The Martian Student: A Science Fiction Story

In the year 2126 young Josh lived in a tall tower on the planet Mars. His mother Lucy hoped that the education of Josh would be a breeze, and that he could learn all he needed to learn by the "brain downloads" that scientists had long promised.  But the hype about "brain downloads" had never materialized into a product anyone could use. So Josh did his studies in a pretty old-fashioned way, assisted by AI tutors which showed up in the form of talking life-like human-sized holograms. 

One day his mother Lucy gave young Josh a hard assignment relating to biology. 

"So I've seen how much you've learned about biology," said Lucy.

"Yes, Mom, I know so much," said Josh. "I can name many types of animals that live on that distant planet Earth I have never seen."

"But now I want you to go deeper," said Lucy. "This will be an assignment much harder than things like learning the names of animals."

"Uh, oh," said Josh, fearing some hard work was ahead. 

"What I would like you to do is research the topic: how did you and people like you ever get here? How did the human race ever arise? And how did your body ever arise? And how did your mind arise?"

"No problem, I'll just ask one of my holographic AI tutors," said Josh. 

"For this assignment, I don't want you to use a holographic AI tutor," said Lucy. "I want you to read a book to get the answers."

Josh groaned, realizing the assignment was a hard one. Using the very extensive electronic facilities of his Mars colony, he selected a book on biology, and began reading, trying to get the answers to the questions his mother had asked. 

The next day Lucy asked about how we doing. 

"I'm all done," said Josh. "I got the answers to those tough questions." 

"So tell me, Josh: what answers did you find?" said his mother. 

"The first question was how did the human race arise," said Josh. "The book told me the answer. It said every species arose because of random mutations in DNA that were saved and accumulated, because they were beneficial." 

"Random mutations?" said Lucy. "You think humans and bears and lions and whales arose from random mutations?"

"That's what the book said," said Josh. "It said they arose because of accumulations of random mutations such as copying errors."

"But that makes no sense," said Lucy. "The problem is that the bodies of creatures like us are enormously organized. A human body is as organized and fine-tuned as the spacecraft that first brought humans to Mars from Earth. In a human body there are organ systems that are built from organs, which are built from tissues, which are built from 200 types of enormously organized cells, which are built from many types of very complex organelles, which are built from superbly organized protein complexes, which are built from more than 20,000 types of proteins, which are each a special arrangement of hundreds or thousand of amino acids, fine-tuned to achieve some functional result. You can't accumulate your way to that kind of organization."

"But accumulation explains some things, doesn't it?" asked Josh. 

"Sure," said Lucy. "It explains the drifts of red dust we see piled up outside of our windows. But it doesn't explain things that are fantastically organized like rocket ships and human bodies. Now let's look just at you. What explanation did you find about how your body arose?"

"The book says I started out as a tiny little speck in your body," said Josh. 

"Well, at least the book got that right," said Lucy. "That is how you started out. That little speck is called a zygote, and it's all that you were just after I got pregnant. But how did that tiny little speck turn into a big smart boy like you?"

"The book explained it," said Josh. "It said that inside each of my cells is something called DNA, and that DNA is a blueprint for building a body. It seems that my cells read the blueprint, and so they knew how to build my body."

Lucy started laughing. "What a ridiculous tale!" she exclaimed.  "DNA has no blueprint for building bodies. DNA has only low-level chemical information like which amino acids make up cells. DNA and its genes do not even know how to make a cell. And cells don't have the smarts to read and understand blueprints on how to build a body, even if such blueprints existed." 

"But I thought it made sense," said Josh. "the idea of me getting built from a blueprint in my cells."

"Why would that make sense?" asked Lucy. "Do blueprints build things? Of course not. If you dump some construction materials at a spot and also dump a blueprint, that won't cause a new building to get built."

"I guess you're right," said Josh.

"Things only get built from blueprints if there are construction workers smart enough to read blueprints, and follow their instructions," explained Lucy. "The human body is so complex and so highly organized that a blueprint for making a body would be fantastically complicated. Were there any construction workers inside my body smart enough to read a blueprint for building a body, so that your body could be built from a tiny speck-sized zygote, and so that all of the 200 types of cells would know how to find the right place in the body to go to?"

"I guess not," said Josh. 

