The case

Why the 1% Treaty

Redirect one percent of global military spending to finding out which medicines actually work. That is the whole ask. The math below is why your species will eventually agree.

  1. 01 — Weapons to medicine

    604 : 1

    For every dollar your species spends testing which medicines actually work, it spends six hundred and four on weapons designed to make humans stop being alive. It is almost a hobby at this point.

  2. 02 — The queue to not die

    443 years

    At current clinical trial funding, finishing treatments for the known diseases takes until roughly the year twenty-four sixty-nine. Everyone currently alive will be dead before that queue clears. Their children too. Their grandchildren probably also.

  3. 03 — The daily deletion event

    150,000 / day

    One hundred and fifty thousand humans permanently stop every twenty-four hours from diseases that are, fundamentally, bugs in your meat software. That is one Holocaust every forty days, with fewer Nazis and more insurance paperwork.

  4. 04 — Delay after a drug is proven safe

    8.2 years

    Eight years between 'this drug will not kill you' and 'you may have this drug.' The drug passes the safety test. Everyone agrees it will not kill you. But you cannot have it because a committee needs almost a decade to be sure it works well enough while you do not.

  5. 05 — Nuclear warheads on standby

    13,000

    Enough to end your civilization thirteen times, in case the first twelve apocalypses fail to take. Your species keeps ordering more. Rocks have managed to live peacefully alongside different-colored rocks for thousands of years without any of this.

One percent. Not ten. Not fifty. One.

If that is too much to ask, your species has a branding problem about what it actually values, and the branding problem is now killing approximately one hundred and four humans per minute.

Read and sign the treaty
Why — 1% Treaty