The Uncertainty of Truth

An excerpt from The Uncertainty of Truth:

We live in a world where uncertainty has been eliminated. The publication of the Doctrine of Certitude meant that uncertainty was officially forbidden for the first time in history. The passage of this law rendered the phrases ‘I don’t know’, ‘I’m not sure’ and even ‘Huh …’ illegal and punishable by life imprisonment. Neoastrophysicists, using chaos theory, have modelled intergalactic maps that predict even the smallest particle of space dust’s coordinates within a half millimeter of its actual location. Cosmometeorologists have derived atmospheric models that predict a planet’s weather patterns with a five-sigma level of confidence. Even in the field of medicine, the uncertainty we once operated under has all but vanished. The latest validation from the Framingham group can predict your death within a month of your passing. And yet the human race cannot help but spit in the face of this certainty.

Let us use Mr Wigan as a case in point. He was given a certified Framingham score of 689.27. Simply put, Mr Wigan’s death had been verified with 99.99999% accuracy to occur at the age of 68 years from the restrictive lung disease known as astropneumoconiosis (or as the miners on Gamma colony jovially call it ‘kettle lung’). His predicted lifespan was actually 5 years beyond the average life expectancy of a standard Gamma Colonist (whose main occupation is the mining of the colony’s one natural resource Detroleum). Mr Wigan was aware of this certified, validated destiny and wanted nothing to do with it. As he lay in front of me on our trauma bay’s hover stretcher, Mr Wigan was trying incredibly hard to die 41 years before his scheduled date.

To read on, go to the free full-text online article published by Emergency Medicine Australasia as part of the Dispatches from the FOAM Frontier series.

Spiegel R, Johnston M, Ercleve T, Nickson CP. The uncertainty of truth. Emerg Med Australas. 2015;27:(1)2-4. [pubmed]

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