"You're not just a body, but also a mind," said Lucy. "What did your book tell you about how your mind arose?"

"It said my mind arose just from the electricity and chemicals passing around in my brain, and that my brain is like a computer that produces my mind." said Josh.

"How ridiculous an explanation!" said Lucy. "There's basically nothing in the brain that can explain the mind. And brains are not computers. Computers have an operating system and application programs. Brains have no such things."

"The book said my memories are stored in my brain," said Josh. 

"That was nonsense," said Lucy. "Brains do not have any component that can explain learning. Brains do not have any component that can explain instantly recalling a memory, as soon as you hear some name spoken you haven't heard in years.  I remember things very well from decades ago, but the proteins in brains are very short-lived, having an average lifetime of only a few weeks or less. And no one has ever found the tiniest bit of learned information by microscopically examining brain tissue." 

"So how could the book have been so wrong?" asked Josh. 

"When was it written?" asked his mother Lucy.

"In the year 2026," answered Josh.

"Oh THAT explains it," said Lucy, laughing. "Lots of people had foolish ideas way back then, a century ago. Around 2026 many people thought and did the stupidest things. They were so foolish they filled the Earth with nuclear missiles that could have caused the whole planet to be ruined. People have much better ideas now. So I have another tough assignment for you."

"Oh, no," said Josh, groaning. 

"The assignment is: get some answers to my questions from books that were written in recent years, books written in the 22nd century," said Lucy. "And if you think that none of them gave you answers that held up to your scrutiny, then tell me you didn't find any answers that made sense." 

"Mirror Life" Risk Means You Just Might Get Killed by a Mars Sample Return Mission

 Scientists and doctors have a long history of paying inadequate attention to very serious risks that are hard to quantify. Here are some examples. 

• When the first atomic bomb was being developed,  there were concerns that its explosion would cause an uncontrollable chain reaction that would set the Earth's atmosphere on fire. Anyone familiar with the way in which an atomic chain reaction occurs may understand why such a concern was reasonable. A nuclear chain reaction occurs in a way roughly comparable to how a fast-spreading virus spreads, with the reaction passing on very quickly between nearby units, which themselves cause the same reaction to be passed on to other nearby units, and so on and so forth. It was reasonable to fear that an atmosphere filled with oxygen molecules might allow a nuclear chain reaction to pass on endlessly from one molecule to the next. Chapter 17 of Daniel Ellsberg's book The Doomsday Machine makes quite clear that physicists still thought there was a significant chance of such a planet-killing event when the first atomic bomb was exploded in July, 1945. At one point Enrico Fermi estimated the chance at 10 percent, according to one source. Scientists basically shrugged off the risk that the whole atmosphere might burn up when the first nuclear bomb exploded, and approved the first atom bomb test. It was like playing Russian roulette with the survival of mankind. 
• After nuclear weapons were invented, there were all kinds of concerns about the testing of nuclear weapons. Critics said that the tests were creating radioactivity that would increase the cancer risk for very many people. Scientists assured us incorrectly that the risks were very small. This post  states that there were between 340,000 to 690,000 US deaths caused by atomic testing. The result was probably more US deaths than from the bombs dropped on Japan. 
• Many people pointed out the hazards of scientific experimentation modifying the genomes of viruses and bacteria. But scientists recklessly kept up "gain of function" experiments.  Three US intelligence agencies have concluded that the COVID-19 epidemic surging in early 2020 was caused by a lab leak from a laboratory doing gain-of-function research. 
• A health resource web page states this: "For over two decades, the United States has experienced a crisis of substance abuse and addiction that is illustrated most starkly by the rise in deaths from drug overdoses. Since the year 2000, over 1 million people died from drug overdoses in the United States. The annual number of drug deaths exceeded 100,000 for the first time in 2021, beginning a disturbing trend that has continued in both 2022 and 2023." How did this happen? For many years, doctors not paying adequate attention to the risks of opioid medicines went about casually writing prescriptions for such drugs, acting like they were blind to the risks of overdoses and prescription drug addiction. 
• The radiation hazards of CT scans were obvious from the beginning. But countless millions were encouraged to get such scans, often where there was no clear medical necessity for such a scan. Referring to CT scans in the United States, a scientific study stated, "The 93 million CT examinations performed in 62 million patients in 2023 were projected to result in approximately 103, 000 future cancers." Extrapolating, we can assume that millions of people worldwide have got cancer because of unnecessary CT scans. 

