{"id":5865,"date":"2022-07-31T15:05:32","date_gmt":"2022-07-31T19:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ecooptimism.com\/?p=5865"},"modified":"2022-07-31T15:05:32","modified_gmt":"2022-07-31T19:05:32","slug":"the-somebody-elses-problem-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ecooptimism.com\/?p=5865","title":{"rendered":"The Somebody Else\u2019s Problem Field"},"content":{"rendered":"

Science fiction has a habit of becoming fact. Star Trek\u2019s communicator is perhaps the most renowned example. In a more recent one, Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s The Ministry for the Future<\/em> opens with a devastating, deadly heat wave in India. Another of his books, New York 2140<\/em>, takes place in a NYC flooded by rising sea levels, which is not yet<\/em> an example.<\/p>\n

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The Ministry for the Future is part of a growing genre of fiction
(for now) centered around climate change that\u2019s been dubbed Cli-Fi.<\/p><\/div>\n

Whereas the Star Trek communicator took 32 years (yes, I looked it up) to make a real-world flip phone appearance, Robinson\u2019s India scenario took a mere two years, occurring even in the same location.<\/p>\n

Sometimes science fiction scenarios are more about concepts than inventions or events. In Douglas Adams\u2019 The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em>, the spaceship \u201cBistromath\u201d was mysteriously made invisible by something called The Somebody Else\u2019s Problem field. If you look it up in The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy Wiki (because where else would you look it up?), you\u2019ll find<\/a> \u201cAn S.E.P. can run almost indefinitely \u2026 and is able to do so because it utilises a person’s natural tendency to ignore things they don’t easily accept.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A famous phrase from The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide is \u201cDon\u2019t Panic.\u201d
It could substitute for climate change deniers accusing
\u2018believers\u2019 of being climate alarmists. (And, yes, this is my old beat up copy.)<\/p><\/div>\n

Another fan site<\/a> explains further that the S.E.P. field \u201crelies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.\u201d<\/p>\n

The direct quote in The Hitchhikers Guide, in the expert words of Ford Prefect, says \u201cAn SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

(The Ford Prefect, by the way, was a line of British cars in production until 1961, 17 years before the Hitchhiker radio show was broadcast. So maybe that constitutes a reverse of science fiction foretelling the real world.)<\/p>\n

If you want a real-world application of the S.E.P. field, Wikipedia cites<\/a> a 1976 article on bureaucratic inaction on low-income housing as an example of the principle of somebody else’s problem.<\/p>\n

Climate change deniers have often employed something like this as one of their, perhaps unconscious, excuses. Something that we can\u2019t see because we don\u2019t want to is the equivalent of a child covering their ears and saying \u201cI can\u2019t hear you; I can\u2019t hear you.\u201d<\/p>\n

If they can no longer maintain that it doesn\u2019t exist \u2013 which is pretty difficult to argue in the face of record-breaking heatwaves around the world, record-breaking droughts, deadly floods and wildfires in places that have never had them \u2013 they can still ignore it because it\u2019s something that happens to somebody else (unless they can\u2019t water their expansive lawn in California, in which case it becomes a nuisance) or something that is caused by somebody else. \u201cChina produces more CO2 than the US does so why should we have to reduce ours.\u201d<\/p>\n

It’s not science fiction, but there\u2019s another concept that comes into play here: confirmation bias. Psychology Today defines confirmation bias<\/a> as something that happens \u201c[w]hen people would like a certain idea or concept to be true, [so] they end up believing it to be true.\u201d Trump\u2019s \u201cBig Lie\u201d is, of course, an all-too-current example.<\/p>\n

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Senator James Inhofe using a snowball to confirm his bias<\/p><\/div>\n

The S.E.P. field\u2019s application was in allowing the ship to be invisible. Until very recently, the climate crisis had a built-in S.E.P. field in that its impacts were invisible. You can\u2019t see CO2<\/sub>. Rising sea levels were merely a prediction. A global temperature change of 1o<\/sup> was imperceptible and sounds insignificant. Now, while you still can\u2019t see CO2<\/sub>, its impacts are unavoidably visible. If they haven\u2019t affected deniers directly, they can see it in the news. (Unless, of course, they only watch Fox News, which exists to promote conservative confirmation bias.)<\/p>\n

Now that the impacts are visible, one would think that deniers\u2019 S.E.P. fields would fail, that their cloaking device (to bring this back to Star Trek) had blown an EPS conduit or isolinear circuit or something. But confirmation bias is strong, especially in our severely polarized culture. What will it take to overcome it? How we turn deniers into alarmists? It\u2019s a shame we don\u2019t have Vulcan mindmelds to pull them out of their parallel universe.<\/p>\n

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