Page 106 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Sunscreen

“In a word: yes,” replied Rutger smugly. “It’s called ‘station
keeping.’ Just a mechanical function; no sweat for a supercomputer.
And each of those units is in communication with its neighbors,
creating a sort of synergy. Again, not difficult for what is effectively
a neural network. The brain of a chimpanzee has more
connections.”
Ignoring the implied insult, Leith persisted.
“But something that large could not be expected to operate
through any length of time without failures. Even at one percent
annually, that would be five million shades going out of commission
every year. And some of them might fail spectacularly, taking out a
few dozen of the adjacent units in a chain reaction.”
“Come, come, Leith,” said Rutger patronizingly. “Surely you
don’t think this wouldn’t have been anticipated and hundreds of
repair and replacement missions ready to go at a moment’s notice,
do you? I shouldn’t think self-testing and self-destruction
capabilities wouldn’t be part of the design. And that rate of failure is
really a bit high, don’t you think?”
“Don’t call me Shirley,” muttered Leith Mauker.
“Let’s not get lost in the minutiae of what, after all, is fictional,”
said Fred Feghootsky hastily. “Let us work with what is on offer: a
monumental, global task presented by a monumental global crisis.
If we can’t find drama in that, we may as well pack it in, folks.”
“Okay. Once again, analysis of possibilities may help.” Izzy
Azimuth assumed a professorial air. “A decision tree or critical path
chart might expose make-or-break points in the implementation.
One: how do you get international accord? Sacrifice is involved.
Two: is there a hard deadline? The public has become blasé with
repeated warnings based on CO2 ppm: that’s the horror of it all, an
invisible menace striking when it’s too late to stop. Three: just as in
the manufacture of electric vehicles, vast quantities of unwanted
pollutants will be counterproductively and counterintuitively
released to build the infrastructure for this equipment. Will the
public sit still for what may be a case of delayed gratification? Four:
although every plan can have contingencies, not every contingency
can have a plan. Who will be responsible for the possibly heroic

105