Scientists have recently discussed a type of risk that few have imagined previously. It is the risk called "mirror life."  To understand the idea, you have to understand the important idea of homochirality. 

A protein molecule typically has hundreds of amino acids. Chemicals such as amino acids and sugars can be either left-handed or right handed. A left handed amino acid looks like a mirror image of the right-handed amino acid, and a right-handed sugar looks like the mirror image of the left-handed sugar. Homochirality is the fact that in living things essentially all amino acids are left-handed, and all sugars in DNA are right-handed. But when such things are synthesized in a laboratory, or produced in experiments simulating the early Earth, you see equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed amino acids and equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed sugars.

But what if life had arose on Mars long ago? Such life might have a type of homochirality the exact opposite of the type we see in earthly life. For Mars life it might be that all proteins used right-handed amino acids, and all sugars were left-handed.  Such a theoretical form of life is called "mirror life." Recently articles have pointed out a great danger in trying to create such mirror life through laboratory experiments. If such mirror life escaped a lab, it might act like an unstoppable virus. Theoretically if mirror life were unleashed in the earthly biosphere, it might wipe out all or a large fraction of earthly life. 

So there is a danger in returning samples from Mars that might contain life. Such life might be mirror life. And if such mirror life escaped the lab, it might act like some unstoppable virus. The result might be a pandemic that might make the COVID-19 pandemic look like "a walk in the park" in comparison. 

The possibility I am mentioning is not some weird speculation I dreamed up myself. The possibility of a mirror life pandemic was raised recently in an article published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The article had the title "Black swans from the Red Planet—Could NASA bring back 'mirror life' from Mars?" The subtitle read this:

NASA and the European Space Agency plan to bring samples back from Mars. Could they harbor a type of life that scientists warn could trigger mass extinctions on Earth? 

Later in the article we read this: "With perhaps a 50-50 chance that any Martian life developed from a mirror biology, the return of samples from Mars has transformed from a scientific opportunity to a potential existential risk."

The possibility of a mirror life pandemic after a Mars sample return mission is another reason why such a mission should not be funded. The main reason is the very low likelihood of detecting life or traces of dead life, given that no type of amino acid has ever been detected on Mars. Amino acids are the building components of protein molecules, which (along with protein complexes)  are the building components of the simplest one-celled life. 

A more intelligent approach would be to send to Mars robotic instruments with whatever equipment is sufficient to detect life, if it exists. Or, simply wait until a manned expedition reaches Mars, a mission including a competent biologist with all the tools needed to detect whether life on Mars exists or ever existed. 

Oops, it was deadly "mirror life"

Trying to Explain Human Development, Physicists Offer Only the Emptiest Hand-Waving

 The marvel of human development is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the head of today's scientists. Somehow a speck-sized zygote existing just after impregnation progresses to become something a trillion times more organized: the internally dynamic structure of the human body. Scientists have long told a childish lie to try to explain this wonder so very far beyond their understanding: the tall tale that human bodies grow because there occurs a constant reading of a specification for how to make a human body, one stored in DNA or its genes. Such a specification has been called a blueprint, a recipe or a program. This tall tale is a lie because no such specification for how to make a human body exists in DNA or its genes. Instead of having a blueprint or recipe or program for building a body or any of its organs or any human cell, DNA and its genes merely have very low-level information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 

The very childish nature of the "DNA blueprints build bodies" tall tale may become clear to you once you realize that even if such a blueprint were to exist inside DNA, it would never explain how a human body gets built, for the simple reason that blueprints don't build things. Dump a blueprint for a house and the construction materials at a vacant lot, and that will never cause a house to get built. Things get built with the help of blueprints only when there are intelligent agents around smart enough to read blueprints and get ideas about exactly how to build things. A human body is so enormously organized and has such fantastically intricate biochemistry and internal dynamism that any blueprint for making a human body would be a specification so complex that only a superhuman mind could understand it. There is in the human womb nothing like a mind capable of interpreting and understanding instructions so complex, if they happened to exist in DNA and its genes, where there is no such specification for building a body or any of its organs or cells. 

