Category: science

We’re Doomed! Long Live the Gloom!

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“The planet’s not in trouble,” a comedian said onstage. “It has survived countless threats, tragedies, and catastrophes. The planet will be just fine. Human beings, however, we’re screwed.”

The End of The Road

We’re doomed, and we love it! If ratings, proceeds, and ratings mean anything, doom and gloom is big business. 

We want it in the all-too-near future, “Ten years from now…” Ten years is one of our favorite time frames. Twenty years is too far away and five years is too close. We want urgency, we need it now, but not too close. We might deem it hysterical if it’s too close, and we might not worry about it if it’s too far away, so we’ve deemed ten years the Goldilocks, sweet spot for dystopian rants. I think I can top them. I think future street corner bell ringers might want to narrow their hysterical rants for greater appeal among consumers. If you know anything about grocery store pricing, you know that consumers find round numbers too stark, too pricey, and generally unappealing. Their psychologist advisors have informed them that consumers find $9.99 more appealing than $10.00. It’s a penny right, what’s the difference? These psychologists say it’s everything to consumers, so we now see their items listed accordingly on all shelves, car salesmen do it, and everyone who wants to appeal to this mindset we all have. The chicken littles of our future might want to recalibrate accordingly and say, “Nine years and nine-nine days from now…” 

Ten years also seems like enough time for human ingenuity to develop a solution. If we’re facing a true cataclysm that will end the human population, we have to think it would become the sole focus of more than a few of our brightest stars in science, engineering, and just about every other focus we have to attempt to counter the sure-to-come devastation of life on the planet? 

How many times has human life faced extinction only to have some genius come along and devise an ingenious way of saving life? This time it’s different, of course. This time, no one can save us. We’re helpless. How exciting!

We’ve all been here before, in theoretical forecasts, but this is the future. We’re here to report that the ten years in the future that we’ve forecast for the last seventy years is now here. It is ten years in the future, and a moment, not the moment, but a moment we’ve feared for at least seventy years is here, and we don’t know what to do about it.

The reporters investigated and attempted to locate and expose a human culprit. They hopscotch between various narratives to find a bad guy before it’s too late. They join forces with the scientific community to narrow the focus of their study on human involvement. Regardless whether they’re wrong or right, they have the best intentions.

So Scary, It’s Beautiful!

There are no high-profile news agents ten years in the future. They’ve been exposed in one way or another, and relatively few read, watch, or listen to them anymore. In their wake, citizen journalists rose up on the internet and developed reputations for telling the truth in the years preceding the looming tragedy. Some of the more prominent citizen journalists provided a contrarian belief that certain scientists developed by studying the looming tragedy through various angles that focus on the math and science of the universe. These contrarian scientists eventually proved incorrect, and those with no knowledge of science rained fire upon them. 

“It’s you job to figure this out!” a reporter screamed at a contrarian scientist, as he walked to his car. This confrontation went viral and social media launched “It’s your job!” meme at scientists, and the citizen journalists who supported them.

The contrarian, non-human theories were rejected so often, and so publicly, that most become afraid to voice their concerns with their neighbors, lest they be called a denier. “There’s nothing we can do!” becomes the credo of the day. “The scientific consensus suggests there’s nothing we can do.” 

Teams of scientists hear this, of course, and they’re scared, but some of them brave the cynical firestorm to push this theory that the new, unforeseen, looming, and disastrous event involves a detailed and complicated natural occurrence that has nothing to do human beings. 

“It is,” they write, “an event that occurs throughout the universe on a relatively infrequent basis, and it is going to occur near Earth, unless we are able to do something about it.” 

Numerous scientists attempt to disprove their theory, as is their role, and most of them suggest that their findings are inconclusive. Some of those scientists who unsuccessfully attempt to disprove the theory, decide to pursue the theory in purely hypothetical mathematical and scientific forms. “If true,” they write, “then we could use an end around to avert the looming disaster.” Other scientists join in and posit theories around this new end around theory. 

“It’s time to say it, Science has failed us!” a major online news publication, that no one reads anymore, states in the title of an article they publish in a desperate attempt to remain popular. The article proves popular, of course, as a crude attempt to develop “if it bleeds, it leads” style click-bait articles that feed into the gloom and or doom themes. “As time continues to tick down,” the article states, “our most brilliant minds continue to fail to find a solution.” 

