Lactaid and Stevia

A modern reformer walked gaily up to a fence erected across a road. She said, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.”

The fence burst into flames. God called to her from within the fence.

“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

The reformer said, “My feet would hurt and get dirty if I did that, and there might be broken glass or something. Surely footwear wouldn’t be a billion-dollar industry if cushioned soles weren’t a genuinely beneficial innovation.”

God said, “I am the the God of your father, the God of Lindy, the God of Moloch, the God of Pareto Distributions, the God of Survival Functions, the God of Multipolar Traps, the God of Local Minima, the God of Antifragility, and the God of Inner Alignment. And don’t call me Shirley.”

At this, the reformer hid her face, because the fence was now burning brighter than the sun, and she was more concerned about the directly observable aging effects of UV damage than the harder-to-study long-term effects of vitamin D deficiency.

The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my children in modernity. I have heard them crying out because they don’t know whether it’s better to get an epidural for childbirth or tough it out like nature maybe intended, or whether the spirit of the village is better captured by rural areas with their fresh air and tight-knit communities or cities with their walkability and density, or what it is everybody’s getting out of astrology, or which if any nootropics really are a free lunch, or whether graph-based knowledge management systems really are the next printing press, or whether the printing press was even a good idea in the first place all things considered, or whether power posing is worth trying just because it was so memetically powerful even if it didn’t replicate, or whether circumcision is an old enough practice that it can be considered a safe choice even though most cultures don’t do it, or whether the appendix is actually in charge of some function they don’t know about, or whether agriculture has been around long enough for them to feel okay about eating gluten.

“So I have come down to rescue them from the patchwork of band-aid solutions and to bring them up into a good and spacious utopia, a land flowing with objective answers to the questions of which dairylike option and which sweetener are best. Now, go. I am sending you to bring my people into a more enlightened age.”

So the reformer led her people to the land God had promised. And indeed, they found that in the very center stood a young oak, the Tree of the Knowledge of Net Positive and Net Negative, which they could approach with questions and receive definitive answers.

Industry flourished as never before. Nobody ever had to try thirty-day elimination diets again. They paved the streets with computronium. They struck the precisely optimal balance between cultivating urban scenius and retiring to the country for lindywalks. They took all the money that had been allocated for randomized controlled trials and used it to build fusion reactors instead. GDP quadrupled because everybody took Adderall once a week and thrived the rest of the time by incorporating 30% more nonviolent communication into their management styles, rotating among the best-value ergonomic chairs recommended by the tree, and going back to bowling together.

As technology accelerated, the tree had to scale as well to generate up-to-date answers at the same pace. It was propped up by scaffolding, grafting, genetic engineering, and miracle pesticides that made every child who ate them go up a grade level in reading. The reformer recalled the day she had first led her people to the promised land, when the tree barely cleared a two-story house; now it was so high she couldn’t even see the top without getting into her zero-emissions flying car.

One day God called everyone together. “OK, I think you guys are set, actually,” He said. “As a society, you’ve converged on a robust equilibrium – you’re equipped to adapt to technocultural advancement at the same rate you create it. You can basically do whatever you want now and it will be fine. Just use common sense.”

The people high-fived and then went to go dig up all the computronium from the streets. Now that they were no longer tethered to the Tree of the Knowledge of Net Positive and Net Negative, it was time to colonize the stars.

“Does anyone still need this for anything?” the LORD asked, gesturing at the tree.

“Nah, you can have it,” said the people.

“That’s the spirit!” said God, and He cut the tree down and hauled it off.

The precisely optimal amount of time later, a million self-replicating spaceships were bound for a million galaxies, each loaded up with a million disease-free, untraumatized, securely attached human consciousnesses hanging out in fifth jhana on the new twice-as-efficient alternative to silicon while their cryonically frozen corporeal forms waited in cold storage for the ships to land.

The first generation of children born in the first set of galaxies heard stories from their parents about the tree; the fourth generation, whose ships were powered by Dyson spheres, vaguely remembered something about it from their family lore; the seventh generation, who had coordinated all extant alien civilizations into a vast network of acausal trade, told the stories as folktales in which the tree was widely accepted to be kind of a metaphor; the tenth generation, for whom things like storytelling and bodies were kind of metaphors, had a couple of idioms related to “asking” “trees” “questions”, an interesting linguistic quirk whose origin scholars debated.

One afternoon, the reformer’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, a celebrated astronaut, was out cruising with his crew in their souped-up Alcubierre drive when his twelfth sense informed him that he had come to the edge of the universe. Curious, he decelerated and approached the border. Something large and tan came into view.

As they approached, it became clear what was blocking their way: a hypermassive oak fence.

The astronaut said, “I don’t see the use of this…”