I thought it would be interesting to put the rest of you through the things that I do in my spare time. So from now on, every few weeks, I’m going to post a Thought Experiment. Thought experiments tend to be designed to frustrate the rational mind, running it into assumptions that cannot possibly be correct without breaking free of what is assumed to be true. I use thought experiments a little differently. I ask myself a very broad question with only a few constraints, and then explore its incarnations.

These thought experiements will be intentionally vague with no actual right answer. In fact, your interpretation of what I ask may be very different from someone else’s. You won’t find Schrodinger’s Cat or The Grandfather Paradox here. The point of the exercise is not to be frustrated by a box, but to have the power to define the box, to fully understand and appreciate all of the possible ways to think about the problem, despite it’s various incarnations and fine probabilities, and find a general answer that might be adjusted by context. But it’s not about the answer, of course. It’s about the exploration.

So with that, here’s the first one:

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You are part of a secluded community of 100 people. You have enough food for 50 of them to eat without worry for six months. How do you proceed?

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In case you need some place to start with this first one, consider that it could be post-apocalyptic with zombies, a meteor, a super-volcano, WWIII, the Rapture, the second Civil War, some doomsdayer finally being right about something, etc. It could be that you’re trapped on a mountain top or an island, or you could be living in a bubble on Mars or under the ocean. No such constraints. Just address the concern. Because the conditions could differ so much, odds are small that solutions will cross situations, but it would be great if they did.

Good luck.
-CG