Scientists develop other theories, and other scientists disprove them. The lack of understanding of science, leads to mayhem all over the world as citizens the world over begin to panic over the delays. In the midst of that panic, as time ticks precariously closer, a scientific hypothesis emerges.

High profile scientists immediately reject the hypothesis, with no evidence, and popular sentiment follows suit. Prominent leaders of the world join the popular sentiment. With the lack of any government endorsements, and more importantly government funding, these teams of scientists desperately seek private donors to help them pursue the hypothesis that no scientist has been able to concretely disprove. The theory does not please anyone and everyone is torn, until it works. The event from the far reaches of the universe is thwarted, and the little dots in the universe, we call human beings, avoid extinction. Most of us feel weirdly disappointed when we realize that we get to live at least a little bit longer.

Science does not experience a popular upgrade in the aftermath, since so much of it failed, so often, when people were really scared. The citizen journalists do not experience more popularity, as the historical record suggests they backed the wrong horse more often than not. One citizen journalist, in defense of his record, and the record, suggests that this is the nature of science. “Most of science is as wrong, flawed, and incompetent as the humans who develop it. Scientists develop theories and other scientists disprove them, until the various teams compile a deeper knowledge of the harmony of math and science in the universe.” He continues, “Scientists are flawed human beings who aren’t large enough to qualify as a speck in the universe. Our/their knowledge and understanding of how universe the works wouldn’t qualify as a speck either. The failure of these brilliant minds only reinforces how little we are, and we can know what we know and still be wrong an overwhelming number of times, until some congealed form of human ingenuity, based entirely on observations, wrong educated guesses, and the infighting we now all know about leads, inevitably and almost accidentally, trip on a truth.” 

The politicians who said the end around theory would never work, because they wanted us to follow the theory that they supported, now attempt to embrace the end around theory as one they supported all along. The reporters and social media outlets who rejected and condemned anyone who believed in the theory move onto other, click-bait stories of the next looming disaster. 

When Tuesday rolls around, everyone forgets how close we actually came to extinction on Monday, as few appreciate a tragedy that never happens. The various teams of scientists who developed, pursued, and helped execute the end around theory are vilified by the scientific community, the politicians eventually join in the condemnation for those who saved the world, and the media seeks numerous angles to further vilify them. A major, online publication produces a series of pictures depicting the team of scientists most responsible for saving the world in mug shots. “They saved the world,” the title of the feature article says. “Why it’s not okay to like them.” 

Some of the scientists who braved the negative forces primed against them to save the world, quit their jobs, others finish out their career anonymously, because their names were never attached to the chains that led to the theories that saved the world, and one unfortunate scientist commits suicide. “Leave my family alone!” was the first sentence of his suicide note.

“He joined a team that wound end up saving the human race from annihilation,” the suicide victim’s friend said in the eulogy, “and they destroyed him for it.”

It is the future, it is the past, and it is the present. 

Mutually Assured Destruction

“He was the worst human being on the planet,” we now hear. “What he did was indefensible!” The definition of defensible involves flowcharts. Who is the alleged perpetrator? “Who are his victims?” What was the nature of his crime? “Was he well-intentioned or just awful?” It’s impossible to know, and we might never know. We base our conjecture on what team we’re on.

If we’re on his team, we qualify with excuses. We have so many excuses. Why? We don’t really know what happened, so why do we care so much about the accused that we’re willing to put our reputation on the line to see our guy go free or be penalized as little as possible? “What if he’s guilty?” What if he’s innocent? “All right, but what if?” We have no serious, vested interest. We’re just watching it on TV.

They don’t believe him. We know they’re on a certain team. If they believe him. We know they’re on the other team. The bad team. We know they’re capable of anything. We don’t know the truth, but we know if they pound the table harder than the other guy, they can sway popular opinion.

