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A chance to glimpse the traces of an alien intelligence—whatever alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market.

alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market.

At the heart of the history of the Company of Scotland was a group of individuals who never travelled to Darien, who never felt the heat of the Central American jungle or smelled the stench of death in the huts of Caledonia, and as a result have not featured highly in the accounts of historians. These were the men and women who, in very large numbers for the period, became shareholders in the Company and provided the money to fund the venture. They spent the years from 1696 to 1707 on an emotional rollercoaster between ecstacy and despair, waiting expectantly for each crumb of news. An examination of who they were, and why they were willing in such numbers to invest in a joint-stock company in 1696, is of central importance not just to the history of the Company but also to explaining the passage of the Treaty of Union through the Scottish parliament in 1707.

We’ll also adopt a fairly strict pay-for-performance model in which you get paid nothing in your bad years—no cheating, like guaranteed bonuses or repriced stock options allowed—but you receive a very generous bonus, say $10 million, in your good years. At first glance this arrangement seems fair—because you only get paid when you perform. But a second glance reveals that over the long run, the gains that you make for your employer are essentially canceled out by your losses; yet your compensation averages out at a very handsome $5 million per year.

And knowing this, it’s tempting to take the next step of assuming that this future trajectory has in some cosmic sense already been determined, even if it has not yet been revealed to us. But this last step would be a mistake. Until it is actually realized, all we can say about the future stock price is that it has a certain probability of being within a certain range—not because it actually lies somewhere in this range and we’re just not sure where it is, but in the stronger sense that it only exists at all as a range of probabilities. Put another way, there is a difference between being uncertain about the future and the future itself being uncertain. The former is really just a lack of information—something we don’t know—whereas the latter implies that the information is, in principle, unknowable. The former is the orderly universe of Laplace’s demon, where if we just try hard enough, if we’re just smart enough, we can predict the future. The latter is an essentially random world, where the best we can ever hope for is to express our predictions of various outcomes as probabilities.