Is free energy something you might be interested in?
Energy will soon be freely available, as I told the “Shark” and the “Onion” – two Swedish daytraders – yesterday. And when energy is free so will everything else be.
How will we live, educate us, work, invest?
But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning.
Power is all around us
-and we have already begun to capture it
A couple of hour’s worth of sunlight energy falling on the earth is worth about a year of global energy consumption. In short, it’s enough, and it’s basically everywhere.
If we build enough solar cells, some of the energy collected could be used for the construction of an automatic cleaning and maintenance system for the energy infrastructure.
That would give us free electricity.
Read it again if you didn’t understand.
Yes, I’m aware of the challenges in terms of making new kinds of efficient and sustainable, “green” solar cells, as well as making enough of them and designing a fully automated maintenance system. Just give it time.
There will be robots
-a myriad of robots of all sizes, taking care of us and each other
Then use the surplus energy created to power some robots to add more solar cells and build more robots. Voilà, we essentially have created a free labor force of solar powered robots.
Sure, we’ll need better robots, autonomous vehicles, robots being able to build robots, better solar cells etc., but we are getting there.
No matter what the elite wants, it won’t take long until everybody has his own solar cells and robots, or access to a pool of such resources. When? I don’t know, but very probably within half a century.
Once energy and labor are free, so will water (large scale desalination is only a matter of energy input), food (robot-tended vertical farms with artificial light [reverse solar cells]), shelter (as if I need explain how solar powered robots can collect any material and build/3D-print any type of structure according to open source specifications on the internet (10 houses in 24 hours), transportation (vehicles are robots and thus free as shown above; cars, planes, ships and roads will be powered, built, driven and maintained automatically in much the same way as everything else) and communication (the easiest task of all in the scenario of free energy).
There will be no blood
-in the meantime however, artificial blood, made from skin cells, is saving the day starting by the end of this decade
The only urgent challenge remaining will be death, and its cousin, disease.
The good thing is, with everything else free; every intelligent man, woman and child will be free to think, collaborate and barter, in order to develop the technologies necessary to prevent aging and illness.
Scientists are already chipping away at the longevity problem piece by piece. They are increasingly referring to the idea of immortality as an eventually curable disease, rather than an inevitable law of nature.
Craig Venter and Peter Diamandis have, e.g., formed the company Human Longevity, Inc. in March 2014, aiming to use big data on tens of thousands av sequenced genomes to combat cancer and extend healthy human lifespan.
The trick is to live long enough to live forever, helped by the following technologies:
Nanotech robots (this year’s Nobel Prize, in line with Drexler’s and Feynman’s pioneering ideas)
Genetic research (aided by the Crispr-Cas9 would-be Nobel winner, not to mention Craig Venter’s work on synthetic biology/life)
Artificial intelligence (If there were a Nobel prize for computer research: IBM’s and Google’s realizations of machine learning, and Kurzweil’s ideas about hierarchical hidden Markov models. Perhaps in the future, one of the efforts to map the human brain connectome will result in a Nobel prize in physiology or medicine)
Immortality for the rich
-solar powered robots, VR and material riches for the poor
The battle for immortality will most likely be a tough one. And only for the elite for decades to come.
The rest of us will spend our time in luxurious mansions, dining like kings and living it up every day on 3D printed designer drugs with no hangovers, or being super-humans, or as depraved as our darkest desires allow, in the virtual world of our choice. Still slowly dying though; never forget.
The more creative of us could spend our days creating and sharing, both in the material world and in the virtual ones.
How we will share and trade with each other? Perhaps there will be a currency like Bitcoin, perhaps millions of digital currencies. Perhaps digital agents will negotiate ad hoc services barter deals for everything without any kind of currency.
For an early example see how the excellent Real Vision TV production is bartering reruns, ‘encores’, for ad spots at the equally excellent podcast show Macro Voices.
Who knows? The idea here, however, is that your worth and potential for an above average existence will be decided based on your ability to create unique solutions/blueprints that can be traded for other unique services.
If you can’t… Tough luck*, you’ll just have to do with whatever you can produce with the help of free labor, free energy and free open-source templates for material and virtual assets.
* not so tough after all; I imagine the bodily and mental pleasures freely available will be unimaginable to the present day human. A pretty nice upgrade from the Roman strategy of Bread And Circuses, after all.
Deprived, not necessarily depraved
Now, this is not what I intended to write about today
What I meant to discuss was all the things modern society has deprived us* of and how that risk making us weak, allergic, depressed, ill, apathetic, catatonic and miserable. What’s worse is that we have replaced walking with sitting, beans with bacon, natural weather with AC, sunlight with artificial light, bacteria and viruses with sterile environments etc.
Unfortunately it turns out all that comfort we are constantly seeking is an evolutionary mismatch of homeostasis. For example, if the immune system has nothing to do, due to a lack of pathogens in the environment, it sometimes attacks the body instead.
* such as viruses, bacteria, parasites, extreme temperatures, fright, loneliness, walking, sad music (what?!! See pic below) and calm meditation
I didn’t find enough time to deal with the issues of education, work and investments either, although the general direction should be clear from the above discussion: Automation, Robots, AI, Energy
Oh, well, I’ll just have to leave it for another day. Perhaps later this week…
For today, let’s keep with the Everything Is Awesome theme.
Summary
Energy will be essentially free in a few decades
Consequently all other material needs will be satisfied without cost: food, water, shelter, transportation, communication. Every individual will thus finally be able to live independently in material abundance “Every man is an island“).
So, is free energy something you might be interested in?
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