Open prison theory
An invitation to intellectual humility, scientific curiosity, and collaborative exploration.
I have a theory that this world is an open prison. There are no physical walls other than physical laws and the perception trap. Our best chance is to collaborate with the other inmates to discover and push the limits.
This essay is about one of my core leadership principals using the universal numbers to gain perspective. We will try to use the same numerical scale across this article. It is easy to lose the scale when we throw a G, M, or K at the end of a number.
🤖🚫 Note: No generative AI was used to create this content. This page is only intended for human consumption and is NOT allowed to be used for machine training including but not limited to LLMs.
Time
The universe is believed to be 13,787M years old. The dominant theory about the creation of universe (big bang theory) has some flaws but since it pinpoints the start of time, the question about what was there before is irrelevant.
Our planet is 4,543M years old. Earliest mammals walked the earth 210M years ago and humans have existed in this shape and form about 0.2-0.3M years
Regardless, the average person would be lucky to live 0.000,1M years. A third of that time is spent sleeping and there are physical limitations at the start or end of life to what we can do or even think about.
Our life is a sparkle compared to the age of the universe.
Space
The universe is expanding, but the part we can see is 93016M light years wide. Beyond that, we don't know.
When we look at the sky, we see the past. The closest galaxy to ours is Andromeda which is "just" 2.537M light years away. It is so pale that our eyes can’t see it as it was 2.537M years ago.
What happened to it in that time, we don’t know! It might have been swallowed by a black hole, but we won’t know until the light reaches us.
Our own galaxy is 0.1M light years across. It takes a photon that much time to travel in vacuum from one side to the other if it doesn't hit something. It is not that likely to hit something because the universe is 99.999999999999% empty space!
By the way, 1 light year is 9,461,000,000M meters (5,879,000M miles).
If we go to Mars, we'll be at most 0.000,000,000,004M light years away from the earth.
Even if we leave the solar system one day, we've managed to travel 0.000,001,58M light years from the sun. The galaxy's center is 0.026,67M light years away from us.
The earth
Let's forget the galaxies for a moment and shift focus to the rocky spaceship that carries all of us on a journey into the void.
Water covers 71% of our planet's surface making it unsuitable for us to live. That leaves us with 29% land. 95% of people occupy only 10% of the land.
If the entire 8 billion population of the earth gathered in one point, they could fit in an area 2,378M square meters. The surface area of the planet is 510,100,000M square meters. We cover 0.000,466% of the planet standing shoulder to shoulder!
We live under a thin coat of atmosphere on a fraction of land on a planet mostly covered with water.
The human body is adapted to sea level altitude. The higher we go, the harder it becomes for the body to survive. At 0.000,018,3M above sea level, the blood and other body liquids start to boil at body temperature due to the lack of pressure (Armstrong's line).
We like to build our cities close to water. Life, after all, started in the water!
Unlike land, we have very limited knowledge about the part of the earth that's underwater. As of June 2024, only 26.1% of the global seafloor had been mapped.
Who knows what’s there? There can be alien creatures or geographic phenomenon in the rest that we still don't know in our home planet.
When it comes to depth on land, the maximum we've been able to drill is 0.012262M meters in Kola Superdeep Borehole. That is 0.192% of the way to the center.
Then the money ran out and the technology hit its limits so we sealed it for good back in 2005!
Senses
We have 5 senses. Our eyesight is pretty good in the animal kingdom, but our sense of smell and taste can easily be defeated by many animals.
Even our eyesight has severe limitation to how quickly it can perceive reality or what range of light is visible to us. Lizards and birds can see lights that we don't see --we call them "dark light": infrared, ultraviolet, etc.
The situation isn't much better when it comes to hearing or touch. Much of our understanding about the world around us is limited by those senses: we can't see an atom or a galaxy far away with the naked eye. Before we had the tools to see them, we proudly thought we’re at the center of the universe!
But the real kicker is the brain: the little information we perceive via our senses is heavily processed and filtered by our own brain.
