If you could change one thing...
While walking the dog together, I asked my daughter what is one thing she would change if she could at the snap of her fingers. This was spurred on by her choosing a "problem solving" lesson at school as an elective for next year, and her wanting to practice some thought processes. So, she chose to get rid of all of the pollution in the world.
Good idea.
While great to be back at square one of course, getting rid of it would be short-lived unless we also change our behaviours, so I asked if she had any ideas about that. Which she did, but they weren't really viable options, or had already proven fruitless - like education. Everyone has learned pollution is bad, yet we are still polluting. As expected from a nine year old without a huge amount of life experience, the references and applications were pretty narrow, but she will get there.
It is about the thought process to find solutions, not the solutions themselves that is important at this stage, and I feel that she rushes through too fast without putting enough energy into the problem. And gives up too fast rather than spending the energy. Which led us into a conversation about how the brain works, how it doesn't really want to think and learn, and how it will often choose what it likes, even if it isn't good for it.
She asked me what I would do, and I said if I could click my fingers and have clean, free energy, that is what I would do. Why? Because with clean free/cheap electricity, building better machines that don't pollute and building new machines that reverse pollution and its effects becomes viable. For instance, desalination is a highly energy intensive process at scale, so with limitless energy it would be possible to desalinate large amounts of sea water and rebuild wetlands and forests in places where they have been destroyed and deserts are forming. Similarly, large air-filters would be possible to build that could capture and treat airborne pollution.
Energy is a massive limiting factor.
And even now, the majority of the energy we use is spent on things that don't really matter much and are often the worst polluters. Designing around energy limitation and cost also holds back design freedoms, so that the outcomes are inferior capabilities. And then, environment aside, human wellbeing is severely hampered due to energy restriction, because it is a huge part of the economy and therefore, war. If there was clean, cheap energy available, the strait of Hormuz could become a tourist destination, because no oil would need go through there. No oil would need go really anywhere.
Clean, free energy and the world as we know it changes drastically.
Everything changes. The entire supply chain for everything is disrupted at the core, dramatically shifting cost of living and the entire economic structure. We would be decoupled from the need for resource extraction for energy and pivot into environmental recovery. the political landscape we know would crumble and the wars fought over resources would cease to exist. And of course, food security would be easily achievable, and there would be massive drive in innovation unhindered by the need to save.
If anyone gets one wish, click your fingers for free, clean energy.
And as a thought experiment, I spent some time thinking if at the micro personal level, what would it be like to have limitless human energy. To be able to focus attention for as long as required without tiring. To be able to move endlessly without needing to slow, or sleep. It would have the potential to almost do whatever you want, because everything takes effort. With endless energy, the need for effort is no longer a limiting human factor. Whether it be a manual task or a thought task, the body nor brain will need to be lazy to save energy.
Of course, we are biological entities and energy is always required and there is no such thing (at least at this point) as limitless energy available for our body to use. We need rest, we need limitation on activity, we need recovery. But, the question could be asked, how effective are we, and how effective could we be?
With free, clean energy, we would have the capacity to start really finding out how much wellbeing a human can endure.
Taraz
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