Is it Possible to Live Forever with Abundance?
"The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance."
-RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(1803-1882)
Is it possible to live forever with abundance? Living forever means computers and machines will have to do the brunt of the work to increase the average life expectancy in the short and long term. Sustaining extreme life spans will become more complex and resource intensive. Fortunately, we are already creating solutions for our expected radical longevity. Political, literary, and Luddite scenarios stir up fears of future overpopulation, food scarcity, pollution, poverty, along with visions of boring, frail lives, and the rich suppressing the poor. These proposed problems have been described ad nauseam in their imaginary futuristic scenarios. Their synopsis leaves out the history of humanity’s constant improvements, and the recent exponential technological advancement that has already been created, these facts sully their credibility. They envision minimal levels of smart technological paradigms and also leave out the decrease in costs that accompany technological evolution. To the Luddite crowd dematerialization, demonetization, and de-skilling are scary things. Removing the tragic problems brought about by the need for material goods, will be solved through dematerialization, and the need for money will be solved through demonetization, and a hard boring life of repetitious work will be solved through de-skilling. Dematerialization, demonetization, and de-skilling are what we need to live long and prosper happily. Technology is giving us the tools to make dematerialization, demonetization, and de-skilling happen in the emerging future.
The following video is Dr. Diamandis explaining what the world was, what we have already developed, and what small teams all around the world have been working on that is now altering our much improved world, into a world of abundance.
Humanity’s grand challenges are being addressed now, so that old world policies and fears do not play out in the future. One such organization that is addressing these problems today is the Singularity University where each of their 100+ projects are created to improve the lives of a billion people in ten years by implementing exponential technological growth to the grand challenges of humanity. Another organization that attempts to educate and preempt a “machines gone wild” scenario or threats from self-aware artificial general intelligence robots is the Singularity Institute while the Foresight Institute focuses on threats from nanotechnology and cosmic calamities. “Is it possible to live forever?” once answered, leads to even bigger questions.
Living forever will be sustainable in the emerging future when everyone has food, products, and a place to live comfortably. Researchers are creating the new manufacturing technology to make this possible. Atomically precise manufacturing will eventually (2030s) make products of every kind quickly without excessive waste products, created from recycled material, all in the privacy of your own home. This will be one of the main tools that will give people the ability to enter the post scarcity epoch. Dr. Peter Diamandis of the Singularity University has written about the technology that is now being created for all humans to live a life of abundance in the next 10 to 15 years, while Dr. Eric Drexler (the father of nanotechnology) is writing about shifting into a life of radical abundance when everything changes. Even developing countries are already planning to enter the post scarcity era and initially implemented throughout Africa with the help of a project called Matternet (Lifting the Rising Billion) by using smart phones, autonomous aerial vehicles, and distribution centers. Matternet is an autonomous distribution network that flies medicine, tools, and products to and from individuals living without transportation systems (roads, airports, ports) via small autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs). Matternet can also distribute the needs of people that live outside the major infrastructures of roads etc. by sending digital files of household products and pharmaceutical products to local 3D printers and nanofabricators.