For example, as you're reading this, there might be some noise in the background that you can hear if you pay attention to it, but it was probably filtered until I brought that up! 😅
Fortunately, there's only so much filtering the brain can do because its size is inherently limited to what fits in our skull! I don't know if that's a good thing, especially because only about 2% of our body mass is the brain.
It's safe to say that our processing power is severely limited, and this might be the primary reason we're so scared of unleashing the AI daemon because the silicon brain doesn't have our skull limitation.
The boundaries of knowledge
We know so little about time, space, our planet, and body. Science is a beacon in the dark, but we know so little that it's hard to even raise proper questions about unknown unknowns.
For example, we can ask what's beyond the observable universe, but there are more interesting questions that we cannot ask because either we don't have the context yet, or we're genuinely unable to understand the right answer.
Open Prison theory
We came to this world without an instruction manual. It is scary as shit. The thought of our planet floating in the vastness of the 3D space is scary. All the other aspects I mentioned until here just add to that fear factor. Regardless, we live.
There's been many efforts to define a bigger meaning for life. There's been gods, wars, and stories to kill or die for.
But at the end of the day, there is no instruction manual. The best tools we have is math to explain the universe and physical models to validate the little we do understand.
Psychology is still in its infancy and there's a lot about the brain or body that we don't know. This is partly because we cannot experiment on human body and psyche with the same ease as cutting a meteor open or feed rats with opioid. But the main reason is because millions of years of evolution has created extremely complex and intricate structures for us to fully understand.
If you’ve been to the doctor, you know what I mean! It’s guesswork and they spend decades to reach that level of accuracy. If programmers debugged code with the same accuracy, computers would never grow beyond a weird and expensive hobby for a select few. Yet we have memes like this:
Everywhere we look, there are limitations. The open prison has no walls. It doesn’t need to. We’re eternally trapped by the laws of physics and inside our mind. We can imagine a ship like this that takes us to the edge of the unknown:
And one day we may build it. But more likely, the creatures that build interstellar ships (our descendants) look and behave so differently that calling them human would be an insult —the same way some people take offense when I say we’re merely hairless apes. 🙊
If we weren’t we wouldn’t fight over territory or look down at each other because of small discrepancies in melanin level or that ±10% height difference, eye color, gender, religion, age, birth place, etc. We are more similar than different:
The devil is in the details. We are more similar to the humans that we so passionately hate —the differences are miniscule on the cosmic scale.
Fortunately, we seem to try our best to explore the unknown. If we don't commit collective suicide or get wiped off the planet by "accident" (read known unknowns like meteors or unknown unknowns), one day we may know enough to answer some basic questions like:
Where do I come from?
Where do I go after?
What is my role in this universe?
Don't be mistaken. I'm well aware of people who claim to have universal answers to those questions or those who feel enlightened to have an answer.
Not to belittle either group, we don't know. Otherwise, there wouldn't be multiple religions killing for salvation! If there was a convincing answer that everybody could understand, we would be done and move on to more interesting questions.
And that's my point in this essay. We don't know how much we don't know. What we do know is very humbling. Our entire existence is trapped in time and space. Our reality is limited to 5 clunky senses and heavily filtered by a relatively small brain —no offence! 😄
Yet we roam the earth as we own the place!
Too much focus on money has fucked up the little land and drinkable water we have. And I don't mean the slightest to shrink this post to global warming or the 6th mass extinction, but it goes to show how much of the ape is still left in us despite losing all that hair!
Personal implications
I’ve had this philosophy more than half of my life now. It’s fascinating to go through some of the ways it has shaped my own behavior and in turn, the way I am perceived as a person and professional.