“What is the truth?” No one would openly say that the truth doesn’t matter anymore, “but someone has to be right,” and someone has to be wrong. Do we crush the importance of truth under the weight of what’s right? “I don’t know and you don’t know,” but let’s not study that subtle distinction. “Right.” We know that they’re wrong, and no one will be able to convince us otherwise. Our guys aren’t capable of wrongdoing, because like us, they come from better stock. “They would never do that.” We like our side, because they make us feel like a major component.

When we debate the other team’s proponents, we fear they might know something we don’t. We know our stuff, but we don’t have that haymaker to silence all debate. Everyone is searching for the person, place or thing that provides the haymaker. Yet, we don’t even bring it up, thinking that they might know something we don’t, or they could be offended. Saying our guy could be innocent might offend their sensibilities, and our friends might not be our friends in the aftermath.

The End of The Road

We can find the truth, as always, nestled somewhere in between. The lawyers in every industry define a truth. Not the truth. They manage information and disinformation so well that they push us further away from the truth through whatever means necessary. It’s called a quality defense, and we’re willing to pay buku bucks for it. Everyone is afraid of lawsuits, so we don’t question their version of the truth.

There are those who report a truth based on how they see it. Are they right? Who cares? We dismantle truth seekers based on past behavior to destroy them, so no one believes their version of truth. The truth seeker goes on defense, and our assumption of guilt and innocence depends on how much they defend themselves. The more they defend themselves, the guiltier they are. We think we’re onto something. As far as we know, they reported their side’s version of truth. Is their side’s version of the truth true? Who cares, destroy them before they destroy us in a pact of mutually assured destruction.

This might sound cynical, but how could anyone paying attention avoid some semblance of cynicism? Cynicism is the safe place for those seeking foolproof status. You can’t fool me, and neither can they, but while no one can call me a fool, I can’t say I know anything about the spaces in between.

