Page 64 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Operation KNEECAP

own lives on the line for that success. Then the two-to-one vote
might be imperiled by the dissenter.”
“Yes,” chimed in Hydrargyrum Diggers. “Make it personal. Your
triplets may or may not disagree in that fateful tally, but their faith
in the overriding importance of their mission is worth testing. Their
enemies may be ambiguous, even misguided. I can imagine a sort of
Sampson scenario, with the finally frustrated Papp brothers taking
down the world’s dirty extractive industries despite being thwarted
in setting up their free, clean energy network. They go down with
the rest of the cartels, polluters and plunderers, their work never
known. Maybe you could give each of them one type of fossil fuel:
Manny owns oil, Moe gets the coal and Jack has gas.”
After laughter subsided, Izzy Azimuth made his contribution.
“In that biblical or mythological vein, I would play up the tragic
fate of those Greek characters. Is it mankind’s ineradicable flaw to
have a reach exceeding its grasp? How can the Papps do other than
fail? The entropic dead weight and momentum of our institutions,
not to mention the darker side of human nature, virtually guarantee
a sticky end to universal broadcast power. Wars will be fought for
control of that infrastructure, just as they have been for land and
water. The towers will be bombed, the satellites shot down, the grid
metered for greed. The brothers might be able to build it, but they
will not be able to run it. National sovereignty won’t magically
evaporate, ethnic conflicts disappear, oligarchs turn over a new leaf.
So maybe the Papps, despite whatever means they employ to attain
their end, will not learn it cannot be attained in the real world. They
are dreamers.”
Rutger Schlager was next to speak. He was shaking his head.
“The important story here is Götterdämmerung or Apocalypse,
the cathartic destruction of the world beloved of science-fiction
fans, particularly the younger ones. It is perhaps a guilty pleasure,
bordering on the sado-masochistic, but the impatience of youth,
with its simplified but clear-eyed view of the horrific mess manifest
in human history, leads to practical nihilism: if we can’t fix it, break
it and start over. Why perpetuate failure, while the environment
takes hit after hit and the population exceeds the planet’s carrying

63