Least Damaged World

 Least Damaged World

As I write these words, blinking lights in basements, garages, attics, and she-sheds, millions of gaming and mining rigs crunch away on a single new problem. Least Damaged World.

Up till now these rigs were running Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, PlayersUnknown, and hundreds of other sick titles happily warming the oceans.

But these machines and their highly skilled ops now run a sim that seeks to solve but one solicitation:

How do we save New York?

Why all that horsepower on such a short question? Because it’s not just New York. It’s London, Paris, Munich and everyone pop music. Let me talk about it [short on time]:

We’re 100 seconds to midnight and we can do anything we want with those few precious moments.

The thing we should do is answer the question, like so:

There is some order of nuclear exchanges, starting with the tactical one now aimed at Ramstein AFB, that kills the least people and another set that kills the most people. Right now, no one on Earth, knows the answer to that simple question. No brass, no fruit salad, no one. That question is identical to the first one. How do we save New York, first on the list?

But we could know it. It is knowable.

There is some best order of bartered exchanges, gained only through brute force simulation, that says what targets must be struck to save the Newest New Yorkers. This includes the lovely option of striking no one anywhere. This includes shooting the gun out of their cold dead hand. This includes shooting them in face even because no one holds gfriend by the neck but me.

Cut to the chase:

It unrolls like this. WormOfData Googles the nuclear inventories of all the card-carrying powers that be. DawnOfThunder puts them in the Unreal and Unity game engines. HiFionWiFi builds a Matrix quality sim good down to the dumpster decal. SereneDipity hacks a pure speed sim that trades away ray tracing in favor of getting the answer before 100 seconds are up.

ZipTie googles the fuzzed out regions to data-is-beautiful mine where the BIG ONES live, and which ones have their mouths open ready to barf up megadeath.

DateScroller divines the submarine inventory and Monte Carlos the favorite positions in an electrostatic LoveBoat episode of pissed off leaders in unhappy places.

SomebodySpecial forks a faster leaner version 12, built in as many days, outed to the world as open source.

You get the idea. Touch big red and watch the world end in a sim. Now change one fateful thing. A fewer number of people die. In a few million GPU hours you don’t just have crypto coinage, you saved New York, and a ton of all creatures great and small. Why? Because you and everybody else now knows something that wasn’t known before. What is the order, what is the optimal target list? Is the best thing to do nothing? What would have happened if we did nothing after 911? Would it be better than what we did? We don’t know till the sims run. We just don’t know. And second order ignorance is an unhappy end, whether you’re brass or fruit salad or no one like me.

What is best thing [to do] after the First Strike?

That would make a nice name for Citizen SDI, but I’m sure it is already taken.

Is there even a world without New York? We tasted that one before…

- Van2022