but should be evolutionary plausible given such an environment, but humans are guaranteed existence on this planet.
It might be easier to start with the question: what does the world that maximizes human suffering look like? Make it too inhospitable and everyone dies or the population falls to a point at which it becomes sustainable. How do we overcome the inherent general tendency for populations to not totally over-burden their environment? Remember that we’re picking a single world out of the space of essentially all possible worlds so we ought to be able to find a really genuinely awful one. And it only has to be reasonably plausible for the point of view of the reader, this isn’t even hard science fiction.
I’m refraining from posting my one plausible idea for the moment since I don’t want to taint the discussion but will post it for feedback if I’m not getting too much in the way of discussion. And of course, if you’re posting something here then I assume you don’t mind me using it (with credit) if this work ever gets finished.
My best guess is to delay the discovery/acceptance of science. Imagine a world where Descartes never made his clever arguments (the hand etc.) that made it possible to pursue natural philosophy in a way that was compatible with Christianity. Or one in which western Christianity took up a ban on idol-like representations (as Islam has—a friend tells me it very nearly got there, and changing one influential essay would be enough), so art was not pursued the same way, projective geometry didn’t arise, and the axiomatic revolution never happened, or happened much later.
Or, being more subtle, what about a world with no islands—that is, no places where heretics could go into exile but continue working on their heretical things. The Netherlands was able to be such a place because of the defensibility of swamplands and its position as a pawn in wider political machinations, right? I’m trying to think of the kind of world that would give rise to a strong, unified government—which then wouldn’t even need to be particularly evil, just populist and follow the typical medieval outlook. What about a world where weapons of mass destruction were easily available, where any reasonably competent person could create a city-destroying weapon from naturally available materials?
People learn best through pain. What about a world that has embraced this—where torture is an everyday fact of life, what you do to kids as part of bringing them up, what you do to subordinates who need to acquire a new skill?
Lead poisoning makes people stupid and aggressive—not enough to make society collapse, but enough to make everyone’s lives a little bit worse. What about a world where, rather than gold and copper and the like, the aesthetically attractive metals are the kind that cause heavy metal poisoning.
This is a good try, but I am looking for something much, much worse. Like 30 billion people living in complete destitution with massive famines sweeping the world ever seven years killing off 40% of the population each time and leaving the rest in pain and agony. Or only one in twenty children survive past the age of seven, the rest dying terribly. A world so bad it makes you uncomfortable to even think about it. I’m also thinking about this more on geological time scales—we can probably come up with a world where such suffering has been going on at least long enough for evolutionary pressures to be significantly compensating for some of the dreadful environmental effects.
I do like the idea of lead poisoning. The only thing difficult with that from the story perspective would be the relative difficulty in rectifying that problem but that’s probably fixable with some creativity. Easily accessible WMPs wasn’t the direction I was thinking of but might work and is definitely your most horrifying suggestion from my view.
If you can pick the physical, but not the social, makeup then you don’t have sufficient precision to reliably pick out a world that is actually significantly worse of than your home timeline—if it supports humans, either it has social and technological structures conductive to a high-utility equilibrium social order, or it can be dystopian. Note that base-line earth is largely dystopian in the sense I mean here!
Most of the population is living lives much poorer than our understanding would permit. , and you will not be able to reliably predict the social structures at all from the information you have. Which also means picking a world certain to have problems you can solve is impossible, and you will in fact be certain to land in a world with social and political structures you dont understand at all. Which will probably cause you difficulties.
Best bet for landing somewhere where you can do some actual good, with a skillset that will allow you to do so?
Study the engineering principles of heavy EE, hydro-power, Nuclear Engineering, metallurgy, and the techniques of the modern agricultural revolution.. Pick a world with no easily available fossil fuels. With sufficient knowledge it should be possible to specify out a path to an industrial economy that goes “Muscles and animals->Hydro->Nukes” and you are likely to have some info which is useful to the locals regardless of what level they start at.
Well, this is fiction so there’s a fair handful of deus ex machina here; if it needs to happen for the story, a particularly bad world needs only to be plausible to come about. Moreover, there’s a poorly-defined mechanism which makes the chosen world be more like what they expect it to be than would be really justified by its description. Sorry I’m doing a poor job of describing the exact setup, since it’s a little convoluted. It’s also not a 100% known mechanism for the character involved either.
What Earth-like world would maximize the amount of good a single person could achieve?
I don’t actually believe the following answer, but as we’re talking about fiction, and some people might actually think it would work, why not.
