Emergency Brake
You’re on a train halfway through a six hour journey between two cities, surrounded by the usual mix of tourists and business travellers, families with kids.
Suddenly a voice comes on over the public announcement system:
Ladies and gentlemem, this is your chief engineer here. We’ve just received word that a large bridge on our route, about 300 km. from here, has collapsed. We will have to stop the train and await further instructions.
Your fellow passengers sigh in frustration. People start fiddling with phones, updating loved ones on their wrecked schedules.
But you notice something different.
The train doesn’t seem to be…slowing. It’s the darndest thing but it feels like the train is…speeding up?
But that can’t be. There’s a wrecked bridge up ahead, why would you want to sp…
This is your chief engineer, again. Just want to let you know we’re working on applying the slow down procedure as normal, we just seem to be having a little tro…the team is working on this problem, our top priority is to keep all passengers safe.
Now everyone is looking out the window too, trying to gauge the train’s speed. It doesn’t feel like it’s slowing down. It still feels like it’s speeding up. Faces tense, as passengers start to lose confidence in the engineer.
The voices jumping on murmurred calls all around you sound tense now. Your fellow passengers start to make eye-contact one another, recognizing the joint situation you’re now all in.
You look out, and you’re sure. This train is not slowing down. It’s going faster and faster.
“How far did he say this bridge was?” a man in his 30s in a black office overcoat asks.
“300 kilometers,” an older lady in garden overalls answers.
“How fast do you figure we’re going now?” the man says.
You look out the window. It’s hard to say.
“At least 120 kph,” the old woman next to him says confidently. “I watched on that short stretch of highway back there and we were leaving cars behind.”
“At this rate,” a high school student behind you says, “we’re going to hit that bridge in like what, like two or two-and-a-half hours…”
“Less than that if we keep speeding up,” a slight woman behind him says.
A tense silence falls over the carriage. Then you notice it. There, in a discrete box above one of the exits, it is, marked in red.
“Emergency Brake”
Underneath is a small text that reads. “Warning, use only in case of emergency. Braking from high speed may derail train.”
Another announcement.
Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, we’re having some trouble slowing down the train. A mechanical fault appears to have hit the train’s break system and the engine, well, seems not to be responding normally to our controls. We are working on these issues to stop the train ahead of our arrival at that bridge, which is now, well, 250 kilometers ahead.
“They have no idea what they’re doing,” the slight woman behind you says.
“It’s a terrorist attack, the train’s been sabotaged, we’re fucked,” says the man in the overcoat.
“Nonsense, just a technical glitch, they’re working on it, trains are safe,” says the lady in the garden overalls.
Your eyes are still glued on the emergency brake. You’re astonished nobody else has thought to point at it.
As minute piles onto anguished minute, a kind of tacit conspiracy of silence seems to have developed around it.
So you pluck up your courage to speak.
“Excuse me, everyone,” you say, “but I think it’s time we acknowledged that there is something we could do, right now, that would certainly stop the train going over that collapsed bridge. It carries some risks, obviously, but this train does come equipped with an emergency brake specifically for use in a situation like this one.”
“That’s dangerous non-sense,” says the slight woman behind, “it’s far too dangerous to pull an emergency brake when you’re going at this speed, we’ll derail!”
The high school student behind you tut-tuts. “Typical middle class arrogance, thinking you can get out of a scrape like this with an magical solution like an emergency brake. It’s just people like you don’t want to face the hard work of curbing the speed of this train. You want the easy way out. Coward!”
“We are going to be just fine,” the lady in overalls says, “the train company has been running this train safely for years, we’ll be fine.”
The scenery keeps going past the window faster and faster. The train engineer comes back on the speaker and says,
“Folks, train director here, listen we understand you are worried. I’m going to level with you, I’m worried too. The bridge that collapsed ahead of us spanned a 200 meter tall ravine. We’re in an emergency, and this is why the world’s greatest minds have come together to face this problem. Our researchers have developed mechanisms that we believe will reduce the second derivative of the rate at which the train is speeding up by a few percentage points. We’re also working on an experimental Direct Air Capture for speed system, though the underlying technology for that is, admittedly, only theoretical at this point, but we’re confident we can develop it over the next two weeks. We will be billing each of you, or, well, your estates, 3.7 million dollars as we do everything in our power to bring this train all the way down to Net Zero.”
“We’re all going to die,” the high school student intones soberly.
Everyone looks down. Muffled sobs break out on all sides.
Nobody at all is looking at the emergency brake now.
Except you.
What would you do in this situation?
You could try to build consensus, of course.
You could try to reason with every person on the train, try to convince them all that, though risky, pulling the emergency brake was now your least bad option.
But you don’t need to do that.
You can just get up calmly and pull the emergency brake yourself.
Would you?