After reading yet another dismal Foreign Affairs article (“Rogue Superpower: Why This Could Be an Illiberal American Century” by Michael Beckley) about the diminished human future we can expect even after Trump’s departure, I decided to write a pure Blue Sky piece about an alternative future. I won’t claim this is a “progressive” vision: there is no way to disguise the massive amount of human disruption and suffering we have set in motion with overpopulation and climate change, and though there are paths to a better world through the coming fire, it couldn’t be a completely familiar world we would end up in.
And the humans in that world couldn’t be entirely familiar creatures either. In Star Trek, whenever the differences between the humans of the Federation and those of the past became obvious, the writers waved them away with an airy “we evolved”. But that process of “evolution” is never explained. It involved some hard times -- a WWIII , “post atomic horrors”, genetic supermen like Khan running amok — but then in the ST canon some smart people invented warp drive, met the wise Vulcans, and things got better. We don’t seem to be having quite same set of problems in our “timeline” (e.g. no genetically-enhanced Khans yet, just pedestrian oligarchs and demagogues an ancient Greek would recognize), we aren’t likely to invent warp drive in this century (or perhaps ever), and our real interstellar neighbors might all be uncommunicative bacteria. Our path to a post-scarcity future looks less straightforward than the Star Trek path.
Nevertheless a post-scarcity civilization is possible -- even one in which space exploration plays a role. And certain themes dear to the Socialist tradition seem achievable, at least once global population settles down to a sustainable level, which most demographers project for the 22nd century but might happen sooner. While the goal of achieving a global post-scarcity society by the end of the 21st century may be overambitious given current population trends in the least developed regions of the Earth, such a goal should, I believe, be adopted by progressives in the spirit of Breakthrough Starshot: as a deliberately Blue Sky effort, one that might actually take twice as long as projected, but is still worth the attempt — or at very least, worth the discussion.
So here, in no particular order, are some key milestones for Breakthrough Earth.
- Sustainable global population
- Sustainable global production
- Carbon sequestration and drawdown of atmospheric CO2
- Global ecological restoration
- An end to poverty and hunger
- Universal basic income
- Universal access to education at all levels, facilitated by widespread high-speed communication and computation
- Universally accessible Open Science/Library of Earth
- Automation of routine production
- Massive societal investment in scientific, medical and technological research
- Investment in space exploration (in some TBD mix of robotic and human exploration)
- Development of “electronic democracy” i.e. open, accessible, participatory societal decision-making processes and technologies
Some possible goals, which need to be studied and debated
- Moving manufacturing off-planet
- Life extension, “Neural laces”, external wombs, and other “post-human” biotech
- Space colonization
- Extensive mining of solar system bodies
There are of course many technologies that might be developed in coming decades and could potentially have a large impact on life in this century: e.g. lightweight, ultra-strong carbon nanomaterials and other advanced materials such as high temperature superconductors, new electronic and computation technologies, biomaterials derived both from Earth’s biota (parts of which are still poorly known) and from synthetic biology. But predicting which technologies in the R&D pipeline will become economically important is a crystal-ball exercise that I will leave to technology investment gurus.