A world in which a catastrophe has reduced the population to a group of a few breeding pairs, or just one—plus yourself, who have managed to survive the catastrophe and preserve your access to the technology of the vanquished civilisation. You use your overwhelming power to take charge of the remaining tribe and direct their development, confident that you can do better than the blind chances of history. You crack some sort of good-enough immortality for yourself, so that you can perpetuate your absolute rule indefinitely, and make humans live they way the clearly ought to. Since you are, for practical purposes, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, failure would be a contradiction in terms.
This one sounds like a lot of work to do—I don’t think I mentioned that you have the power to do this as often as you like (and have time for!) and this would tie you to just a single world forever instead of doing as much good as possible across many worlds. I’d also like to not assume any access to omnipotence, immortality, or other such things: you can specify a world to travel to by describing and then travel to it. But once you’re there you’re just like anyone else, save for the knowledge that this world matched your description and any knowledge you brought from Earth. So you might know the location of a particularly rich vein of minerals, for example, or an underground reservoir of water that, when released in some manner, could alter global climate significantly by disturbing an El Nino-like process. Or releasing a bacteria into the ocean which spreads and alters atmospheric composition over the next ten millenia (you’re a long-term thinker and don’t mind it if the benefits you bestow don’t take effect until long after you’re dead). Or altering the flow of a river to bring previously-unknown fertilizers to the largest pockets of human civilization.
I’ve been considering mostly geo-engineering style solutions since that seems to be your main comparative advantage given your knowledge of the world and few of the big things that could really really alter the long-term course of the world. And it fits with the idea of picking an implausible world out of the vast space of possibilities—you get to in effect choose that the planet was ‘designed’ to have an easily-triggerable chain reaction. Other options probably exist, like introducing the right technology in the right place, but they haven’t been as obvious to me.
What Earth-like world would maximize the amount of good a single person could achieve?
This is a question I am struggling to come up with moderately plausible solutions to for a piece of fiction I am slowly poking away at. I’d love some suggestions. Here’s a more complete description:
Suppose all the worlds in a huge space of possibilities exist and most ones that could support human life do. You have the ability to pick out one of these worlds by describing it and then to visit it. You happen to be a utilitarian and so with this great power you want to select the world in which you can do the most good. So what does a world which has been going through a huge amount of suffering, but could be corrected by one person, look like? You can describe the geological, environmental, and, to some extent, physical constraints of the system but not the social ones except in so far as they are determined by the above. (So you can’t just say “Here’s an Earth where a Hitler rules forever over a population of 100 billion in constant fear and torture.” You have to come up with a world that would cause Hitlers to exist.) The world does not have to resemble Earth except so as to be habitable. Flora and fauna can be specified to an extent but should be evolutionary plausible given such an environment, but humans are guaranteed existence on this planet.
It might be easier to start with the question: what does the world that maximizes human suffering look like? Make it too inhospitable and everyone dies or the population falls to a point at which it becomes sustainable. How do we overcome the inherent general tendency for populations to not totally over-burden their environment? Remember that we’re picking a single world out of the space of essentially all possible worlds so we ought to be able to find a really genuinely awful one. And it only has to be reasonably plausible for the point of view of the reader, this isn’t even hard science fiction.
I’m refraining from posting my one plausible idea for the moment since I don’t want to taint the discussion but will post it for feedback if I’m not getting too much in the way of discussion. And of course, if you’re posting something here then I assume you don’t mind me using it (with credit) if this work ever gets finished.
My best guess is to delay the discovery/acceptance of science. Imagine a world where Descartes never made his clever arguments (the hand etc.) that made it possible to pursue natural philosophy in a way that was compatible with Christianity. Or one in which western Christianity took up a ban on idol-like representations (as Islam has—a friend tells me it very nearly got there, and changing one influential essay would be enough), so art was not pursued the same way, projective geometry didn’t arise, and the axiomatic revolution never happened, or happened much later.
Or, being more subtle, what about a world with no islands—that is, no places where heretics could go into exile but continue working on their heretical things. The Netherlands was able to be such a place because of the defensibility of swamplands and its position as a pawn in wider political machinations, right? I’m trying to think of the kind of world that would give rise to a strong, unified government—which then wouldn’t even need to be particularly evil, just populist and follow the typical medieval outlook. What about a world where weapons of mass destruction were easily available, where any reasonably competent person could create a city-destroying weapon from naturally available materials?
