"What's the worst that can happen?" goes the optimistic saying. It's probably a bad question to ask anyone with a creative imagination. Let's consider the problem on an individual level: it's not really the worst that can happen, but would nonetheless be fairly bad, if you were horribly tortured for a number of years. This is one of the worse things that can realistically happen to one person in today's world.
What's the least bad, bad thing that can happen? Well, suppose a dust speck floated into your eye and irritated it just a little, for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make you notice before you blink and wipe away the dust speck.
For our next ingredient, we need a large number. Let's use 3^^^3, written in Knuth's up-arrow notation:
- 3^3 = 27.
- 3^^3 = (3^(3^3)) = 3^27 = 7625597484987.
- 3^^^3 = (3^^(3^^3)) = 3^^7625597484987 = (3^(3^(3^(... 7625597484987 times ...)))).
3^^^3 is an exponential tower of 3s which is 7,625,597,484,987 layers tall. You start with 1; raise 3 to the power of 1 to get 3; raise 3 to the power of 3 to get 27; raise 3 to the power of 27 to get 7625597484987; raise 3 to the power of 7625597484987 to get a number much larger than the number of atoms in the universe, but which could still be written down in base 10, on 100 square kilometers of paper; then raise 3 to that power; and continue until you've exponentiated 7625597484987 times. That's 3^^^3. It's the smallest simple inconceivably huge number I know.
Now here's the moral dilemma. If neither event is going to happen to you personally, but you still had to choose one or the other:
Would you prefer that one person be horribly tortured for fifty years without hope or rest, or that 3^^^3 people get dust specks in their eyes?
I think the answer is obvious. How about you?
If you ask me the slightly different question, where I choose between 50 years of torture applied to one man, or between 3^^^3 specks of dust falling one each into 3^^^3 people's eyes and also all humanity being destroyed, I will give a different answer. In particular, I will abstain, because my moral calculation would then favor the torture over the destruction of the human race, but I have a built-in failure mode where I refuse to torture someone even if I somehow think it is the right thing to do.
But that is not the question I was asked. We could also have the man tortured for fifty years and then the human race gets wiped out BECAUSE the pan-galactic cataclysm favors civilizations who don't make the choice to torture people rather than face trivial inconveniences.
Consider this alternate proposal:
Hello Sir and/or Madam:
I am trying to collect 3^^^3 signatures in order to prevent a man from being tortured for 50 years. Would you be willing to accept a single speck of dust into your eye towards this goal? Perhaps more? You may sign as many times as you are comfortable with. I eagerly await your response.
Sincerely,
rkyeun
PS: Do you know any masochists who might enjoy 50 years of torture?
BCC: 3^^^3-1 other people.