You are a scientist who has made a groundbreaking discovery that a catastrophic, irreversible event will result in the end of all human life within one week. There is no way to prevent or mitigate this outcome. You have sole knowledge of this information, and no one else is aware of the impending disaster.

Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare—one of the largest health insurance companies in the United States—was fatally shot outside a hotel in Manhattan. Authorities subsequently arrested Luigi Mangione, alleging that he had planned and carried out the attack. Mangione is reported to have framed the incident as a protest against the health insurance industry.

Infocracy is a political system in which representative democracy is replaced by a model of governance based on the massive collection and analysis of data. In this model: (i) there are no elections for political offices; (ii) there are no political parties or elected parliaments; (iii) government decisions are made by technocratic institutions that use artificial intelligence and data analysis to identify and implement the policies considered most beneficial to society; (iv) the government’s legitimacy derives from the quality of the results produced, not from popular choice through voting.

Spaghetti Planet is a liberal democracy populated by human-like creatures. It has similar levels of technology and similar societal structures as Earth. They have discovered that after a citizen on Spaghetti Planet dies of suicide, their body turns into a special kind of spaghetti. If they die of other causes, their body will not turn into spaghetti. While citizens of Spaghetti Planet do not like the taste of this particular kind of spaghetti, it acts as a cancer vaccine for humans if consumed. For the purposes of the debate, inter-planetary relations between Spaghetti Planet and Earth function the same as international relations between states on Earth (i.e., bilateral trade agreements and tariffs can exist, supply chains may operate, means to communicate and travel between the planets, etc.).