Our Abundant Future
For ages, humans have fought a heroic battle to survive in a harsh, indifferent world. People have undergone unimaginable suffering and maintained hope through it all, always scrabbling to pull together enough food and shelter to survive another winter, another year.
Finally, a few centuries ago, our ancestors started to get some momentum in the eternal battle for human survival. Building on the meager technological advances of the preceding centuries, they learned to harness the magical power of coal, then oil, then atoms. At last, food, shelter, and security became givens for a rapidly increasing part of humanity.
Most people welcomed these increases in abundance, while a few preached about impending doom. At every turn, the prophets of doom were proven wrong. Humanity moved forward and forgot about the few who warned that it wouldn’t work, couldn’t work, shouldn’t work. Ultimately, people were more excited about more energy, more food, and better shelter than they were scared of possible side effects or running out of raw materials.
Humanity made incredible progress in solving all of its eternal fundamental problems at a large scale in one hundred years, between 1850 and 1950. The essential problems of ensuring a stable food supply, high-quality shelter, and general physical safety for the average person were solved in a flurry of scientific and technological progress. We were flying, figuratively and literally. A generation was born into unprecedented plenty: the Baby Boomers. They were perhaps the first generation who grew up in a world with no major practical, everyday problems (not all of this generation, but most of them).
So of course, they promptly went to work finding problems to fill the void. Something meaningful to enliven the sterile, orderly, white-picket-fence existence. They found real problems that marred the almost-perfect American Dream. After the flurry of rapid growth, it /was/ time to step back and evaluate the side effects of all the growth. That emphasis on the environment was needed. We could have had a healthy balance between growth and protecting the environment.
Instead, in the last half-century, the activists, the political entrepreneurs, have completely routed the engineers, the builders, the private sector entrepreneurs. The dreams of the optimistic mid-century technologists are barely alive. The too-cheap-to-meter energy, the flying cars, the supersonic flight, it’s all been banished to the dark corners of the discourse, to self-published books with garish covers.
The clearest example is nuclear power. In the 50’s and 60’s, it was clear to many that we could just build a ton of nuclear power and energy would be too cheap to meter. As late as 1973, President Nixon proposed building 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000 as part of an energy independence initiative. Then, of course, there were the accidents. Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. In response, civilian nuclear energy drastically slowed down over the last forty years.
We may be coming to the end of a unique period when humanity first solved the basic needs of the average person at a large scale, and the void in purpose was filled by a cadre of radical activists. After fifty years, we’re realizing that it’s not working. So the builders are regrouping. They are speaking up and reviving the engines of human progress: space exploration, radical innovation in automobiles, even nuclear power! In a small example of the fringe becoming mainstream, the second edition of Where is My Flying Car? has been published by Stripe Press, now with a slightly better cover. It’s a great book (see the review by Jason Crawford) and now it’s getting the exposure it deserves.
So, the technologists are back. They’re speaking up, they’re getting bolder about putting forth their visions of an abundant, technologically advanced future and bringing renewed energy to building it. It’s about time.