1.8
Post-Encounter Deposition
Mitchell T. Sprague, PhD
Department of Economics,
New York University
Make, buy, sell, trade, hold. The basic operations of the dismal science we call economics. Less talked about in our circles but equally important:
locate, extract, refine, and divide (as in the mining or energy
sectors);
hunt, gather, plow, sow, reap, preserve, combine, and consume
(as in agriculture);
reduce, reuse, repair, and recycle (in any environment where
resources are limited);
arrange, perform, observe (as in the arts);
collect, organize, report, praise, and disparage (as in
journalism);
learn, invent, prototype, produce (as in technology startups);
and everyone’s supposed least favorites: threaten, steal,
damage, and destroy (as in crime, war, natural disasters,
and nonconsensual governments).
There are others—so many others. We econ types spend our life cataloging them and awkwardly fitting equations to them in hopes of describing something real.
In 2050, I won a Nobel Prize for asking the question, in a dozen papers across a span of five years: which of these operations would space aliens do? All of them? None? Some? It depends what kind of aliens you’re talking about, which is not a profound observation for me to have made. But neither is most economic theory, so there you go.
Okay: the Beings. Economics would insist that in any situation where there’s more than one autonomous agent, there’s got to be commerce of some kind. Even prokaryotes trade information and resources, and form colonies to protect themselves. The Beings must have an economy of some kind, right? But what if they’re a disembodied intelligence, with no concept of quantity, and barely a concept of time? What does that do to all our fancy assumptions? I didn’t exactly put this question to them, but they seemed to detect it from me the way a Geiger counter detects radiation, and their answer came back to me like street noise. Lots of voices, lots of sounds. Hard to make out, but you pick up the general tone of it, and that helps you tune into the details.
In brief: yes. The Beings have an understanding of value. To them it’s wordless, numberless, and totally lacking in physical substance, and yet it’s absolutely as evident as a stack of coins or a boxcar full of grain, or what have you.
I don’t know where they get their energy, but apparently they absorb it from somewhere, and expend it, and I got the impression they’d disappear completely without it. Their “bodies” are like a clothesline extending from past to future, and at each point along the line there’s an input of energy pinned to the rope, which is noted as important. It’s their most basic unit of value, and one that can be hoarded or squandered or exchanged. Squandering may not be the right word, because generating a blob of entropy for no clear purpose appears to also have a kind of value, in maybe a gluttonous or sensuous way. Guilty pleasures of the disembodied.
Patterns also have value to them. Patterns of matter and energy in time and space attract their attention, and that attention is another unit of value. Creating patterns can create value, but destroying patterns can also be valuable. It’s not clear to me that matter per se is of any particular interest to them, except for the way it changes and moves the energy around it. But one Being will sometimes create a pattern for another Being, or multiple Beings, to observe or consume.
Things that are unexpected have more value than things that aren’t, although it was never quite clear to me what “expectation” meant. The size or duration of a thing didn’t seem to particularly matter to them, but there’s a quality—maybe “poignancy”?—that seemed to matter a whole lot, so that the beginning and ending of things were of greater importance than their boring middles.
I could fit equations to that, and I will, but economic theory could never capture how raucous and exuberant the Beings’ economy seemed to me: an open-air market of shouting voices, offering songs for a dollar and skyscrapers for a song. I felt them jostling, pushing, laughing at the absurdity and yet also placing a deadly serious value on the laughter itself.
The sort of people who snort DMT at parties have often described the Beings as elves or angels, but I think these manifestations are just avatars. They’re sock puppets or wooden ducks, meant to lure us in for closer examination. I just think somehow that the actual Beings are much larger and farther away, and in attracting our attention—in getting us to do anything we wouldn’t ordinarily have done—they were satisfying an urge within themselves.
We went to visit them because the mere knowledge of their existence has tremendous value to us, and anything we learn from them (or that we can’t learn any other way) is so valuable it’s difficult to even articulate a way to measure it. And let me tell you, the converse seems to be true as well. We may never know the fortunes they expended to lure us out to meet them, but it seemed like a really vast undertaking, and one that we can accept as a compliment. They’ve never seen or imagined anything like us, and although we sometimes despise ourselves, or each other, the Beings really seemed to like what they saw. Their investment had paid off massively.
Will we commerce with them? Are we of only brief value to them, or is their interest ongoing? Can we create things they will pay for? Can they supply a thing to us, that we have no other way of getting? I don’t know, and maybe they don’t, either. Call it a successful first date, with many questions still to answer.