The Danger of Paper Planes

This is a story, not just about nuclear weapons, but the threat of knowledge itself. The thought experiment stands at the opposite pole to the idea that open and free knowledge is the best security we have against danger and tyranny.

Far away there was a distant civilisation. Peaceful, advanced and spiritually enlightened. They had mastered nature, and cured virtually all the ills of civilisation that we know of today.

There was no hunger, or inequality. People lived in harmony with nature. Governance was not oppressive, and opportunity was available to all.

In this civilisation, that had spread across many planets, they had vastly superior understanding of the mind, of how society worked and of the laws of nature. Their technology was so advanced that all they needed in order to manufacture food, or create machines, was to think hard and write down their thought on what they called "paper".

This paper was free and cheap to manufacture - open source you might say. Children were taught from a young age how to programme this paper. They would write on it and fold it into intricate designs - much like we do with origami today.

The paper would take these instructions and using something we might think of as akin to nanotechnology (though it was certainly more advanced), build computations and ever more advanced machines from the matter around it until the task was completed, the instructions fulfilled.

Many great works were made this way. Works of philosophy and great medical advances. The experience of this work was immensely pleasurable. it was part meditative, part curiosity or scientific enquiry, and the civilisation went through an explosion of progress to the great benefit af all citizens when it was invented.

Even the arts flourished, as there was no longer the need to struggle for resources, and more time could be dedicated to the pursuit of meaning, as short term gratification became a thing that was readily available to all at almost no cost.

One day a child rediscovered an ancient piece of wisdom, and scribbling a wish on a piece of paper, and folding it just so created a paper plane. Throwing this paper plane into the air, emulating the birds that were plentiful on the planet where he lived, the child was overjoyed to see his new creation fly instead of crashing to the ground.

Indeed it soared. It flew over the living room floor and out the window, above the trees and up, up into the sky. Past the clouds it flew, until it reached the border of space, and still it continued.

Moving ever faster and radiating like a commet or star in the night sky, the plane shot into the centre of the nearby star, destroying the known universe and with it the great civilisation that had invented paper planes and the children that play with them.

There are several things certain about this story. that knowledge will progress at a faster and faster rate until such technical ability is potentially available to every individual in our society at the speed of thought. Or something will stop this progress, or the flow of information in some as of yet undetermined way.

That is the power to communicate these ideas will become greater and greater. the internet is only the beginning. As will the power of technology over the physical matter in the universe, as well as biology and other domains.The hard part is not to reach that goal, that looks unstoppable, but rather to think of what might happen along the way to prevent paper planes from destroying the know universe. There may be many good answers to that question, but it does look like the harder question to answer.

Is it simply the case that paper planes do not exist? The evidence seems to indicate that they do. Certainly in the relatively near future the ability to create plagues more virulent than any known in history will be no harder than a child's imagination, some computational power and a bit of cookery.

Or is it that educational and spiritual advances will ensure that every child would not dream of such a thing? What would that mean for children's dreams, or the way society were structured?

Many of the greatest scientists of our time, who worked on the atomic bomb believed in paper planes: