“And?”
“Spring will be spring again, and autumn autumn. It might even be possible to do something about global warming, though that development is still in work.”
“It sounds wonderful,” I said. “Just how is all this going to be accomplished? Or is it accomplished already?”
“It requires money,” he said. “Large, visionary money.” And he explained it to me.
Not then and there; the gym was filling up with grunting, sweating people. We went to the LUNY cafeteria (a nice place, wheelchair-accessible—do you know, by the way, that many federal post offices aren’t?—and full of good, if odd, food—I’ll tell you about it some time) and he drank coffee and I drank some and spilled some, and he laid it all out for me.
Which brings me to that request.
What Inkling needs, and I think deserves to have, is the hell of a lot of development money. In order to make his scheme work, he needs a great deal of cash with which to underwrite the construction of thousands of mechanical butterflies, each equipped with a comm unit—and a network of communications stations with links to the global net of weather satellites. (It develops, as you probably know, that I was wrong about the amount of space required for this; miniaturization has come a long, long way, and what you can write on the head of a pin these days is the Encyclopedia Britannica.)
It’s his feeling that ten thousand mechanical butterflies will be enough, but he admits that the figure may not be quite right. “The problem is susceptible of fairly simple analysis,” as he says, “and it’s just a loose end that will be tied up fairly soon.”
But I don’t think the world should wait even an hour longer than it has to for complete weather prediction and control. I think we should go for it now, and support Inkling’s system. A medium-sized contribution from every reader would do the job nicely—something more accurate than “medium-sized” will get to you in a few days, when I have some final figures from Inkling.
Stan, he really does have something here—and it’s the answer to most of the difficulties chaos theory keeps mentioning, just by the way, at least as far as I understand chaos theory.
(And why can’t he apply for a government grant? Two reasons: first, LUNY never takes any government money, being a little afraid that the government would then step in and alter the place—a stance I think is perfectly reasonable—and second, the government is being very chary about grants of any kind these days, what with the Balancing Budget Side Show, among other things. No, this has to be private money—every contributor to be a shareholder in the eventual company, of course, which may be an added spur to interested readers.)
And what is his scheme? Its simplicity is just staggering.
Somewhere (not in Iceland), a butterfly flaps its wings, upsetting weather patterns all over the globe and making real weather prediction (and therefore control) out of the question; nobody (we assume) can track every butterfly.
But, with the help of spy-satellite technology built into the mechanical butterflies, you can. Assign each mechanical butterfly a fairly small space of that part of the world which has butterflies in it. Key the butterfly to report instantly on the movements of its real-life cousins.
Then duplicate the movements—in reverse—with the mechanicals. When the butterfly goes east, the mechanical goes west; when its wings flap up, the mechanical’s wings flap down.
Just as with some new sound-deadening systems, the reverse motion will cancel out the original motion (we won’t have to fly the mechanicals as low as the originals—the differences in air density, wind and so on can be allowed for, and a capable computer system can vary the duplication as needed).
The result will be a world of simple, predictable weather patterns, entirely free from the butterfly effect. And prediction does mean control here; weather-control, once you’re sure of the weather, isn’t terribly complex to set up.
(I said, by the way, that this notion smoothes out a lot of the difficulties pointed at by chaos theory—and it does. All we need is enough money, for instance, to build Negative Planets [and Negative Asteroids, to be sure], and we can regularize the Solar System perfectly. Other applications will doubtless spring to mind—they certainly keep springing to mine.)
Inkling’s Negative Butterflies look like a giant step forward for humanity—and I think you’ll agree, Stan, that they are a truly LUNY concept.