The Valeon Lemma

If the polar ice caps are museums of deep time, then whatever argument we build on their unknown contents must cut both ways. The same ignorance that allows us to imagine a buried, apocalyptic pathogen also allows us to imagine a buried remedy, an enzyme, a molecule, a mechanism that cracks the problem of cancer or the common cold. When what we know is not certain, intellectual honesty doesn’t mean pretending all outcomes are equally likely, but it does mean admitting that the unknown can’t be conscripted to serve only our fears. It must leave room for their opposites too.

This is what I found myself circling around this morning, half awake, half thinking about the slow melt of ancient ice. We like the image of the polar caps as archives: layer upon layer of frozen air, dust, spores, the breath of forests that no longer exist, the ash of fires nobody remembers. And somewhere in that stack of time, our imagination places a sleeping threat, a parasite in perfect stasis, waiting for just the right conditions to reawaken and slip back into a world that has forgotten it. It is an easy story to tell. It feels serious, sober, informed. It wears the costume of scientific caution.

But if we are going to let the unknown carry that story, we have to let it carry its mirror image as well. The same ice that might hold a pathogen could also hold a forgotten good: a protein fold we’ve never seen, a metabolic trick that lets cells repair themselves in ways ours no longer can, a viral mechanism that turns out to be the missing tool in some future therapy. The archive of deep time is not morally aligned. It is not for us or against us. It simply is. Whatever we project onto it says more about the stories we are inclined to tell than about the ice itself.

So here is what I am calling, for my own purposes, the Valeon Lemma: whenever we appeal to genuine uncertainty to justify one emotionally loaded possibility, we are logically obliged to admit its opposite as live as well. If our argument is “we don’t know what’s in there, therefore something terrible might emerge,” then the same ignorance equally supports “we don’t know what’s in there, therefore something astonishingly beneficial might emerge.” Afterward, we can and should weigh which is more likely given what we already understand about evolution, biochemistry, medicine. But we do not get to pretend that uncertainty is a one-way door that only opens into doom.

You can feel how often this asymmetry slips into our thinking. We do it with technology: because we cannot fully predict the behaviour of advanced AI systems, we imagine paperclips and grey goo and automated catastrophe. Some of that is necessary; precaution has its place. But if the argument rests on “we do not yet know,” then honesty also requires us to admit that we might be just as incapable of imagining the upside: new tools for diagnosis, creativity, coordination, understanding, which sit beyond the current edge of our models. We still might judge the risks to outweigh the potential gains, but we should be clear that this is a weighting of probabilities, not a decree handed down by ignorance itself.

We do it with culture, too. “The future is unknown, therefore decadence, therefore collapse” is a familiar refrain. Yet the same future, equally unknown, might hold renewal, synthesis, slow and patient repair. To stress one without at least acknowledging the other is not realism, it is selective storytelling. Fear likes to dress up as wisdom. Pessimism likes to claim a monopoly on seriousness. The Valeon Lemma simply says: if the only tool you are using is “we don’t know yet,” you are not allowed to wield it in just one direction.

This is not an invitation to naïveté. Unknowns are not blank cheques for wishful thinking. Possibility is not the same as probability. The world has more ways to go wrong than to go right, and there are situations where the asymmetry of risk is real and heavy. A one-in-a-thousand catastrophic outcome is not “balanced” by a one-in-a-thousand utopian one if the cost of the former is irreversible. The lemma does not erase that. It simply asks us to be clear about where our arguments come from: evidence, mechanism, careful modelling on one side; atmosphere, mood, narrative preference on the other.

What I find interesting is how this small adjustment changes the texture of contemplation. Thinking about the ice this way, I don’t feel compelled to manufacture hope to counter fear, or to manufacture fear to prove I am paying attention. I just notice that the archive beneath our feet is indifferent and vast, and that my mind is the thing painting monsters or medicines into those frozen rooms. The humility lies in recognising that gap. The grace lies in refusing to let only one kind of story through.

And of course this all folds back inward. Each of us has our own “polar caps”: layers of memory, belief, habit, frozen over by time. When we look into our own unknowns—into the parts of ourselves we have not yet excavated—the same temptation appears. Because we cannot see clearly, we expect only the worst: if I look too closely, I will find something broken, shameful, dangerous. Maybe. But if the only warrant for that expectation is that we do not know, then we must also concede the possibility of the opposite: that beneath old ice there are resources we have not yet drawn on, remedies for patterns we thought were fixed, forgotten capacities waiting on a change of climate.

The polar caps may never yield a miracle cure. They may never unleash a new plague. The deep ocean may remain mostly unseen for as long as we exist. The point is not to bet on either extreme. The point is to remember that the unknown does not belong, by default, to fear. When what we know is not certain, we honour the world—and our own minds—by letting uncertainty point in more than one direction. We can still prepare, still guard against the plausible harms, still take responsibility for the risks we can see. But even as we do, we can leave a small, quiet space for the opposite: for the buried remedy, for the unexpected good, for the possibility that some of what sleeps beneath the ice is not there to end us, but to surprise us.