People learn best through pain. What about a world that has embraced this—where torture is an everyday fact of life, what you do to kids as part of bringing them up, what you do to subordinates who need to acquire a new skill?
Lead poisoning makes people stupid and aggressive—not enough to make society collapse, but enough to make everyone’s lives a little bit worse. What about a world where, rather than gold and copper and the like, the aesthetically attractive metals are the kind that cause heavy metal poisoning.
This is a good try, but I am looking for something much, much worse. Like 30 billion people living in complete destitution with massive famines sweeping the world ever seven years killing off 40% of the population each time and leaving the rest in pain and agony. Or only one in twenty children survive past the age of seven, the rest dying terribly. A world so bad it makes you uncomfortable to even think about it. I’m also thinking about this more on geological time scales—we can probably come up with a world where such suffering has been going on at least long enough for evolutionary pressures to be significantly compensating for some of the dreadful environmental effects.
I do like the idea of lead poisoning. The only thing difficult with that from the story perspective would be the relative difficulty in rectifying that problem but that’s probably fixable with some creativity. Easily accessible WMPs wasn’t the direction I was thinking of but might work and is definitely your most horrifying suggestion from my view.
If you can pick the physical, but not the social, makeup then you don’t have sufficient precision to reliably pick out a world that is actually significantly worse of than your home timeline—if it supports humans, either it has social and technological structures conductive to a high-utility equilibrium social order, or it can be dystopian. Note that base-line earth is largely dystopian in the sense I mean here! Most of the population is living lives much poorer than our understanding would permit. , and you will not be able to reliably predict the social structures at all from the information you have. Which also means picking a world certain to have problems you can solve is impossible, and you will in fact be certain to land in a world with social and political structures you dont understand at all. Which will probably cause you difficulties.
Best bet for landing somewhere where you can do some actual good, with a skillset that will allow you to do so? Study the engineering principles of heavy EE, hydro-power, Nuclear Engineering, metallurgy, and the techniques of the modern agricultural revolution.. Pick a world with no easily available fossil fuels. With sufficient knowledge it should be possible to specify out a path to an industrial economy that goes “Muscles and animals->Hydro->Nukes” and you are likely to have some info which is useful to the locals regardless of what level they start at.
Well, this is fiction so there’s a fair handful of deus ex machina here; if it needs to happen for the story, a particularly bad world needs only to be plausible to come about. Moreover, there’s a poorly-defined mechanism which makes the chosen world be more like what they expect it to be than would be really justified by its description. Sorry I’m doing a poor job of describing the exact setup, since it’s a little convoluted. It’s also not a 100% known mechanism for the character involved either.
I don’t actually believe the following answer, but as we’re talking about fiction, and some people might actually think it would work, why not.
A world in which a catastrophe has reduced the population to a group of a few breeding pairs, or just one—plus yourself, who have managed to survive the catastrophe and preserve your access to the technology of the vanquished civilisation. You use your overwhelming power to take charge of the remaining tribe and direct their development, confident that you can do better than the blind chances of history. You crack some sort of good-enough immortality for yourself, so that you can perpetuate your absolute rule indefinitely, and make humans live they way the clearly ought to. Since you are, for practical purposes, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, failure would be a contradiction in terms.
This one sounds like a lot of work to do—I don’t think I mentioned that you have the power to do this as often as you like (and have time for!) and this would tie you to just a single world forever instead of doing as much good as possible across many worlds. I’d also like to not assume any access to omnipotence, immortality, or other such things: you can specify a world to travel to by describing and then travel to it. But once you’re there you’re just like anyone else, save for the knowledge that this world matched your description and any knowledge you brought from Earth. So you might know the location of a particularly rich vein of minerals, for example, or an underground reservoir of water that, when released in some manner, could alter global climate significantly by disturbing an El Nino-like process. Or releasing a bacteria into the ocean which spreads and alters atmospheric composition over the next ten millenia (you’re a long-term thinker and don’t mind it if the benefits you bestow don’t take effect until long after you’re dead). Or altering the flow of a river to bring previously-unknown fertilizers to the largest pockets of human civilization.
I’ve been considering mostly geo-engineering style solutions since that seems to be your main comparative advantage given your knowledge of the world and few of the big things that could really really alter the long-term course of the world. And it fits with the idea of picking an implausible world out of the vast space of possibilities—you get to in effect choose that the planet was ‘designed’ to have an easily-triggerable chain reaction. Other options probably exist, like introducing the right technology in the right place, but they haven’t been as obvious to me.