Earlier, I wrote in response to Ed Storms:
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.
. . . All notions of wealth and poverty, and probably the entire notion of economic systems will become meaningless in the distant future.
This may seem utopian or far-fetched, but as I said, it has been the trend for the last 200 years, and I see no reason why it will stop. Nothing will promote this trend more than cold fusion. Needless to say, the idea is not original to me. The best expression of it is in chapter 13 of Clarke's "Profiles of the Future," which ends with this paragraph:
"So we may hope, therefore, that one day our age of roaring factories and bulging warehouses will pass away, as the spinning wheel and the home loom and the butter churn passed before them. And then our descendants, no longer cluttered up with possessions, will remember what many of us have forgotten -- that the only things in the world that really matter are such imponderables as beauty and wisdom, laughter and love."
People who have not read Clarke's book should stop what you are doing and read it. You do not understand the future and the potential of cold fusion unless you have read this book, plus lots and lots of history, since we can only see into the future by looking into the past. You can order the revised Millennium edition from the U.K. which is up to date and covers cold fusion. As mentioned in the Forward, Clarke wrote it with help from <ahem> . . . me. A few gems have been removed from it, alas.
I should copy that above quote into the last chapter of my book, which I may expand a little for the Japanese edition. In a non-intrusive way, I have to explain a little more about what a "woodchuck" and a croquet wicket is, and give a better feel for what it means when I say I think children should hide from their parents and play poker instead of Little League Baseball. That is the challenge of translating: make it feel the same by reading differently.
In this benighted era, I suppose there are good many Americans who would not know a woodchuck if they saw one, and who profess shame -- shame! -- at the notion that kids should learn how to gamble and deal with money, winning and losing. In the Victorian era we expected children to be innocent of sex; now we want them to be innocent of everything else, and unable to cut a watermelon with a kitchen knife, for crying out loud. I saw a 12-year old girl in that predicament a few years ago. When, if ever, do parents expect their children to grow up and learn to deal with knives, money, or anything else?
- Jed