There is therefore an ocean-sized explanation shortfall in explaining the physical origin of any full human body. Strip them of their lies about what is in DNA and its genes, and our developmental biologists stand empty-handed before us, "with their pants down." To make it look like the explanation shortfall is not so enormous, discussions of morphogenesis sometimes appeal to physics.  The maneuver is futile. Physics does pretty much nothing to explain the origin of a human body. 

In Quanta Magazine in late 2025 there was an example of one of the misleading articles we get when someone is trying to persuade us that physics does much of anything to explain human development. We have an article entitled "Genes Have Harnessed Physics to Help Grow Living Things." 

Early on the writer states this:

"Typically, biologists try to characterize growth, development and other biological processes as the result of chemical cues triggered by genetic instructions. But that picture has often seemed incomplete."

We get no explanation of why "that picture has often seemed incomplete." The reason is that genes do not give any instructions more complex than instructions for how to build a polypeptide sequence (a chain of amino acids) that is the beginning of a protein molecule. But constructing a human body requires many types of higher level organization such as building protein molecules into protein complexes, building protein complexes into organelles, building organelles into cells, building cells into tissues, building tissues into organs, and building organs into organ systems consisting of an organ and many other parts.  Genes cannot explain how such building occurs, because genes have no instructions on how to perform such operations. 

The writer's next sentence starts to tell us the very misleading story of "mechanical forces" that "steer" human development, saying, "Researchers now increasingly appreciate the role of mechanical forces in biology: forces that push and pull tissues in response to their material properties, steering growth and development in ways that genes cannot."  The story is baloney. You cannot explain any of the marvels of the construction of a human body by appealing to blind "mechanical forces" and the claim that such forces are "steering." Constructing a human body is a task almost infinitely harder than the simple task of steering a car.  And blind mechanical forces don't do steering anything like the steering that occurs when a driver with vision and an idea of a desired destination is steering a car. 

There is almost always the same kind of misleading word trickery in discussions of this type. They include the following:

(1) There is the extremely misleading trick of trying to shrink the problem of explaining the arising of a human structure to a mere problem of explaining a shape. Within a human body is the most enormous organization of matter, a degree of organization that dwarfs the level of organization inside an automobile or computer. The problem of morphogenesis or human development is the problem of explaining how so gigantically organized an arrangement of matter arises. Such a problem is more than a billion times greater than a mere problem of explaining a human shape. 

(2) There is the extremely misleading trick of trying to speak as if a mere "sculpting" or "shaping" could explain the origin of a human body, which is just another way of trying to make an explanation problem look a billion times easier than it is. Any action of "sculpting" or "shaping" could merely explain a shape, not an internal structure that is vastly organized.  So it is always misleading to speak as if some kind of "sculpting" or "shaping" action could explain the arising of a human body or any of its cells or organs.

(3) There is extremely misleading personification language in which mindless and blind mechanical forces are described as "steering" or "sculpting" as if such mindless and blind mechanical forces were intentional agents who could see and will.

(4) Here and there there are sprinkled a few references to mechanical forces such as pulling or pushing or stretching. Using "give me an inch and I'll take a mile" tactics, some attempt is made to make such references sound like mechanical forces are helping to explain the origin of a human body, something that is not true in any substantial way. 

The Quanta Magazine article employs all of those misleading tricks. Nothing of any real substance is discussed in explaining how blind mechanical forces can help explain the miracle of the arising of a gigantically organized human body having a special arrangement of parts far more impressive than the special arrangement of parts in an automobile or a jet aircraft. All that we have is the emptiest of hand-waving, combined with a few gossamer threads of speculation, which (even if true) would explain no more than a thousandth of the marvel of the origination of a human body. 

We have in the article scientist Alan Rodrigues engaging in very empty hand-waving by saying this: 

" 'What’s really amazed us is that you might be able to get by with a relatively simple amount of instruction from the genetic and molecular level,' said Rodrigues. 'Because you have additional emergent processes and properties happening at other levels.' ”

No, you can't "get by" with a "relatively simple amount of instruction" from DNA and its genes merely telling low-level chemical things like which amino acids make up a protein. Constructing something as enormously organized as a human body (with so many layers of organization and so many interdependent components) requires a causal reality enormously greater, which cannot be mere "instruction," because instructions don't engineer things. 

