The Golf Ball Problem: Why Humanity's Solutions Are Useless by Design
I was trying to figure out how I’d describe humanity to some other life form, one that gets most of our concepts but has never actually met a human. I think I’d tell them this:
Imagine a normal street. On one side, you’ve got a guy who loves to play golf. He spends his free time practicing in his garden, always launching the ball in the same direction, figuring, "If no one’s complaining, what's the deal?"
Now, on the other side of that street lives another guy, and you’ve probably guessed it, he has a serious golf ball problem. At completely random intervals, golf balls just rain down from the sky onto his property.
One day, there’s a knock at his door. It's someone who just got hit by one of the stray balls.
"Yo," the visitor says, "golf balls are literally raining down on your property. Aren't you going to do something about it? One just hit my foot, which was close. Next time, it could be my head. God forbid."
"Oh, thanks for reminding me," replies the resident, the golf-ball-plagued human, as he starts rummaging around for something. "Here it is," he says after a few minutes, walking out to the front of his house.
When the visitor follows, he sees the man proudly mounting a brand-new warning sign: "Warning! High-velocity golf balls crossing!"
Seeing this, the visitor is glad to have helped. "That's much better," he says with a nod. "Have a nice day!" Then he walks off to meet some friends and hit a few rounds himself.
After a hard day's work mounting the sign, the man with the golf ball problem cracks open a beer, heads into his own garden, and starts practicing his swing.
From the Garden to Reality
And just like that, I suddenly understood why an alien race might want to annihilate us. They'd witness something like this, conclude we’re a lost cause anyway, and decide to just end our collective suffering.
Maybe you think that’s an exaggeration, but is it really?
One of my first encounters with this logic was probably when I was under 12, watching a movie with an FSK 12 warning, that’s Germany's version of a PG rating. Then came the graphic warnings on cigarette packs. As a kid, my reaction was just… okay?
So we have violence (movies) and drugs (cigarettes). What’s missing? Correct. Sex.
And this is where I really should have started questioning things. Does anyone, really anyone, believe a single person on this planet has ever honestly clicked "No" when asked if they're over 18?
Don't get me wrong, plenty of us have clicked it, myself included, just to see what would happen. But I’m willing to bet that every single person who intended to watch porn did so anyway.
While there are countless examples of this useless-by-design thinking, one I bumped into recently really highlights the flaw. As I was creating images for this blog, I noticed that pictures generated by AI, at least from Google, come with a sort of digital watermark. I get the intention, I really do, but come on. I’ll just use another AI to remove it. I’d bet my life there’s some law or regulation somewhere that just states, "You have to include a marking," with zero thought for how pointless that is in practice.
The Loophole in Our Logic
That’s the part I just can’t wrap my head around. The same glaringly obvious, self-defeating patterns that people see in my life, I see in all of humanity, and I don't understand it any more than they do.
