While I readily admit the inexorable fell logic of John C Wright’s Space Princess Corollary to the Drake Equation, I feel sadly compelled to exhume and add the even more scientific Lex Luther Theorem, as we’ve discussed here before and as revised to be even more scientifilicious:
FR = percentage of a population that is Filthy Rich, here determined to mean ‘worth $1B or more’;
SS = percentage of a population that’s super Smart, here using a 200 IQ as the cut-off;
HS = percentage of a population that are homicidal sociopaths;
Now, it should be clear that FR * SS * HS * Total Population = the probable number of super genius homicidal billionaires in a population at any one time. (1) If the number falls below 1 for a given population at a given time, it’s only a matter of time before one arises as people die and are born – Total Population can be viewed as all the people who ever lived over a long enough period of time.
A Filthy Rich Super Smart Homicidal Sociopath has the means and the motive to exterminate life on earth – or on any other planet where intelligent life arises – based on exactly the same logic Mr. Wright laid out above. One must conclude that, Nature being Nature everywhere, it’s only a matter of time before not only a FRSSHS arises, but a FRSSHS Space Princess arises! How ’bout them apples? Of course, Mr. Wright, it would seem, has already met several alluring young things that meet this description. In short: We’re doomed.
Finally, we have:
CA – chance that a FRSSHS will succeed in his attempts to Completely Annihilate everybody. So:
FR * SS * HS * Total Population over time * CA = chances all intelligent life on a planet will get exterminated. We could divide by time, and determine exactly how long, on average, an intelligent species will exist before a FRSSHS Space Princess arises and kills them all off.
The beauty here, as opposed to Drake Equation, is that we’re making (almost) no baseless assumptions: there really are billionaires, sociopaths and super geniuses walking the planet as we speak – something like a 1,000 billionaires, several thousand super geniuses and tens of millions of sociopaths. And I’d propose that CA (success rate of our FRSSHS) approaches 1 as technology improves – engineer a virus, burn off the atmosphere, poison the oceans – these are now pretty imaginable steps a sufficiently smart, rich and crazy man could take.
See how tidy and all-explaining this is, how logically rigorous? It does not deny the Drake equation, yet explains Fermi’s Paradox – and casts a doomed pall over all human life! Damn, I just love science!
1. Just in case some pedantic statistician (Flynn) drops in – yes, we’re assuming the variables are uncorrelated, for the simple practical reason that this is a blog post and I’ve long forgotten the math needed to tidy it up, if I ever knew it.
Yard Sale of the Mind 
“tens of millions of sociopaths”
???!!!!!????
Yep. About 2% of the population.
Permit me to repeat myself – you are SCARING ME!
I had no idea. Henceforth I shall tread far more circumspectly….
It just doesn’t seem fair, though, that my chances of becoming super-rich and/or über-smart are so much smaller than the chance of my becoming a mass murderer.
The really scary math: in any group of 100 people, you can expect to find 2 sociopaths on average. I would say that I’ve run across at least 3, possibly 4 sociopaths in my life. They are very good at not getting spotted, so there may have been many more who just didn’t care to be identified.. A couple hints: wildly inappropriate reactions in intensely emotional situations. (I had a woman smirk at me as I was breaking it to her that she needed never to get within a mile of some children under my care; I’ve run into stone walls of calm while catching someone in a bald and damaging lie – that kind of thing.) Also, there’s some tendency for pulling geographics – these people tend to move around, as they burn up the people in one area or company (or church!).
I’ve learned much more about this than i would care to know.
To be precise: about 2% are sociopaths, meaning they do not have a conscience and so not feel anything like empathy or sympathy. The bulk of these folks (let us fervently hope) are not *homicidal* sociopaths – they are content to destroy work environments, abuse the people who might care for them, or otherwise amuse themselves at the expense of others. They might even decide, based on reason, to be saints – we must believe this possible, I suppose.
But some percentage do in fact become homicidal sociopaths. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, many of the most monstrous Nazis, for example, sadistic and murderous death camp guards, seemed like normal people until they got put into a situation where all normal constraints on their actions were removed.
2% of 7,000,000,000 = 140,000,000 = tens of millions. The effects of the Fall are indeed deep.
I have led a sheltered life!