Low-confidence leadership: incompetent leaders don’t have a good measure of skill or talent. Instead they resort to the old fallacy of assuming
confidence = competence. That’s where I fail to get their attention. The appearance of confidence is something I observe a lot in upper level management rooms. That’s because the higher you go, the more you need to be comfortable with the unknown. Unfortunately, there’s a misconception that those who speak confidently and put up a show are comfortable with the unknown. In reality, however, being comfortable with the unknown requires curiosity, investigation, and finding pieces of the puzzle across the organization to build a picture of the reality that’s closer to truth.Curiosity > Ego: I rather ask the “stupid” questions to get closer to truth than swallowing the question and proceed with a stupid assumption. This strategy got me to “trouble” many times because as the English proverb says “Curiosity kills the cat”. Besides, some people look down at someone who doesn’t know what is obvious to them. I put trouble in quotes because it’s actually a good strategy that helps filter out narrow minded people out of your life. Every time my curiosity was perceived as incompetence and a door was shut, another door opened with more opportunities. Curiosity can punish you at one environment, but reward you at another. By sticking to your values, you will deliberately be guided to the right environment where truth is more important than the appearance and ego.
Seeking approval: the people you’re so hardly trying to impress is yet another ordinary person. It happened to me many times where I got a chance to get closer to someone I adore only to realize that they’re clueless and flawed in many ways. Aren’t we all? Once you zoom in to the societal and corporate level, some people have genuinely impressive skills and talent at the micro scale. But at the macro scale, we’re all lost. Instead of seeking approval from outside, we need work on the inside and it starts with being honest with ourselves. Self-censorship is the worst censorship because it limits what you’re capable of discovering or expressing.
Promotion: By far the best way to get promoted is to keep your mouth shut unless you have something smart to say. Coincidentally, by far asking the "stupid questions" and lowering the bar to earn feedback is the best way to grow. If you're in an environment where people are constantly judging each other with no mercy, learn as much as you can and get the hell out. Find a workplace where people are welcome as they are and are measured by the value they create not the ego and prestige they emit.
Emperor’s new clothes: everyone is trapped in their own perception. It takes deliberate effort to capture those perceptions to build a perspective. That perspective is very powerful because it enables making sense of the environment. When I’m sure that something is wrong, I speak up.
That last one is my favorite because it’s expensive, but goes to show the value of truth:
We humans are not really truth seeking animals. We are social animals. Take you back in time ten thousand years and you’re in a small village. If you go along, to get along, you can survive, you can procreate.
If you’re the village truth teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night.
Important truth can be uncomfortable, awkward, exhausting, challenging… it make make people defensive even if that’s not the intent. But any high performing organization… has mechanisms in the culture that supports truth telling.” —Jeff Bazos (on Lex Fridman podcast)
You may get punished for truth seeking or truth telling. You may limit your curiosity to survive, but a better alternative is to find an environment where pursuit and sharing of truth is not frowned upon but is appreciated.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw
Coincidentally, the environments that are more comfortable with the truth, are the ones that make the right bets because they are ever so slightly closer to reality.
Conclusion
This essay is a bit different than what I normally write. I'm laying the ground for my leadership philosophy which is about discovering truth together, empathy, and kindness.
As a social species, there is a way to put our limited senses and small brains together to get closer to reality ever so slightly.
That endeavor is more valuable than any title, prestige, or pay. It’s our only way out of this prison and we’re probably not going to make it. Our ancestors may. Can’t blame prisoners from trying to get out.
The prison itself is open, more like an open zoo. We’re confined by the laws of physics and our own biology and lifetime. Let’s be kind to the other inmates.
If you don’t want to lend a hand, at least be humble. We’re too small, too short lived, and too basic to walk the earth with pride and look down at each other.
In a universe where death is the default, every single life is a miracle worth celebrating.
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I like this direction. It's like leadership from the First first principles. Puts the rat race in perspective. I'll be watching this series with great interest.
Did you mean "descendants" instead of ancestors? Like, our descendants might find the answers in the future? I know it's a small detail, but it confused me while reading the text. Thanks for the insights though. This was a great reality check that reset my mindset for the new year and the challenges I have to tackle.