The Mystery of the History of Zero

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Zero has always meant nothing to us. It lurks in the shadows of something. It’s a number, but it kind of isn’t in some confusing, “I don’t want to think that much” way. It has its own identity, and it doesn’t. It’s complicated, and it’s not. It’s an odd number, but it’s not odd. It’s not even even, but it is and it isn’t. We don’t consider it prime or composite. It’s not positive or negative, as it separates the negative from the positive. It’s a number but it also represents the absence of a number. It’s so confusing to us that we have to wonder if teachers should even teach its advanced concepts, and if they do, at what age? We were taught the basic facts of how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide zero, but when we reached advanced mathematical concepts, we learned that certain mathematical answers cannot be answered. They’re undefined, which led us to say, “What do you mean undefined? It’s zero.” At this point, the mathematician explains that if we try to divide twelve groups of people into zero groups, it cannot be done. It’s undefined. It’s complicated, and it’s not.
As Andreas Nieder writes in a 2016 paper, “For a brain that has evolved to process sensory stimuli (something), conceiving of empty sets (nothing) as a meaningful category requires high-level abstraction. It requires the ability to represent a concept beyond what is perceived.” 
“We’ve now reached a point in our history where we have to describe nothing,” someone, with some sort of twisted brilliance, said at various points in human history to try to advance the cause of what we now call zero. “How can we properly appreciate the concept of something, without a concrete grasp of nothing?”   “But there’s always something,” his counterpart probably argued. “Is there nothing in the vast expanse of a desert? There’s sand, over one septillion of tiny grains of sand, and how many molecules litter the water of the vast quantities of nothingness in the ocean? Even in the vast expanses of space, there’s always something.”  Zero is not substantial when compared to the other numbers, and it’s not tangible, but how many of our current creations, and measurements for those creations, would be almost inconceivable without it? It’s been there for so long now that we take it for granted. Yet, it went through a long, slow, debated, and debatable gestation cycle. Even in the relatively limited historical record of ancient civilizations, such as those in Babylon, India, and the Mayan civilization, zero, or some semblance of zero, appears. We don’t know why it made an appearance numerous times in different civilizations. Its birth remains a mystery to us, because its purpose wasn’t defined. They invented the concept of zero, but there is no evidence to suggest that they developed it in a substantial manner. As with most theories, they appear to have failed to apply the concept of it to real world constructs, but we have to give them credit for developing the theory of it. Bottom line, their theory was probably as difficult for them to grasp as it was to explain, because there’s always something. Even if we laid four avocados on the ground and then removed them, there would still be the millions of granules of dirt beneath it, trees, leaves, and the micro organisms that feed on them. There’s always something. Scholars believe zero began its life as something to fill columns when humans advanced their attempts to count. When those who invented, developed, and applied a method of counting, they encountered a void after nine. Their question, how do we get past nine, and all the other nines that lead to ninety-nine without something to carry us to the next number. How do we get to eleven, twenty-one, and one hundred and one? India’s positional numeral system needed a zero to scale past 9, and their trade demanded it. They needed a placeholder, or something to fill the void. They didn’t start counting numbers with zero, but they wrote a placeholder in the tens, the hundreds, and the thousands to fill columns when necessary.   
In a Scientific American article, Charles Seife, author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Viking, 2000), says “Filling columns is not a full zero. A full zero is a number on its own; it’s the average of –1 and 1.” “The Number Zero began to take shape as a number, rather than a punctuation mark between numbers, in India, in the fifth century A.D.,” says Robert Kaplan, author of The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford University Press, 2000). “It isn’t until then, and not even fully then, that zero gets full citizenship in the republic of numbers,” Kaplan says. Some cultures were slow to accept the idea of zero, which for many carried darkly magical connotations.   But Seife is not certain that even a placeholder zero was in use so early in history. “I’m not entirely convinced,” he says, “but it just shows it’s not a clear-cut answer.” He notes that the history of zero is too nebulous to clearly identify a lone progenitor. “In all the references I’ve read, there’s always kind of an assumption that zero is already there,” Seife says. “They’re delving into it a little bit and maybe explaining the properties of this number, but they never claim to say, ‘This is a concept that I’m bringing forth.’” Kaplan’s exploration of zero’s genesis turned up a similarly blurred web of discovery and improvement. “I think there’s no question that one can’t claim it had a single origin,” Kaplan says. “Wherever you’re going to get placeholder notation, it’s inevitable that you’re going to need some way to denote absence of a number.”
The Revolutionary, Ancient Indian Dot
So, if the Babylonians developed a placeholder (a wedge) by 300 BCE, not a “full zero.” India’s leap—likely pre-Brahmagupta, with the Bakhshali manuscript (3rd-7th century AD)—was making zero a standalone number, and the Maya did it too, independently, by the 4th century AD, we might suggest that there is a well-defined trail but no clear-cut discoverer, inventor, or even a well-defined point of origin, of the number zero, as it was always just kind of there, but its functionality wasn’t even as clear to early users as the functionality of negative numbers appears to have been. If it was always kind of been there, but rarely used as a number, how did zero make the leap as a concept?   Why did the powers of the zero contain “darkly magical connotations?” As with all cultures, modern and otherwise, the unknown is beyond current capabilities to explain, so we assigned mystical, dark, and forbidden connotations to explanations of what we otherwise cannot. With that in mind, why did someone brave the “here, there be dragons” designation to further the concept, and what was the reaction among their peers?  