In the last post, we talked about identifying Scope by locating the smallest possible instance of a resolution. In our tiny example of Brewster, Florida, there were 40 possible instances. As we expand to more cities, the numbers balloon so exponentially that many of the calculators we used to write this post simply couldn’t process the total. We’ll dip a toe into that math today.

If math isn’t your thing, don’t be overwhelmed! We already did all the calculations for you. Just focus on what this teaches us big-picture about understanding a resolution.

Resolved: The United States should invade a country.

• Countries. Let’s say there are 196 counties.

• Methods. There are many implementation options. Let’s vastly oversimplify and say there are 10 ways to invade each country.

• 196 Countries x 10 Methods = 1960 Instances

That’s pretty high, but it’s a number we can wrap our minds around. Let’s go wider.

Resolved: Civil disobedience in a democracy is morally justified.

This is the NSDA novice LD resolution for the first two months of every season.

• Is. The resolution is present-tense, so it’s talking about current democracies. We’ll limit ourselves just to instances from today.

• Democratic citizens. The 2019 Democracy Index says that 49.3% of the global population live in some sort of democracy. That’s 3,845,400,000 people.

• Chances to Disobey: All actual instances of civil disobedience in democracies are instances, but the actual resolution is much larger. It’s looking at all instances when civil disobedience is possible in a democracy. Let’s oversimplify and say every democratic citizen has 25 opportunities to engage in civil disobedience today.

• 3.8 Billion Citizens x 25 Chances = 96.1 Billion Instances

And again, we’re only looking at instances from today.

Resolved: Protection of intellectual property ought to be valued above open source innovation.

This is Paladin League’s current LD resolution.

• Ought to be. There’s room to interpret, but it would be reasonable to include the past - even the distant past - in this example. Let’s only count back to the year 0.

• Population. The global population was about 170 million when we start counting, and it’s 7.8 billion today. We modelled the population from then until now using data from Worldometer, using weighted averages to fill in the gaps. If we add each global population count for each year together, it adds up to 1.13 trillion.

• Companies. Using calculations we won’t get into, we’ll estimate that there are about 200 million companies in the world right now. Assuming that the number of companies scaled with population, we get 29 billion between now and the year 0.

• Governments. Counting governments throughout history is a bit much even for us, so we’ll oversimplify and say that there have always been about 200 national governments, each with about 100 local governments, for a total of 40 million.

• Chances to value. Let’s suppose that each person, company, and government gets just 1 chance per week to value intellectual property over open source innovation.

• 1.13 trillion people x 29 billion companies x 40 million governments x 52 chances to value = 69.5 nonillion Instances

Nonillion means there are 30 zeroes after it. If you had as many human hairs as you did resolution instances, you could lay them side-by-side (not end-to-end) all the way from one edge of the Milky Way galaxy to the other … 5 million times.

NCFCA’s current LD resolution is a bit smaller, but still astronomical.

Stoa’s current LD resolution is much bigger.

Comparing economic growth and stability means almost all economic transactions that have occurred or could have occurred are potential instances. And there’s nothing stopping us from looking into the near future as well. 2020-2021 Stoa LD has more instances than there are atoms in the observed universe.

If the resolution is general, as it usually is in value debate, this is a problem. How do you empirically prove 35 nonillion instances in 6 minutes?

And if you’re facing a specific resolution as negative, the problem is worse. You have to prove the entire resolution false; if you lose by one nonillionth, you lose everything. How do you surmount those odds?

The answer is simpler than you might think. Stay tuned.