by Andrew Fraknoi
From the United Planets Official Wikipedia, last edition before the Catastrophe
When, after years of acrimonious debate, the United Planets Council finally legalized betting on astronomical events, it was natural to exclude professional astronomers from those eligible to place a wager. But many commentators pointed out that astronomers were as likely as the next United Planets citizen to have extended families and close friends. What was to prevent an astronomer, after some productive nights on the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile, from asking a drinking buddy or third cousin to place a bet on the next comet to enter the inner solar system?
Indeed, a number of early payoffs were eventually traced to insider information. Soon, however, astronomical betting became so widespread, that it didn’t much matter. After Asteroid 2045QY2 hit downtown Las Vegas (a random event with which the religious right had a field day), the hobby of astronomy became so popular that astronomical gambling became a major source of revenue for planetary governments around the system.
Early on, astronomers could earn some extra cash by suggesting new phenomena on which bets could be placed. With the solar-system-wide net of repeater stations allowing inexpensive communications between worlds, planetary gambling authorities vied with each other to come up with new games to attract gamblers not only from their own local populations, but from around the system.
At first, bets were placed only on the best-known astronomical phenomena. There were games guessing the direction and arrival time for new comets coming from the Oort Cloud, or the discovery of new asteroids above a certain size that crossed Earth’s orbit. Others involved predicting the Sun’s next coronal mass ejection pointed toward Earth and above a specified energy threshold, new volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io, or new geyser eruptions reaching above a certain height on Neptune’s moon Triton, to name just a few top money-makers.
Soon, however, the solar system was just not big enough to contain humanity’s urge to gamble and gaming authorities turned to the wider Milky Way. Suddenly, schools felt the pressure of teaching astronomy to all children before they were done with high school.
Popular longer-term games involved predicting the explosions of massive stars at the end of their lives and the detonation of white dwarfs in binary star systems. To the initial confusion of the betting public, astronomers called both types of explosions supernovae, yet the odds for the two different kinds of stellar blasts were different. Still, both kinds of supernovae were quite rare in the Galaxy. The wait between explosions could be decades or centuries, meaning that, if a lot of people played, a successful prediction offered the chance for a huge payoff.
Stellar explosions remained elusive even when the inauguration of GART, the Gargantuan Array of Radio Telescopes on the far side of the Moon, made their discovery easier. In earlier years, supernovae had been discovered by the light they produced. Unfortunately, there was enough dust filling the disk of our galaxy that only the nearest explosions could be observed with visible-light telescopes; more remote ones were hidden by that curtain of dust. With radio observations, more distant parts of the Galaxy were opened to our view, but the number of supernovae in the Milky Way during any human lifetime remained annoyingly small.
When the Mars gambling authority decided to expand the betting to include supernovae in other galaxies, and to allow bettors to select one galaxy, a group of galaxies, or even a constellation to wager on, the supernova game suddenly got a lot more popular. Scientists were quick to point out that supernovae were random individual events – given the scale of distances between stars, the explosion of a star in any given galaxy would not lead to the explosion of another elsewhere in that galaxy. Nevertheless, when, within a decade, three supernovae were observed in galaxy NGC 3190, lots of people put bets on that galaxy for a fourth explosion. That’s how government budgets grew and people’s electronic wallets shrank.
Other violent astronomical phenomena that eventually lent themselves to wagering included two kinds of gamma-ray bursters, the fast radio bursters, and ordinary novae (stars whose surface explosions brightened them but didn’t destroy them.) Gravity-wave events were too common to bet on, but there were wagers on the largest masses resulting from intermediate black hole mergers. Ingestion events (and even minor burps) by supermassive black holes – in the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond – were soon added to the list.
When a top government official on the Moon was caught trying to get advance information from the director of the Joint Lunar Observatories (whose son had been quietly caught in a compromising sex TriD by the local authorities), new commissions were set up to isolate gambling servers and rule-makers from political influence.
Humanity’s addiction to astronomical gambling only came to an end when a large rogue planet happened to approach a previously unknown, but rather massive, black hole that had been hiding, with no previous sign of its existence, in our section of the Milky Way’s local spiral arm. Once the material of the planet was disrupted and drawn to circle the black hole, as luck would have it, one of the resulting jets of relativistic-speed particles was pointed directly at our solar system. The accompanying gamma-ray energy, coming at us from the constellation of Canis Major, wiped out most of our colonies on worlds that were not protected by a substantial atmosphere. And it damaged the Earth’s ozone layer and changed the composition of our upper atmosphere. Darkened skies, acid rain, and copious ultra-violet radiation made the life of the survivors on Earth miserable for decades to come. No one had placed a bet on that outcome.
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Bio:
Andrew Fraknoi is a retired astronomer, college instructor, and the lead author for “Astronomy,” the free, online introductory textbook from the nonprofit OpenStax project, which has now been used by more than 1.1 million students. He has also written two children’s books, edited or written a number of books for science teachers, and published seven other science-fiction stories so far. His colleagues have named Asteroid 4859 Asteroid Fraknoi to honor his contributions to the public understanding of science.
Philosophy Note:
Many studies have shown that, in making bets on unlikely events, we humans tend to overestimate our chances of winning, sometimes by huge amounts. Why do people bet? The anticipation of a big win gives us a shot of endorphins in our brain which allows us to associate betting with feelings of pleasure. Psychologists have come to understand the “Gambler’s Fallacy” – a cognitive bias in which we think prior outcomes of an independently determined wager will influence the next outcome. So, if you flip a coin and it comes up tails three times, you convince yourself that it now must come up heads the next time. For some people, gambling can become an addiction, very much like becoming dependent on the pleasure of alcohol or drugs. Many state governments in the US have taken shameful advantage of this addiction to fund services to their citizens, even including such vital things as education, through state-sponsored lotteries. In this story, I tried to imagine a future in which governments – always looking for new sources of funds that have few political costs to elected officials – allow and encourage people to bet on astronomical events.