What twisted, weird, and just plain different theoretician(s) sat in a bathtub and dreamed up ways to further the concept of nothing and zero. If he eventually managed to successfully sway his peers to accept the premise of this proposed furtherance, how did he answer their “And then what?” questions. Okay, we’ll accept the premise of your newfound importance of a zero, but what do we do with it? Theory is one thing, application is quite another. How do you propose we use it? What purpose will it serve? When we’re building a house, diagramming a structure, or figuring out how to use water in our fields, what purpose does a concrete explanation of nothing serve? Your point of reaching a greater understanding of something through nothing is a provocative one for pointy-headed intellectuals to consider in their philosophy caves, but how do we apply it to real world concerns? In my uninformed and admittedly limited search, I found no timeline specifically breaking down a concretized life cycle of the zero. Various points on the timeline state that it was discovered here, mysteriously listed there, and it appeared here, there, and elsewhere in the historical timeline, but in terms of some form of functionality it mirrors the resume of the misspent life of a cousin who did nothing in life. He was always there, but he never did anything noteworthy. No one knows how it happened, nor can they answer the when, where or why questions, but he became the star of the family one day.  The most interesting elements to the timeline of the zero are not the who and when, though they are interesting, but the philosophical push of how zero made its way into the halls of Physics, Calculus, Engineering, Geometry, relativity and quantum mechanics, and a large part of finance and economics to, in many cases, eventually lead the way to numerous modern advancements in these areas.  If dealing with natural numbers, i.e. 1,2,3 …, is dealing with tangible things and events, the zero provided more of an abstract idea for mathematicians. This provided mathematicians greater freedom from real world constructs and representational qualities into high-level abstraction. The eventual inclusion of the properties of the number zero was such that the advancements of modern mathematics would not be possible without it. Imagine being a renowned “genius” in one of the fields listed above, and you have a problem that has plagued you for much of your life. This genius has put this problem to a group of peers and his students for decades, and no one can solve it. The genius eventually labels this problem unsolvable, a 0̷, or no solution, until some egghead walked up to him in the town square, while he sipped on his brew and said, “Try putting a zero on it.” The renowned expert probably sent this egghead away with a “Yeah, great, Montenegro, now go home to your flock of sheep and your basket weaving, and leave me alone.” Until, the expert went home, and they hell’d it, and put that zero into his mind-boggling equation. Did the genius use the zero to solve the problem, or did he approach it in a way that he never considered before? Was the genius’ problem of solving for something only solvable by introducing the concept of nothing? It’s impossible to know if a representation of nothing had an epiphany affect on any one person soon after it was incorporated into theoretical or actual problems, but we have to imagine that the effects and affects were cumulative until we finally arrived at a collective epiphany that led us to fully incorporate it over time.
A very brief and succinct description of our favorite number/non-number zero is that it flickered in ancient Babylon as a placeholder wedge by 300 BC, but India’s Bakhshali manuscript (3rd-7th century AD) and Brahmagupta’s 7th-century rules made it a real number. The Maya mirrored this leap by the 4th century, while Al-Khwarizmi carried it to the Islamic world in 825 AD. Europe, stubbornly resisted until Fibonacci’s 1202 Liber Abaci, finally caught on—linking India, the Middle East, and the West in a slow, vibrant chain. The research suggests that if Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Al-Khwarizmi, and Fibonacci, and the other brave souls hadn’t weathered the storms to bring zero to absolute indoctrination, the progress we know today, “the opening of the universe,” wouldn’t have been possible. Zero defines nothing and everything at the same time. It can be used as a point of origin, in positive and negative ways, and some suggest that those brave souls ended up furthering knowledge to advance Physics, Calculus, Engineering, Geometry, relativity and quantum mechanics, and a large part of finance and economics. The very idea that the “nothing is something and something is nothing” complex identity of zero ended up playing a starring role in science. In Calculus, for example, zero provides a tease of limits, where functions flirt with the abyss as values approach it. In relativity, zero-point energy keeps the universe buzzing even at absolute rest, and in binary code, 0 as “off” teams with 1’s “on” to whisper digital secrets to us. Mr. Zero, as we should now address his highness, or lowness, depending on how we choose to view him, transformed computers from clunky gear-spinners to sleek bit-flippers, while revolutionizing physics and engineering. Without zero, we might have to work with Roman numeral guesswork to form the precise calculations necessary to build bridges and figure out planetary orbits. If the geniuses listed here hadn’t developed a theoretical counterpoint to something, in these fields and others, we might have to leave such matters to vague speculation and our imaginations. Imagine that!  Zero is also one of the primary languages of the computer. We’ve all heard the phrase ones and zeroes. Zeroes are needed to create code and messages that the computer requires for functionality. If the properties of zero were never invented, discovered, and advanced, is it possible we wouldn’t have the knowledge or the technology necessary for the computer?   Even after everything it’s been through and everything it has accomplished for us, we still have no love for zero. The full zero, standing on it’s own, and the average between -1 and 1, represents absolute failure in the classroom, a complete condemnation of athletic ability on a scoreboard, and desperation when it appears alone in our bank accounts (zero involves some desperation, but not the total devastation the negative numbers create in our equations). We considered calling someone an absolute zero to be worst insult we could say about a person, until Billy Corgan came along and reminded us of its positive, negative and abstract qualities. We also thought we had a firm grasp on the traits of nothing, until the writers of Seinfeld redefined it and showed us how brilliant nothing could be. Now imagine going back to a time before zero to explain to the most brilliant minds in math and science how zero and its resulting revolutionary concepts have reshaped our world. “Achieving something is just as important in our time as it is yours,” we might say, “but the most brilliant minds of the civilizations, since your time, couldn’t have achieved half of what they did without fully developing and realizing the properties and possibilities of nothing.”   

