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.   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:
 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 The issue currently is commercial 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 incumbent economic system to enable plentiful, environmentally-friendly power.  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:
  ). 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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