Oh, the pain of longing to skip steps! At the bottom line, we'll all give it up to Maslow's Hierarchy. According to him, we must meet our human needs in this particular order, with no skipping ahead:
- food, water, shelter, and I think maybe sex is up there too,
- safety, for yourself and those who feel like future-you,
- relationship, intimate or one step further off, e.g. friends & extended family,
- some kind of sense of self, worthiness, self-confidence + self-respect,
- awareness/sense of the Greater Good, the Big Picture, ability/availability to solve Big Problems.
I guess I would call the first couple of Maslow stages the "meat computer" (excellent phrase!) I don't think it's in anybody's power to skip them, even if we long to. How to get beyond that is a whole nother (political) question, of course. I just think we have to start on the ground. So yes, "if everyone had adequate food, clothing, shelter & easy access to any desired health and education resources,...," who knows what might be possible?
mb
On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 5:58 PM, Doug <doug1943@gmail.com> wrote:
dougNot to sound like an old Soviet propaganda film, but the possibilities in front of humanity are unlimited. I think we've got two or three generations of serious unpleasantness to go through, and I worry about the moral disintegration of the US, whose strength has been critical in allowing democracy to flourish, but in the long term, I don't think progress can be stopped. The big task for our generation right now is avoiding a big war, which can be done -- at least an essential component of doing this is -- heeding the slogan 'World Peace through Western Firepower Superiority". But once we've cracked the Fusion Power problem, and have begun to understand how the 'meat computer' inside our skulls works, and have learned how to control the human genome (in future generations) ... it will be a really different world, and a far far better one. What economic arrangements our descendants will make for getting stuff made is anyone's guess -- I doubt that it will look like either capitalism or socialism.Electric trains, yes -- see 'vacuum trains' on WIki: maglevs in near-vacuum tunnels running at 2 or 3 thousand miles an hour... the engineering project of the century.On 5 January 2015 at 21:49, Roy Griffin <rgroygg@gmail.com> wrote:R.Jumping many, many steps ahead in an argument that will never be settled in my lifetime, it seems to me that if everyone had adequate food, clothing, shelter & easy access to any desired health and education resources, humanity could well afford the risk of any "moral hazard" resulting from same. For none of those things do more than provide a platform for *possible* happiness and none guarantee it.New York City incinerates its non-recyclable trash also, using much the same kind of equipment although I don't know what the City does with its ash.Sitting around watching *How It's Made* on the TV & witnessing the wonders of robotic manufacture, it occurs to me that at the level of First World consumer items it should be the case that an hybrid electric automobile could be manufactured that would only cost a few hundred dollars and that could likely last decades...I guess one could argue that there might be even more advanced and superior vehicles that need to be made room for...but why? A 100 years ago it took about half an hour for non-farm workers to get to their jobs. Today, it takes about the same amount of time. But maybe that's all the wrong speculation. How about minimally polluting rail or air travel? Still should be real cheap.And Singapore, a tiny crowded city-state is using the ash from its incinerated trash to expand the size of its territory by building an artificial island offshore that is beautifully landscaped with trees and plants. Likely it will become an upscale housing development, but it seems like a good idea. The trash that gets incinerated represents the 54% or so of Singapore's garbage that is NOT otherwise recycled.