Was Y2K an Unfixable Problem, Hysteria, or an Easy Fix?

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“You never get credit for the disasters you avert,” Technology forecaster Paul Saffo told the New York Times in 2013. 

The greatest fear of the Y2K (Year 2000) bug was the fear of the unknown. In 1999, we thought “the unfixable” Y2K bug was a first step in our dystopian future. We can all have a laugh about it now, but very few of us were laughing in December 1999. We didn’t know, and that’s what scared us.

The crux of the fear, for those who didn’t live through it, was that computer programmers didn’t bother listing the full four numbers of a year. 1995, for example, was listed by most computers as 95. 1996 was listed by computers as 96, and so on and so forth. The fear was that when the calendar flipped from 1999 to 2000, computers might not be able to distinguish between 1900 and 2000, because computers, in computer-reliant industries, might not be able to distinguish between the years, since they had, to this point, only listed years as two digits.

If it was fixed, did it require a collective effort from private companies, government expenditures that some estimate in the range of $400 to $600 billion, and independent engineers, or was this largely exaggerated problem a relatively easy fix? Was the problem greatly exaggerated and overhyped?

Some of us had our own, internalized doomsday clock in December of 1999, because we feared the unknown. Did we fear it from the comfort of our own home, because we were told to fear it? We were told it would affect every human’s daily life in one way or another. Large or small, we thought every day life wouldn’t be as great as it once was in December 1999. Some of us thought the electricity grid might go down, we heard planes might fall from the sky, our cars and unprepared computers would become inoperable, and our bank’s automatic teller machines (ATMs) would not dispense money. We all laugh about it now, but some maintain that tragedy was averted, and when tragedy is averted without a noteworthy event, we quickly forget how tragic it could’ve and probably should’ve been.

If any problem solver fixes a problem before it ever becomes a problem, they receive no credit for it. If they’re concerned with receiving some form of credit, the most advantageous route is to forestall a solution to allow noteworthy events to occur, and then fix it and save the world. As we all know, this did not happen in the Y2K scare.

I knew people who stocked their pantries with bottled water and grain pellets, I knew others who withdrew extra cash from their bank’s ATM, and I knew a number of people who bought Y2K software updates for their computers. No one knew everything, but we all knew some things, and everyone knew that we had to be prepared for anything. Our reaction to the scare defined us in 1999, but it further defined us on January 1, 2000, as it was noteworthy what we did to avoid becoming a victim of something that never happened. Whatever you did became the subject of ridicule.

The theoretical question we asked one another in 1999 was not when it would affect us, because we all knew that. The question was how much would it affect our daily lives? Few reasonable and rational adults asked the question if it would affect us. Due to the fact that computers were still relatively new to us, we considered it a fait accompli that it would affect us. We grew up with science fiction movies that revolved around a plot that that which can help man today could one day, and in some way, ruin man in a dystopian manner that no one saw coming.

In those movies, the proverbial, street corner bell ringer was always the best-looking actor in the movie (which lends their character more gravitas) warning the less attractive (and thus less aware) side characters of impending doom. None of the average-to-ugly actors in the movies recognized the true, impending threat for what it was until it was too late. We didn’t want anyone to consider us average-to-ugly, so we mentally prepared for the day when an attractive person lofted a preposterous notion to us.

