As for fatal accidents, they’re virtually nonexistent thanks to the League of Peoples. The League, headed by aliens billions of years more advanced than Homo sapiens, regards willful negligence as equivalent to deliberate homicide; and the League never hesitates to punish those responsible. If, for example, a corporate executive approves the design for a vehicle, or a body implant, or a nanopesticide that hasn’t been sufficiently tested for safety — sufficient to satisfy the League, not just human inspectors — the negligent executive will be exterminated the next time he or she enters interstellar space. It doesn’t matter if the product is safe; failing to test it thoroughly shows callous indifference toward the lives of others. Therefore, the League considers the culprit a "dangerous nonsentient creature"… and the League instantly kills any dangerous nonsentients attempting to leave their home star systems. There’s no escape, no appeal, and no sentence but summary execution.

One has to admit it’s an elegant way to keep lesser beings in check. The League doesn’t directly govern humankind or the other alien species at our level of development. The League has no courts, no bureaucracies; it doesn’t tell us what we should or shouldn’t do. It simply kills anyone who isn’t sufficiently considerate of sentient life. The onus falls on us to intuit what the League will accept. We receive no hints or guidelines — we just get killed when we don’t do our best.

Which means every commercial product in the Technocracy is as safe as imperfect humans can make it. Also that human communities are built with the finest possible protections against fires, floods, etc. And that police forces are provided with all the facilities they need in order to apprehend criminals who might otherwise jeopardize innocent victims.

So, like Prince Gotama, people of the Technocracy are shielded from life’s cruel grind-wheel. The only exceptions are the few men and women whose duties take them outside the pleasure palace, to places that haven’t been "sanitized."



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