Edmund Storms wrote:
Unfortunately, free energy would not solve the problem. Free energy
would mean the Middle Eastern countries would be even poorer than
they presently are.
Probably, but that will be their choice, and the outcome will be their fault.
The countries have long since exhausted the environment of useful
minerals, the climate is too dry for extensive agriculture, and most
of the soil is poor thanks to centuries of poor management.
As I pointed out in my book, with cold fusion you can make any
climate as wet as you like, with a massive desalination project. You
can also reverse soil depletion, and for that matter, you can grow
all of your food indoors and not worry about the land (although I
hope people will worry about it, and take care of it). All of these
things can be done, but whether they will be done or not is a matter
of choice or free will.
A country needs to produce something the rest of the world wants.
I do not think that will be as true in the future. I think people
will be more autonomous, particularly in the far distant future when
manufacturing is done entirely with robots and local resources are
intensely recycled using high-energy techniques. However, any country
anywhere can produce something the rest of the world wants. Places
like Japan and Singapore have practically no material resources. If
resources mattered, Japan would be dirt poor and Mexico would be one
of the wealthiest countries in the world.
As I said in the book, and just this week translated into Japanese:
"Many people have a sneaking suspicion that cold fusion must be too
good to be true, because nature never does something for nothing.
They think everything is difficult, and there is always a price to
pay for the bounty of nature. Resources are now and always will be in
short supply, and we must therefore compete with others to get our
share. Such people are mired in a stone-age mentality. The only
resources we lack are knowledge and science. Knowledge is power, and
with it we can unlock the unthinkably vast material and energy
resources of the earth, and ultimately of the entire solar system. . . ."
All notions of wealth and poverty, and probably the entire notion of
economic systems will become meaningless in the distant future. This
is the trend of history already, as I point out in chapter 21. By the
standards of the past, all of us in the first world are fabulously
wealthy and we all have godlike powers.
In some poverty-stricken third world countries in Africa politics,
corruption, war, overpopulation and lack of resources have kept
people in misery against their will. But in the Middle East countries
such as Iran, Iraq and Egypt there is plenty of wealth and education.
These people have, in effect, chosen to make themselves miserable.
Their problem is culture, history and politics, not religion. Muslim
people in India and in the US are as wealthy as anyone else. As a US
Army general said the other day regarding Iraq, they have to choose
whether "they love their children more than they hate their
neighbor." So far, they have chosen hate. But that may change. You
never know what people will do next. We have free will.
- Jed