In 1985, someone posed a theoretical question about how Y2K might affect computers when the century switched, but the problem for us was we didn’t know how attractive that theoretician was, so we didn’t take it seriously. Their theoretical notion hinged on the idea that for decades computer programmers wrote the year in shorthand. They didn’t write out the year 1985, they wrote 85. Some claimed the shorthand was done to save memory space. Thus, when the year flipped from 99 to 00, we feared that all of our computers would believe the year was 1900, 1800, or even year 00? Most of us didn’t believe that computers would transport us bedside, next to the baby Jesus, but we feared that our computers would fail to recognize the logic of the switch, and that the bug it created might introduce such internal confusion in the computer’s mainframe that they would simply shutdown. We feared any human input introduced to combat this inconsistency would prove insufficient, and that human interference could lead to some unforeseen complications, and we feared our computers would be unable to sort it out? The theoretical question reached hysterical proportions in the fourteen years between 1985 and 1999, as America grew more and more reliant on computers for everything from its most important activities (travel) to its most basic (ATMs and the electrical grid).

My guess is that the recipient of that first theoretical question brought it to a closed-door boardroom, and some of those board members took that question out to other parties, until someone in the media heard the question and thought it might prove to be an excellent ongoing question to ask an audience in ongoing features every week. They could start a Tuesday Tech story of the week in which they asked the informed and uninformed what they thought of a problem that wasn’t a problem yet, but could be a problem when the calendar flipped.

Media figures play two roles in our lives, they tell us what we need to hear, read, and see, and they tell us what we want to hear. We don’t want to hear eggheads talk 1s and 0s, unless they can make it apply to our lives with a quality presentation. That, in my opinion, provides stark clarity on our mindset, because we prefer the presentations inherent in science fiction to the hard science of the actual factual.

“Nobody cares about computer programming,” we can guess a network executive informed that ambitious reporter’s Tuesday Tech proposal. “Why should I care about this?”

“The angle we’re proposing is more granular,” this reporter said. “The first network focused on the larger question of computer technology in their Tech Tuesday reports. In our Tech Thursday features, we’ll explore how much of our lives are now dependent on computers. Our energy grid, the tanks at the gas station, and the ATMs. We plan on bringing this theoretical problem home to where people live. We will say this Y2K bug is not just going to affect Silicon Valley and Wall Street, it could have far-reaching implications for citizens watching from Pocatello, Idaho to Destin, Florida, and here’s how …”

As usual with hysterical premises of this sort, the one component most news agencies, and the word-of-mouth hysteria that follows, fail to address is human ingenuity. Rarely, do we hear a reporter say, “We’ve all heard the problem called the Y2K bug, but we rarely hear about proposed solutions. Today, our guest Derrick Aspergren will talk about proposed solutions to comfort the audience at home.” The problem for news agencies is that the Derrick Apergrens of the world are often not very attractive or charismatic, and they speak in ones and zeroes. Even though most computer problems and solutions involve a lexicon of ones and zeroes, no one wants to hear it, and few will remember it. As a result, news agencies rarely give Derrick Aspergrens airtime, and they focus on the dramatic and provocative, proverbial bell ringers standing on a street corner.

In 1999, we rarely heard the question, can hardware engineers and electrical engineers fix a problem they created? The learned fear we’re conditioned to believe, based on the plot lines of so many science fiction movies, is that if we dig deep enough, we’ll discover that this isn’t a human problem at all, but a problem generated by a scary conglomeration of ones and zeroes we call AI (artificial intelligence). We knew little-to-nothing about the potential of AI in 1999, but we feared it, and its potential, because we feared the unknown. “AI is here, and there’s nothing we can do about it!” was (and is) the battle cry of conspiracy theorists on radio, in our neighborhoods, and in our work place. The truth is often much less dramatic.

The truth, we now know, was somewhere south of the hype. The truth lived somewhere in the question of whether the Y2K fear was real. If it required a big, worldwide fix, as some suggest happened, how come there were no Nobel Prizes handed out? “That’s because it required a collective effort from so many minds, around the world that there was no individual to accord credit.” Or, was the fix so easy that any hardware engineer, worth half of his college tuition payments, was able to do it?

Was the Y2K scare a tragedy averted by hardware engineers enduring mind-numbing hours of editing, or was the entire affair hyped up through media mis, dis, or mal-information? I don’t remember the reports from every media outlet, but how much focus did the round robin hysteria generated by the media place on possible and probable fixes? Some suggest if there was a need for a fix, it could be easily accomplished by hardware programmers, and others suggest it was never this world-shaking threat we thought it was.