See here for more on this issue

In articles such as these in Quanta Magazine, we almost always see photos of smiling, confident-looking scientists, having some "I got this" look on their face. Were such scientists to be photographed with appropriate body language matching the limits of their knowledge, the photos would show them looking like this:

And were such scientists to give quotes matching how little they know, we would read quotes such as this:

I don't understand this stuff. It's all a mystery a thousand miles over my head. How do proteins ever form very complex three-dimensional shapes needed for their function, shapes not specified by DNA or its genes? I don't understand that. Why do proteins constantly form into just-right functional teams of proteins: protein complexes so well-engineered they are often called "molecular machines," complexes that sometimes use literal motors, forming the most astonishingly well-arranged machines? I don't understand that. How do organelles ever form from proteins and protein complexes? I don't understand that. How do cells of such enormous complexity ever form? I don't understand that. How do cells ever find the right positions in human bodies, with the right types of cells ending up in the right type of organs? I don't understand that. How do cells ever reproduce, something as astonishing as one automobile splitting up into two functional automobiles? I don't understand that. How do cells ever form into organs and organ systems as complex as the human cardiovascular system? I don't understand that. I don't understand these things, and neither do any other scientists. 

Very rarely we will get the truth on this matter from scientists, such as in the quotes below:

• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg." 
• "Fundamentally, we have a poor understanding of how any internal organ forms." -- Timothy Saunders, developmental biologist (link).
• "An adult human body is made up of some 30 to 40 trillion cells, all of which stem from a single fertilized egg cell. The process by which the right cells appear to arrive in their right numbers at the right time at the right place -- development -- is only understood in the roughest of outlines." -- Five scientists (link). 
• "Our understanding of how our organs form is still in its infancy" -- A research project abstract written by scientists (link). 
• "Biochemistry cannot provide the spatial information needed to explain morphogenesis...Supracellular morphogenesis is mysterious...Nobody seems to understand the origin of biological and cellular order."  -- Six medical authorities (link).  "
• "Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how these individual actions coordinate over a macroscopic number of cells to grow complex structures with exquisite functionality is unknown." - Five scientists (link). 
• "However, our understanding of the molecular and physical basis of morphogenesis in plants or in any other eukaryotic system [e.g. mammals] is still in its infancy due to the complexity and non-linearity of processes involved in morphogenesis dynamics (or Morphodynamics)." -- A description of a 2017-2021 scientific project, presumably written by scientists (link). 
• "Understanding morphogenesis in vertebrate tissues in development and disease poses one of the most significant challenges in the life sciences. Despite the impressive technical advances aimed at cellular and subcellular characterization and manipulation over the past half century, a clear picture of how form is created still remains in its infancy." -- Four scientists in 2025 (link). 
• "We don't know what dark matter is, we don't understand how the brain works or consciousness, we don't understand morphogenesis, we don't understand the origin of life." -- Physics PhD Michael Nielsen (link). 
• "You start off as a sperm and an egg, and nine months later [your body has been built], through a magical process of morphogenesis, which we don’t understand." -- Donald Hoffman, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (link). 
• "We take it for granted that we go to bed with two sets of fully functional kidneys and that we wake up with them the next morning but we don't understand the fundamental processes that give rise to this very well choreographed maintenance of an organism's form and function." -- Scientist Sanchéz Alvarado (link). 

Postscript: It seems I am not the only one who realizes the severity of this Missing Specifications Problem.  On this day I read of a long essay  by developmental biologist Michael Levin, entitled "Platonic space: where cognitive and morphological patterns come from (besides genetics and environment)." Levin makes use of Plato's theory of the Eternal Forms (or a theory like it), claiming that physical systems are "pointers to patterns in that Platonic space."  Plato basically said that each man is an instantiation of an eternal Idea of a Man, and each  house is an instantiation of an eternal Idea of a House, and each rock is an instantiation of an eternal Idea of a Rock. Long ago I read every one of Plato's many dialogues, but I cannot recall him ever credibly explaining how such instantiations of transcendent forms could occur for anything that is as complex as a human body.  And we get the same failure in Levin's essay, which has some tangled metaphysics, but does not do anything to explain how cell specifications and protein complex specifications and organelle specifications and organ system specifications could ever have arisen in some "Platonic space" of eternal transcendent forms. In his essay, Levin makes the severe error of claiming that "we, ourselves, are patterns." While the behavior of someone can follow a pattern, you are not a mere pattern or a pointer, but something gigantically more, both physically and mentally. 

