The Next Seven Wonders of the World
Techno-optimists need bold projects to organize around. We need to build and promote the vision of global abundance through massive technological progress. We need new wonders to decisively win the future; stark, awe-inspiring counterpoints to each point pessimists make.
They say humankind is like a cancer on the Earth. We have slashed through jungles, swept magnificent beasts from the plains, and now we’re turning up the heat. Isn’t it time to stop this out-of-control experiment? No. It’s time to decisively move forward and fix the problems we have created and make life better than ever for humans, while taking better care of the Earth than ever. We won’t go back, as loudly as some may scream for it, and we can’t keep muddling along this way, so we need to go forward faster, not slower.
What if we could demonstrate that what tool-equipped humans take away, better-equipped humans can give back, but better? The wooly mammoth is a powerful symbol of a lost world before humanity’s great expansion. What if we brought back woolly mammoths, and helped mitigate climate change as a bonus? This is the purpose of the wildly ambitious Pleistocene Park project in northeastern Siberia. The mechanism is explained in this thrilling essay, but for our purposes here we can say it’s an interesting idea that might not be as far-fetched as it first sounds. Just imagine: a legendary animal, lumbering across the plains again, joining humankind’s grand geoengineering project.
Something like Pleistocene Park could be a beautiful fusion of legendary ancient wildlife and awe-inspiring technology, with quiet electric planes or elevated trains soaring over the surreal landscape of mighty beasts. A place people can visit to viscerally get the idea of bold work towards unimagined abundance. To feel that humanity can break free of the complacency that has sedated much of the rich world in the last few decades.
Of course, there already are ambitious, optimistic builders changing the world. Elon Musk is the obvious icon of technological progress in our time. It’s hard to beat a spaceport called Starbase for unabashed ambition. But we need more. The world should be dotted with symbols of almost unbelievable progress.
Wild stuff. How could we get there? How do we get an abundance of wonders? The natural resources exist. The brilliant people exist. We just need to continue building upon the layers of technology that have already gotten us so far. In the last decade we have seen surprising advances: new digital currencies built by individuals scattered around the world, starting from a crazy, laughably ambitious idea.
We might now need to extend innovation to areas it hasn’t touched much, like governance. We might need innovation in our environments, in the rules we live under, to enable more innovation in regulated areas like medicine and transportation. Balaji Srinivasan has been making a case for the network state:
A network state is a social network with a clear leader, an integrated cryptocurrency, a definite purpose, a sense of national consciousness, and a plan to crowdfund territory. That clear leader is the founding influencer, who organizes the online community that eventually buys land in the physical world.
The network state is a highly novel idea that would still sound pretty unlikely to most people. Srinivasan envisions a proliferation of competing, innovative free states, each focusing on a different area. There could be one focused on life extension, one on prototyping new types of transportation. Perhaps a network state could organize around not only shared values, but a symbolic project like the resurrection of the wooly mammoth or an unprecedented journey into space.
This sounds very lofty, but of course there have been successful new states that became symbols of prosperity and models for the world, like Singapore in the twentieth century.
Despite a rough start, the 21st century can still bring a world of societies competing to outbuild each other on the frontier, not clashing over rents from limited natural resources. Threatening each other with symbolic defeat, not annihilation. Peaceful cooperation and competition, always moving humanity forward towards a better future instead of back to an idealized past.