The problem for us was that the problem was so much more interesting than the fix. Take a step back to December 1999, and imagine this news report, “Here we have a man named Geoffrey James, who says, “If Y2K experts (some of whom have a software background but none a hardware background) ask some electrical engineers about date checking in embedded systems, they will learn that only a complete idiot would do anything resembling the conversion and comparison of calendar dates inside a chip. We use elapsed time, which is a simple, single counter; it takes ten seconds to add to a circuit.

“I may oversimplifying but ultimately the reasoning doesn’t matter,” Geoffrey continues, “the unfixable system problem either isn’t real or isn’t significant enough to spawn a disaster. Because there aren’t any.” That rational and reasonable explanation from someone purportedly in the know would’ve gone in one ear and out the other, because for some of us there are no absolutes, and there are no quick fixes. When someone dangles the prospect of a simple solution to the simplest problems, we swat them away:

“You mean to tell me that all they have to do is add to a circuit. I ain’t buying it brother, and if I were you, I wouldn’t buy it either. I wouldn’t go out into the world naked with the beliefs of some egghead. We all have to prepare for this, in one way or another, we must prepare.”

Some of us thought the Y2K bug would force us to back to the primal life of the cavemen, or at least to the latest and greatest technology of the McKinley administration of 1900. Friends of mine thought those of us who know how to hunt and forage for food would once again take their rightful place atop the kingdom of those who grew so accustomed to the comfy life of a visit to the neighborhood grocery store. More than one person I knew thought our appliances might explode, and that Americans might finally know what it’s like to live in the poorest third-world nations in the world. They thought we would return to our primal life, and our TV shows and movies reflected that fear, anxiety, and (some say) desire to return to our primal roots.

News reports stated that hardware engineers and other electrical engineers were working on the problem, but they’re not sure they’ll have a workable in time. We knew the line: “For every problem there is a solution,” but when you’re in the midst of hysteria, lines like, “This was a man-made problem that requires a man-made solution” provide no comfort. We all know that tangled within mankind is a ratio of geniuses who not only know how to propose solutions, but they know how to apply and implement them. We know this, but humans suffer from an ever-present inferiority complex that suggests no mere mortal can resolve a crisis like this one. We know this because no self-respecting science fiction writer would ever be so lazy as to suggest that a mortal, whether they be a military leader with a blood lust who wants to detonate a warhead on the monster, a policeman who believes that a bullet can kill it, or an egotistical scientist can resolve this particular dystopian dilemma.

Even though this was a man-made problem, few outside the halls of hardware engineer offices believed man could solve the problem. We heard about geniuses who brought us incredible leaps of technology so often that it was old hat to us. We knew they could build it, but there was this fear, borne in the human inferiority complex, and propagated by the sci-fi movies we loved, that technology had spiraled so out of our control that it was now beyond human comprehension to fix it.

Was Y2K overhyped as an unfixable problem, was the solution so elementary that it simply took a mind-numbing number of man hours to implement it, or was it a simple hardware fix? I don’t know if the numerous media outlets who ran their Tech Tuesday features ever focused on the idea that the Y2K problem, of two digits vs. four, was generated by a theoretical question someone asked fifteen years before, but I told my terrified friends as much. “If this whole thing is based on a theoretical question, what is the theoretical answer?” With fellow uneducated types, I furthered, “And if we search through the theoretical answers, we might find an actual one.” The theme of my response involved the hope that we weren’t so terrified by the questions that we failed to seek answers, and I was shouted down. I was shouted down by uneducated types, like me, and I was, am, and forever will be woefully uninformed on this subject. They told me that I didn’t understand the complexities involved, that this situation was far more serious, and that I was underestimating it. I’d love to say that I adjusted the focus of my glasses, as I attempted to adjust theirs, but when the screaming majority in your inner circle is convinced to consensus those who are relatively uninformed either silence or buckle. I cowered, and I regrettably conformed to some of their fears, but I didn’t know any better. None of us did. The one takeaway I have from the hysteria we now call Y2K is that we should use Y2K hysterica’s fears as a precedent. If we have theoretical questions based on theoretical questions we should ask them of the more informed, more educated “experts”, because theoretical questions could eventually lead to some actual answers. The alternative might result in us shutting down the world over some hysterical fear of the unknown.