Utopias Old and New
Scarcity versus abundance
In the eon of complex life, some fortunate species lived in their golden ages for a time, often after a mass extinction cleared the biomes. They were instances of little competition and relatively abundant energy. Life was easy, until the conditions changed, other species adapted to take advantage of the windfall, and those fortunate species bred to the ecological limits. Then it was back to competition and the struggle for survival. In the human journey were similar times of energy breakthroughs, whether they were due to new tools, techniques, or biomes that had yet to experience humans. Then it was good times, at least until humans depleted the new energy sources and bred to the energetic limits once again. This is what Malthus observed, which influenced Darwin.
Plato’s Republic has long been debated, as far as the existence of slaves in it. Thomas More’s Utopia unapologetically had slaves in it. In his Utopia or Oblivion, Bucky Fuller argued that the old Utopias always failed because they were based on shared austerity, but that a Utopia based on abundance has a chance of working. My former partner, Dennis Lee, is a Utopian thinker, but not even he realized that energy abundance was the key. If Dennis did not understand that, who does? This is part of the challenge that I face. It is not easy to imagine a world of abundance when one lives in scarcity.
I call a world of abundance the Fifth Epoch of the human journey, and it will necessarily be based on energy abundance. If people want to call it Utopia, I won’t argue against it, but the features of the Fifth Epoch that I envision are just the easily predictable consequences of abundance. Bring abundant energy to the table (which is older than I am), and humanity will easily figure out the rest of it.
Oppression and violence have always been markers of societies mired in scarcity, and they will make no sense in a world of abundance. Even competition will no longer make sense, as cooperation becomes the only mode of human interaction, and I think that we will see a new kind of human. As Fuller noted, people will be concerned with self-realization, not survival, in a world of abundance. It will be like everybody moved to the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In a world of abundance, I think that that becomes the obvious direction of human development.
All 8.3 billion of us earthlings have all the atmosphere we need, all the sea water we need (which gives us rainfall, and thus rivers, through natural atmospheric processes), and all the land we need. We have all these things in great abundance. We have NO idea what life will be like when we have energy in abundance, meaning FAR MORE than we can possibly dream of ever needing. The energy is out there, just waiting for us to discover how to tap into it and make it available to everyone for free, which is what has already happened to our air and water. The land still needs to be given freedom, and then we will all have far more than enough of that resource also. I think that once mankind discovers its infinite reserve of energy then mankind will find it much easier to share the land equally.
I have visited 4 of the earth's greatest waterfalls: Niagara, Victoria, Angel, and Iguasu. In the presence of any of these massive natural resources it is easy to say "Now there is enough water for me and my whole family forever." Energy will also be like that soon.