Our Needs

          Every person on the Earth has certain needs in order to do what it is we do as humans. We must have food to continue living. We must have energy to run the societies we have built upon this planet. We must have logical and beneficial ways to manage our natural resources. We must have the knowledge to put all of these things to use for ourselves and future generations. Not all of the sources of our energy and food are endlessly renewable. When those that are limited and already running out do disappear, what will we do? What can we do to slow down the process and ease into other options. We are slow to do this because there are those that gain some kind of wealth from keeping these systems in place. We have begun to explore the better use of some of these options and in the future we will certainly develop new ways as well.

          Imagine a world where no one need ever go hungry. The fields of biotechnology and better resource management systems may allow us to see that dream realized. Imagine a bountiful production of future foods resulting from robotic agricultural farms in the sea to bacteriological conversion of waste materials into nutritious foods. We may some day be able to produce bountiful nutrition in once unusable regions from the arid to the frozen.

          Of all our needs, one that has come to the forefront is that of energy. The world in which we live requires energy to run. We have developed a society that cannot function without it. The answers to our energy problems could come from many varied places. In fact, one answer may be right under our feet. Through harnessing the heat within the Earth itself, geothermal energy could be available for us throughout the world. Perhaps even the temperature difference within the seas could be harnessed in an improved way. Anywhere we find natural forces in motion we may tap into and retrieve energy. Processes for doing this have been developed with the power within the wind and waves and will most certainly be improved upon in our future. Some of the most exiting ways we may reduce or eliminate our current energy dependencies are in better wind, wave and tide turbines and generators, giant orbital photovoltaic arrays, or biomass gasification systems.

          Our environmental sustainability is paramount to any of the visions you may see in this project. The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment found that 60% of our life-support systems are gone or in danger of collapse. A group of 1,360 experts from 95 countries collaborated and produced a global inventory of the state of the world’s ecosystems. According to what they found, degradation could grow worse within 50 years as another 2.6 billion people are added to our Earth’s population. If we can curb our current behaviors and hopefully reverse some of the damages we have caused to ourselves through our environmental impacts, we could then buy ourselves time. With enough time, we can achieve anything proposed within this project and far beyond. In fact, most of what we show here can be done now given our current technology. It is through the better management of our resources and improved universally beneficial priorities that we can move forward into a better future for all.