Dying In the Dark - A Thought Experiment

What Might A "Men in Black" Style Organization Look Like

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about doomsday!

I don’t mean the metaphysical, or eventual end of the world. Instead, I mean, the highly publicized, “this will end the world” kind of events we’ve seen in the past, which surprisingly never happen. Doomsday and World War three claims are common nowadays, and Occam’s Razor suggests that those claims are just clickbait.

Occam’s Razor - look for explanations constructed of the smallest possible set of elements…the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is likely to be the most accurate one.

However, last night on a podcast, Jared Yaw, one of the hosts, commented on the infamous Project Blue Book, Interview with an Alien video that made me stop and think. The supposed interview predicted that we would all die of nuclear war in 2014. As you might have guessed, that was over a year ago, and Jared Yaw mentioned that as well. For some reason, it made me stop and ask these two hypothetical questions:

What If There Was A “Mission Impossible” Style Group That Was Preventing World Ending Threats?

and

What Would That Organization Look Like?

Enter The Thought Experiment

Here is how my thought experiment started: It’s fairly difficult to stop extinction-level threats in the era of smartphones. Also, it would be fairly difficult (if not impossible) to stop a world-ending, act-of-God event (i.e., like the eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera).

An act of God describes an event outside of human control or activity, such as a natural disaster like a flood or an earthquake.

In my mind, that leaves us: human-created, world-ending threats which must be stopped quickly enough that social media doesn’t grab it. Given that limitation, I believe any intelligence firm or community that “dies in the dark” would have to have the following characteristics:

• They have to operate outside of global law with impunity. Wave after wave of international investigation would take too long.

• They have to have a large enough budget to operate anywhere quickly, but not enough to catch analysts’ attention. In my experience, if you are spending too much in a given economy, anomalies start to appear that would draw the attention of very smart people.

• They have to be composed of those who operate outside of moral regulation or constraint. If you are dealing with nuclear threats, bioweapons, and any other criminal activity with a wide damage range, you can’t second-guess yourself.

• They have to be part of a global agreement with all major governments to operate efficiently without obstacles. Connected to the first characteristic.

• They need to be invisible to OSINT and other intelligence tools. Intelligence agencies the world over have access to and invest massive resources into technology that finds people; this group needs to be invisible to all of those.

• They need to be highly intelligent, highly competent, and highly trained.

• They have to move and die anonymously.

After I finished my list, you know what I discovered: The existence of such an organization would be insanely unlikely! Each characteristic alone is an impossible task, much less all of them together. However, as a fun little coincidence, if we ask one more question, the thought experiment gets interesting.

What annecdotal evidence could we find that would show an organization like this might exist?

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