And now we’ve reached the part where PDR is going to introduce a philosophical thought experiment about the social ties that bind us all:

Suppose a Supernatural Being came to you and explained to you that there was an impending cosmic doom that will be magically smiting every person on Earth who is not vouched for by anyone else, those people just turn into pillars of salt or whatever. This doom will happen in a matter of seconds, though time has stopped while the Supernatural Being gathers the information about who vouches for which other people.

The Supernatural Being explains the rules clearly: You are the first person, selected randomly from the entire population to go first, and you must vouch for two other people to survive the cosmic doom, and also those two people are each then given the same opportunity to vouch for two people. Nobody knows who vouched for them, or who has already been vouched for, but the Supernatural Being explains the last wrinkle: if someone is vouched for twice, that person gets a third vote and can select one more person. But that’s it. If they are vouched for again after that, they do not get a fourth vote. Each person who gets to vote has the rules clearly explained to them by the Supernatural Being so that there aren’t any mistakes or anything, but the voters can’t communicate with each other. We each make this choice alone.

So that’s the deal. What can we think of based on that? Who would you vote for? How can we strategize to ensure the most people survive and the fewest are left to fall for the cracks?

As of this writing, I’ve thought about this thought about this experiment more than anyone else, so I suppose I have to give my thoughts. Given the rules above, I don’t think this would spread to the whole world, sadly. If I were vouched for and got to vote, I’d probably go with my mother, whom I assume would spread vouches into the family, and some friend who lives somewhere else, to try to get survival spreading as widely as possible. But I see ways this could go badly. For all I know, my mother or that friend are the one who vouched for me, and for all I know they’ve each already been vouched for and had their third vote already. In that scenario I would survive, but I would be a dead end. That seems less likely than one of them still being able to receive a third vote, so survival would only get one more chance to spread, but the risk would still be there that they would then become a dead end. In fact, the more beloved a person is, the more people would be vouching for them and shattering their votes against someone who has already spent their three.

It’s a thought experiment I’d love to see mulled over and mapped by computers, to see how far it could spread. But mostly I just needed to get it out of my own head and into the world.