The Latest Example of an Expert Group Thinking Stupidly

 I have published a series of 29 short videos on the topic of the errors of experts, which you can view by using the link here.  

My best post on this topic is my post "Disastrous Blunders of the Experts," which you can read here. The post discusses the following examples in which experts produced the most disastrous blunders:

Expert Fiasco #1: The Bay of Pigs Invasion

Expert Fiasco #2: The Vietnam War

Expert Fiasco #3: Eugenics

Expert Fiasco #4: The Housing Bubble of 2005, and Financial Meltdown of 2008

Expert Fiasco #5: Blunders of the Psychiatrists

Expert Fiasco #6: The Iraq War

Expert Fiasco #7: Vioxx

Expert Fiasco #8: The Opioid Overdose Epidemic

Expert Fiasco #9: Nuclear Weapons

The post also discusses quite a few other cases of the most disastrous blunders by experts, including the atomic testing fiasco (in which we were assured by experts that atomic testing was safe, with as many as 500,000 people dying from cancer caused by radiation from such testing), and also the COVID-19 blunders that probably resulted in more than 300,000 unnecessary deaths because of incompetent responses.  It is an open question whether the entire COVID-19 pandemic that killed millions was the result of overconfidence by gene-fiddling biology experts recklessly monkeying with viruses. 

It is not hard to find recent examples of blunders by experts.  One example is all the US military and US foreign policy experts who have unwisely supported providing super-destructive bombs to the State of Israel as it has engaged in an appalling bombing campaign in Gaza, resulting in more than 70,000 civilian deaths, mostly deaths of women and children, with innumerable other women and children being maimed or crippled, and as many as 500,000 put at risk of starvation, homelessness, severe malnutrition or severe lung damage from breathing dust from all the destroyed buildings.  With the help of such a blunder the appalling horrors of the October, 2023 Hamas attack have been dwarfed by a savage slaughter fifty times bloodier. Another example can be found in the recent World Economic Forum meeting. 

The World Economic Forum provides an annual report on global risks. After a meeting in Switzerland two years ago, this expert group  released its 2024 report on global risks.  Early 2024 was a time when the situation in the Middle East seemed like some time bomb that might explode, leading to a new world war, with the situation in Ukraine posing a similar danger. So what did the World Economic Forum list as the biggest current economic risk in early 2024?  The group of experts decided that the biggest global risk over the next two years was: misinformation and disinformation. 

Below is a visual from the 2024 report.  We see "misinformation and disinformation" at the top of the list of 2-year global risks.

Here is the report's description of this "misinformation and disinformation" risk, which fails to make it sound like anything to lose much sleep over:

"Misinformation and disinformation (#1) is a new leader of the top 10 rankings this year. No longer requiring a niche skill set, easy-to-use interfaces to large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models have already enabled an explosion in falsified information and so-called ‘synthetic’ content, from sophisticated voice cloning to counterfeit websites. To combat growing risks, governments are beginning to roll out new and evolving regulations to target both hosts and creators of online disinformation and illegal content. Nascent regulation of generative AI will likely complement these efforts. For example, requirements in China to watermark AI-generated content may help identify false information, including unintentional misinformation through AI hallucinated content. Generally however, the speed and effectiveness of regulation is unlikely to match the pace of development." 

This sounds like nothing much to worry about, compared to threats such as nuclear war, pandemics arising from labs engaging in reckless gene-splicing, and global warming. So what on Earth were these experts thinking when they decided to proclaim "misinformation and disinformation" as the #1 global risk? In early 2024 Eve Ottenberg speculated about a possibility:

"The assorted billionaire geniuses and official intellectual luminaries who gathered in Davos Switzerland January 15-19 proved, for those who doubted, that neither singly nor as a group could these...find their way out of a paper bag. Weighing the world’s fate in their well-manicured fingers, did they seem concerned about the Ukraine War morphing into nuclear catastrophe, or ditto for a wider Middle East war? They did not. Did they tear their beautifully coiffed hair and rend their designer ensembles over the prospect of the earth heating up like a pancake on a griddle due to uncontrolled climate change? A disaster caused by rich countries gobbling up and belching out burnt fossil fuels? Or did they mouth vague platitudes about extreme weather? Yes, bromides were their plat du jour.

