Fundamental resources
From AdCiv
 In the past a lack of technology could be considered a significant cause of scarcity but that is certainly not a reason any more. Despite common perceptions, there is no actual lack of material or energy available to us. Emerging methods of co-operation and advanced automation have the potential to unlock these resources to provide a good standard of living in all parts of the world, while causing minimal harm to the natural environment - a combination that although is hard to imagine today and might appear at first glance to be contradictory, is very much possible. An important trend in technological progress is the tendency of products and processes to steadily become more effective while using less material and energy – i.e. doing more with less – something that Buckminster Fuller
Extracting these plentiful elements (and their compounds) to create useful material essentially involves energy (which is also plentiful) and the right processing methods. From a technical point of view there is practically no limit to the volume of material we could extract and make use of, if we so wished, even while minimally disrupting complex and fragile ecosystems. The reserves of raw materials needed to sustain civilisation are simply not going to run out, because the entire Earth's crust The point is that any existing material scarcity actually has little to do with the reserves at our disposal.    ) expected to grow by 70% [1], rivers becoming polluted and one in eight people already without clean drinking water [2], some have warned that we are heading for a 'peak water' crisis with people lacking the necessary water to survive, and wars breaking out over the access to water supplies [3].
A grim picture, indeed. But fortunately, an entirely avoidable one. Water is one of the most abundant resources available to us on this blue planet. The only problem we may face is synthetic scarcity; this article aims to show that there is no real shortage of water, nor of ways to purify and manage it.
 . People are moving from farms into cities at the rate of over a million a week [4], and their appetite for meat is growing[5]. These trends means that food demand is rising, but there are fewer farmers to supply it. It would indeed seem that we are heading for a food crisis.
But this analysis misses a key point: that there are far more efficient ways to produce food than the ones now in wide use. Any food shortage is really a shortage of applying know-how to food production. In the case of soil depletion, for example, while it is true that certain farming methods deplete soil, there are other methods (like permaculture, discussed below) that rapidly and reliably increase the fertility of the soil. As for our growing appetite for meat: the argument is that it requires 16 kilos of grain to produce one kilo of beef, so to preserve food and avoid a food crisis, we must all become vegetarian [6]. This makes the assumption that cows must be fed grain. Cows eat grass. Grass is not edible by humans, so no useful food resources are being wasted, and beef from grass-fed cows has a better nutritional profile than from grain-fed animals[7]. Similar logic applies to other kinds of meat. Abundance of agricultural resourcesThe world currently produces ample food for everyone — over 2700 calories per person per day [8]. Our agricultural productivity has consistently increased at a rate faster than our population, with a 17% increases in calories per person in the past 30 years, despite a 70% increase in population. This planet currently has 31.8 trillion m2, of arable land However, improving food supply has much more to do with increasing the yield of existing farmland than creating new farmland [11]. This is because the system of agriculture makes a huge difference to the amount of land needed; the average Canadian requires over 12,000m2 [12], while permaculture systems regularly produce enough food for a person on less than than 400m2. This means our 31.8 trillion m2 can grow enough food for 79.5 billion people, well over ten times the current world population. To sustain a growing population in a way that is viable in the long-term, what we need is sustainable intensification [13][14][15]. This refers to a method of agriculture that gives higher yields than industrial monoculture, has less impact on the environment, uses less water and requires fewer inputs. Happily, sustainable agricultural practices also tend to be more productive than non-sustainable ones. An analysis of 286 sustainable farming projects in the developing world found that yields doubled for most plants [16]. Sustainable intensification is being implemented all over the world, with a 50% increase in four years [17], and with entire countries like Cuba and Bhutan moving to sustainable systems. Several practises that may lead to sustainable intensification are explored below. Humanity on average consumes 15 terawatts of energy[18]. This is a tiny amount of energy compared to what is available around us: 72 terawatts of available wind energy at ground level[19], 150 terawatts in the jet streams[20], 44.2 terawatts of geothermal energy [21], 2 terawatts of easily-exploitable wave power[22] and 174,000 terawatts of solar energy[23]. We clearly have tens of thousands of times the energy we need, the key is our ability to harness this energy. This article explores existing and emerging technologies for doing this. Steadily increasing energy efficiency The issue currently is monetary economics. The bottom line is that with the current economic framework it is still 'cheaper' to pump oil out of the ground and burn it to produce power than use other more plentiful, renewable and environmentally benign sources. These alternative energy sources are sitting right in front of us waiting to be harnessed. It may be that open-source methods can bypass the incumbent economic system to enable plentiful, environmentally-friendly power. Much future energy generation is likely to become more decentralised. Many buildings, or group of buildings, will likely generate much of their own power on-site by incorporating solar panels into the roof, walls, pavements and even windows [24], as well as having other renewable energy generation devices such as wind turbines and geothermal systems. Although for power requirements beyond that which can be captured locally for more energy intensive activities, there will be very large-scale renewable energy generation sites. For instance electricity to supply the entire United States or Europe could be met with photo-voltaic arrays measuring one hundred miles by one hundred miles [25]. Although this area might sound large, in a major desert, this would be a tiny fraction of the total area - for instance in the Sahara this would be less than a third of 1%. Desertec is multi-national program looking to develop this kind of large-scale solar facility and infrastructure. We have these major sources of energy available to us, in no particular order and not including fossil fuels that we currently rely on for the majority of our energy today:
 We just haven't been using it as efficiently as we could be. Currently with activities such as design and engineering only relatively small groups of people collaborate in any meaningful way. Research and development — whether of scientific projects, products, services, or modern business processes — is usually done behind closed doors and the results carefully hidden. This leads to reduplication of effort and of skilled cognitive work. As a result, progress is much slower than it could be. Problems such as a cure for AIDS concern us all and it is a terrible waste to have multiple groups of scientists working on the problem in isolation from each other, hiding their results so that their company will profit when the solution is found. Open collaboration is a radically different development landscape, one that allows the entire intelligence of humanity to work together on solutions to the challenges that confront our species. Forces working together intelligently will always be more effective than forces working in isolation, so progress can be far quicker and more efficient. In a sense, human intelligence is the most important resource of all. Abundant energy, material and information are useless if we can't figure out how to apply them to improve the lives of our fellow men and women. This wiki is full of technological solutions to human challenges; but technology is nothing other than the result of human intelligence. Intelligence is the ultimate resource, because abundant intelligence can think its way out of problems caused by a shortage of other resources. As well as potentially increasing the effectiveness of our current intelligence, total intelligence is growing constantly:
 ). Not only are the total number of information processing units multiplying rapidly, but the relative computing power of each one is increasing exponentially too.
On top of that algorithms and programming techniques are improving all the time to make more effective use of the hardware, as are distributed computing  One significant aspect is that information can now completely describe the physical structure of man-made items, and can be communicated to automated fabrication machines which can then manufacture the product, reducing the requirement to transport material goods great distances to the end user, as happens generally now. Most of the journey will effectively be spent as information travelling at the speed of light. (See section on turning virtual designs into physical objects). |
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