So what have we got to work with? Mankind's fundamental resources are material, energy, intelligence and information. In reality they are all so enormously abundant that it's incredible to think that there are people in this world who are still going without the basic human necessities.
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 them 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, is not impossible.
An important trend in technological progress is the tendency of products and processes to steadily become more efficient while using less material and energy – i.e. doing more with less – something that Buckminster Fuller  termed ephemeralization .
Air, water and the twenty most abundant elements in the Earth's crust provide almost all the material needed to create the multitude of machines and goods that mankind requires: buildings, vehicles, robots, industrial machinery, computers, consumer goods and so on.
Extracting these plentiful elements (and their compounds) to create useful materials in essence 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. The point is that the reserves of raw materials needed to sustain civilisation are not going to run out (the entire Earth's crust is made up of them) – any existing material scarcity actually has little to do with the reserves at our disposal.
There is little dispute that fossil fuel is a limited resource but with regard to energy there are vastly more plentiful and greener energy sources available; and as a feedstock for plastics and many other useful petrochemical derived materials, renewable biomass can replace crude oil if necessary or even organic synthesis . Our current heavy use of fossil fuel is due to convenience and the fact that current economics make the alternatives appear less viable in comparison. However 'economics' distorts the perception of what is possible and simply dictates what is easier when working within the current framework that we have inherited from past centuries.
 Some people may suggest this as the one fundamental resource that really is in short supply...
We just haven't been using it as efficiently as we could be. Currently with activities such as design and engineering we have only relatively small groups of people collaborate in any meaningful way. The development of most things whether they be products, services, utilities or modern agricultural processes tend to be done behind closed doors. This means that compared to what is possible, progress is sporadic and slow. With the involvement of all interested parties and using open and transparent development processes, progress could be far quicker and more efficient. This would also significantly reduce the huge duplication of effort that happens today.
As well as potentially increasing the effectiveness of our current intelligence, total intelligence is growing constantly:
- Worldwide education is becoming more pervasive and of better quality, meaning that a larger percentage of the population can effectively participate in developing solutions.
- The world population is still expanding which increases the pool of intelligence
- The proposed advanced automation will result in freeing a greater percentage of the population to work on solutions to significant problems if they so wish.
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:
- Solar: [1] photovoltaics , solar thermal (such as power tower & [1], ocean thermal energy conversion and solar updraft tower ). Prospective: Space solar power including solar power satellite , ubiquitous PV and stratospheric solar array
- Wind: land-based wind turbine, off-shore wind turbine. Prospective: jet-stream sky windmills
- Ocean: wave, tidal, ocean currents
- Hydro-electric
- Nuclear: nuclear fission. Prospective: nuclear fusion and accelerator-driven thorium-fuelled energy amplifier
- Geothermal: shallow geothermal heat pumps, volcanic related geothermal and 'hot-dry-rock' geothermal . See also Future of Geothermal Power (in the US) published by MIT
- Biomass: vegetable oil, compost methane, fermented crop waste, algae, sustainable wood, and clean burning of organic waste, animal dung and rubbish
 The energy available from solar and geothermal alone far exceed our current and likely future energy requirements and could sustain humanity indefinitely. Also steadily increasing energy efficiency , due to improved system design and increasing cultural awareness should become a significant factor in our energy usage.
The issue currently is 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 by-pass the economics issue to enable plentiful, environmentally-friendly power. On the machine side, intelligence is increasing exponentially and should continue to do so for many years to come (see Moore's law ). 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 techniques which are able to make use of idle processor time between connected units.
The ever increasing sophistication and capability of computers mean that progressively more complex tasks can be automated. There has never been more information freely available than there is now. We are now at a phase of civilisation where information costs almost nothing to reproduce or transmit. It is so abundant and readily available that it is finding useful and accurate information that has become the important thing.
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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