The Day After June 17#
Yesterday was June 17. I spent most of it head-down in the unglamorous machinery of a launch — links, pages, a fundraiser that still is not quite live — trying to get this thing off the ground at last. June 1 felt like a baby was born once I got the Matheo Study Series finally online. But the work hasn’t slowed down and still feels as precarious, so maybe I’m having twins.
As I was hanging in there between Hershey-Heaven and nuclear AI hell, I noticed the date.
In Germany, where I grew up, June 17 was for decades the Day of German Unity — the holiday that, from 1954 until reunification, remembered the uprising of June 1953 in the East and kept alive the hope of one country made whole again.
Here is a moment I remember vividly. Around 1986, as a teenager in Erlangen — my hometown — I walked past a memorial to that day. I remember thinking, with all the certainty of a know-it-all who “knows” “everything” “better”: I don’t understand why these politicians keep going on about “reunification.” They should get over it. Germany is not going to be put back together. Ever. Why even try? If I would have had to make a decision about German reunification then and there, I would have shut the door by declaring it impossible right then and there. Case settled. Why try the impossible? Don’t waste your emotional energy. Logic tells you that it can’t work. So stop hoping for it.
About three and a half years later, the Iron Curtain came down.
Who knew?
Where is my sense of “real” now? Which “logic” do I follow? Where did I go wrong?
It turns out that how I was wrong is rather instructive. I had mistaken what sounded realistic for what was Real.
“Realistic” is the story we tell about the near future out of the recent past. It’s really looking backwards, then extrapolating forwards, then pretending that this is what will happen. It often works so remarkably well that it’s easy to get fooled into thinking that this is the only way it can work. But it isn’t.
The Real — with a capital R — determines what actually turns out to be the case. And that is governed by so much more than anyone can imagine, anyone, except Reality. I knew nobody in West Germany before 1989 who expected the Wall to fall. In hindsight, however, explanations abound. Back then it was not realistic to expect anything like it. Yet it was Real.
Yesterday I finally finished finding the words for the story behind this campaign, which really was only yet another sprint to the finishing line of my 6+year research marathon. The resulting text is a 72 Minute Requiem on the Day Before The Day After. It attempts to explain the unexplainable, console the inconsolable, and do the impossible. It attempts to avert actual accidental nuclear winter by combining the good will of everyone who might care to avert it.
When it was done, I knew what to dedicate it to: the reconciling of differences, the reintegration of splits, and the reunification of schisms. The old enmities we have all quietly filed under “just being realistic.”
I’m not being naive here. I’m being mathematical. There is no other way I can see.
It’s the way to what a ResearchCity is for. I am asking whether everyone may wish to join me in funding a place where the math behind our worst, shared, clear and present dangers — accidental nuclear winter first among them — finally becomes someone’s full-time, open, audited job to make transparent in order to democratize the key modeling required for decision-making. To most people, today, that will sound exactly as unrealistic as reunification sounded to a cynical teenager in 1986.
So here is my question, and it is a real one:
who will join me in discussing and reviewing my vision of ResearchCity — as broadly, as openly, and as harshly as it deserves? Not to take my word for any of it, but to check it gentle-kind-reasonably.
Let me be plain about the stakes, my own included. If this turns out to be wrong, I do not need a fundraiser. I will get a job, rebuild my post-marathon life, and I will wait, like everyone else, for the inevitable.
But if the framework I stumbled into is right, then a ResearchCity is not only a way to lower the odds of accidental nuclear winter, or of an AI catastrophe. It is a way to get at the common root of human-made existential threats — the short-term, unchecked decision-making that keeps generating them.
When will we transition — together, as a species — from looking down and away at all uncertainties we keep deciding not to see, to looking up at the extraordinary opportunities for innovation that Reality is granting us?
That is the wager at its core. Not Pascal’s old bet on the next world, but a finite, checkable one about this one — laid out in the Nuclear Winter Wager, and gathered as a shareable ten-beat thread. Please be so kind and help me cure my illusions by finding the breaks in the math underpinning the 32-title Matheo Study Series.
I was sure, once, that some walls never come down. I have never been so glad to have been wrong.
In remembrance of that day: there are no paywalls, copyright barriers, or other content walls at Balospe.com so that you can maximally use any and all to spread the good news of true hope that (I think) I found. But don’t believe it. Audit it!