Across biology, energy, and space the pattern looks the same. There’s a simple pattern I keep running into when I look at biology, energy, space and progress as a whole:
- We know how to do more than we are doing.
- The binding constraint isn’t knowledge or capital.
- The binding constraint is fear routed through institutions.
Sometime in the 1970s the default changed. “Try unless forbidden” became “forbidden until proven safe.” That shift prevented real harms. It also produced a quieter one: stagnation by design.
How we got stuck
The twenty years after WWII compressed a century of invention: transistors, DNA’s structure, commercial nuclear power, the Pill, lasers, integrated circuits, satellites, container shipping, ARPANET, microprocessors, the Green Revolution. Productivity surged.
Then came the recoil: thalidomide, Tuskegee, environmental disaster, nuclear scares. We built antibodies, drug rules demanding proof of efficacy, IRBs for human subjects, environmental review before building, extra gates for nuclear and biotech. Each reform made sense locally. Together they moved institutions from enabling exploration to managing blame.
As societies age and get richer, they select for predictability. Voters have more to protect and less time to enjoy long‑run upside. A visible failure ends a career; a counterfactual success is invisible. The rational choice for officials is to say “no,” or say nothing for years.
Where it bites now
- Biology. We can already screen embryos for disease risk and some cognitive and psychiatric traits. We know how to make multiple precise edits with strong verification in animals. What blocks clinical iteration is reputational and institutional fear. Studies that should take three years take ten or never start.
- Energy. A clean power project often spends longer on process than on construction. Reviews meant to weigh trade‑offs drift into vetoes in slow motion. Carbon keeps accumulating while the PDF gets longer.
- Space. One lunar landing turned into half a century of committee and low‑Earth orbit. Private efforts claw back speed, but under constant drag.
An abundance of veto points.
The missing ledger is delay.
We’re good at counting harms from action. We are bad at counting harms from waiting.
A toy calculation shows why this matters. Suppose we could safely shift a population’s mean IQ by +3 to +5 points over time. Under a normal model (μ = 100, σ = 15), the share above common tail thresholds changes like this:
- ≥130: 2.28% → 3.59% → 4.78%
- ≥145: 0.135% → 0.256% → 0.383%
- ≥160: 0.0032% → 0.0072% → 0.0123%
Per million births that’s roughly 22,750 → 35,930 → 47,790 at ≥130; 1,350 → 2,555 → 3,830 at ≥145; 32 → 72 → 123 at ≥160. Small mean shifts create large right‑tail multipliers, and the right tail produces a lot of discovery and institutional competence. A year of delay means a cohort that never gets that upside.
The same arithmetic applies elsewhere. Slowing an effective cancer therapy costs life‑years. Stalling a low‑emission plant costs emissions. Deferring road fixes costs fatal crashes. “Do nothing” is not neutral but often costly.
The pendulum
This looks like a civilizational rhythm. Scarcity pushes exploration; abundance rewards preservation. Complexity piles up until something breaks it. Then the cycle restarts. Maybe no society can hold the middle for long.
If the pattern is that old, what actually changes it? Historically: war, external competition, collapse. None are good levers. But we’re the first generation that can see the cycle in real time and do the math on what delay destroys. If awareness can’t bend the curve, what could?
- Are there historical cases where a rich society voluntarily shifted back toward exploration without a crisis? What were the preconditions?
- What measurements would make the opportunity cost of delay legible enough to move institutions?
- In biology specifically, which bounded experiments would most convincingly demonstrate that carefully run iteration improves net safety rather than undermines it?
- If this really is a pendulum, how much of it is deterministic and how much is steerable?
Closing. We became careful for good reasons. The mistake was letting caution harden into veto by default. Real safety is the ability to move while knowing when to stop. If we want progress again, we need to start counting the cost of waiting, not just the cost of trying.
Appendix: The tail figures use a normal model with μ = 100, σ = 15; probabilities for ≥130/145/160 are the standard normal survival function at those thresholds under mean shifts of +0, +3, +5. The numbers are illustrative of tail multipliers, not destiny.