The most immediate threat to humanity, according to this assemblage of well-groomed ... (who paid $52,000 apiece to join the World Economic Forum and then $19,000 each for a ticket to the Davos shindig), is misinformation or disinformation – you pick. After all, these bigwigs can take to their pate de foie gras-stocked bunkers if the planet succumbs either to nuclear winter or high temperatures inhospitable to human life. So of course, they regard speech, that is, free speech, as the main threat to their luxurious creature comforts. After all, someone might say something bad about these oligarchs! "

After a meeting in Switzerland in January of this year, this same expert group recently released its 2026 report on global risks.  A long-standing nuclear arms treaty between Russia and the United States has recently expired, raising the threat of a nuclear arms race. Very many are worried about the health, stability and judgment of the frequently-ranting man whose finger is on  the nuclear button of the United States, who has made a long series of outrageous-sounding statements, threats and decisions that have caused many to wonder if he is fit for the grave responsibilities of being US president. 

So what has the World Economic Forum listed as the biggest current global risk?  The group of experts has decided that the biggest global risk over the next two years is: geoeconomic confrontration. 

What are they talking about by using such a term? We get an inkling in one part of the report:

"In highlighting Geoeconomic confrontation, respondents are indicating a deepening and broadening of their concerns: after a year of heightened uncertainty over trade policy there is now a growing recognition of the escalating use of other economic and political instruments, from sanctions and regulations to capital restrictions and weaponization of supply chains, as tools of geoeconomic strategy."

Figure 24 of the report has a big font boldface caption of this: Executive perceptions of Geoeconomic confrontation (sanctions, tariffs, investment screening etc.), Later in the report we have this definition of "geoeconomic confrontation." 

"Deployment of economic levers by global or regional powers to reshape economic interactions between nations, restricting goods, knowledge, services or technology with the intent of building self-sufficiency, constraining geopolitical rivals and/or consolidating spheres of influence. Includes, but is not limited to: currency measures; investment controls; sanctions; state aid and subsidies; and trade controls."

What did the group of experts list as the second most worrying global risk over the next two years? It was "misinformation and disinformation." Unbelievably (as shown in Figure 2 on page 8 of the report), the percentage of experts who listed "geoeconomic confrontation" as an economic risk was 18 times greater than the number who cited "biological, chemical or nuclear weapons or hazards" as an economic risk, and 18 times greater than the number who listed "infectious diseases" as a risk, and 9 times greater than the number who listed "critical changes to Earth systems" as a risk. And the number of experts who listed "misinformation and disinformation" as a risk was 7 times greater than the number who listed "biological, chemical or nuclear weapons or hazards" as an economic risk, and 7 times greater than the number who listed "infectious diseases" as a risk.

Once again, prestigious elite experts have acted in a way that makes us suspect that they are blind, bungling and biased, less likely to judge correctly than high-school dropouts.  

Asked to name the biggest global risk in the next two years, experts have stated a worry that only some fat-cat investor or some hopelessly out-of-touch clique member might list as his biggest worry. Our World Economic Forum experts have spoken as if they were vastly more worried about some red tape than about oceans of red blood being spilled. Our group of experts has utterly failed to perceive the severity of the biggest risk facing the world: a risk of nuclear war that helped cause the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to recently set its famous doomsday clock to be only 85 seconds before midnight.  

Experts tend to exist in "echo chambers" where groupthink and herd effects may predominate. Often involving way-too-narrow and way-too-specialized fields of study (sometimes called silos), such echo chambers can be found in the ivory towers of academia or the ideological enclaves that are the Pentagon and the White House. Within such an echo chamber people will tend to hear only people who belong to the same belief community, people who share the same ideology. Existing in such an ideological enclave, absurd or immoral or unwarranted opinions may be voiced, and may be regarded as great wisdom by anyone who looks around and sees other members of the belief community nodding in agreement.