How do we build a better civilization?

Humanities most important century

To Those That Care, 😊

I often find myself thinking about how we can make a better civilization at the fastest possible rate.

Humans in the year 2100 if everyone read what you’re about to read :)

It’s easy to feel that the current collective human achievement had something to do with us, but really it consisted of every other human rather than us.

Thus, if you really care about making a difference in the world, it’s worth dedicating some of your time to learn about how humans created this modern human civilization in order to gain an understanding enough to propose how the human race should move forward.

As someone who does care about improving the world, I try to spend everyday learning as much as I can. And, I can always do better to learn more because it’s imperative if I want to improve humanity.

But, to be clear, there is never this moment of truly “understanding” human civilization. Human society is nuanced and complex, and all we can do is to continually study it as much as we can to try to see many different perspectives about the way things work.

Now I don’t look to have answers about about how we can improve human civilization today, as I am still mainly focused on learning.

My intention is to more clearly illuminate the future. I think by looking ahead, we can act more thoughtfully today.

And after looking ahead, I’ll give my current thoughts on how we can create the best possible civilization at the fastest rate. I expect my thoughts will change in the years to come as I learn more.

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Outline

1. The Next 100 Years

2. A System to Grow Our Civilization

3. U.S. Government and 21 New Age Development Goals

4. We Can Change The World. Let’s Do It

The Next 100 Years

The next 100 years will be the most important century in human civilization. This is the “make it or break it” time in our species development.

We have the technology and knowledge to build a species that can live thousands of years into the future and venture out into the stars. Or, we could fall ill with our power and destroy ourselves.

There’s a famous line by the late astronomer Carl Sagan who said something along the lines of:

What if there are intelligent species scattered throughout the universe who never made it beyond their own planet because they all developed nuclear weapons and just blew themselves up before they could venture to the stars.

We are approaching an unprecedented time in human history where we get to determine the future of our entire species.

The internet will connect everyone on earth to this global hive mind, which will create a neural net for the planet.

Climate change will undoubtedly be an existential global threat to our planet that will go beyond any nation state. From sea levels rising, to food and water shortages which will lead to mass migration, we are due for our entire planet to change. It will be imperative that our species moves from finite resource based energy consumption (fossil fuels, oil, gas) to sustainable energy consumption (solar, wind, hydroelectric) if we are to maintain the quality of earth.

Technological advancements in biotechnology will allow us to understand the genetics of nearly every disease and develop targeted therapeutics to create cures. Dying of old age will become much more common than dying of disease. How we afford these therapies, and how we maintain investment in these solutions, is actively being worked through.

Computers and artificial intelligence will continue to replace humans in almost every category showing us that their is nothing that a human can do that computers can’t. As general artificial intelligence gets closer, we may reach a singularity event, which is a termed used for blackholes when we can’t predict what comes after. In this case, if we create artificial intelligence slightly better than humans, there is no reason why it can’t upgrade itself and become smarter again. If this cascade of events happens, with artificial intelligence improving itself, we have no way of predicting what comes next — hence, the technological singularity.

Humans will live off earth. We will develop bases on the Moon and Mars and demonstrate that our species is bigger than the pale blue dot that we were given. When humans arrive on Mars, are they simply from one nation, or do those humans represent a whole species making it’s way across the solar system?

Politically, we have two dominant powers, the U.S. and China, which are conducting soft-power plays around the globe and fighting an economic battle to see who will be a leader of the world during this period of unprecedented change. The people within these nation feel less than thrilled with their leaders and more aligned with their fellow citizens which is leading to civil unrest.

All of these forces bring me to my underlying philosophy that we will see some form of a Global Human Government in our lifetime. It seems to be the natural extension of our species if we are to make the great leap forward and move our species out into the stars.

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Outline

1. The Next 100 Years

2. A System to Grow Our Civilization

3. U.S. Government and 21 New Age Development Goals

4. We Can Change The World. Let’s Do It

A System to Grow Our Civilization

I don’t think we are nearly ready for a Global Government. My best guess is that this will actually take form between 2080 and 2100.

As we consider what it takes to form such a massive new entity on a scale that can last thousands of years, I believe we have to shed some outdated principles on how we get there over the next few decades.

It seems our society is wrapped up in democrats vs. republicans, socialism vs. capitalism, the environment vs. big business, those in power and those who are marginalized.

It really will need to be some awesome merger of the two

We push forward concepts to improve humanity within the confines of ideas that are hundreds of years old.

This is a new century — the next 100 years will not look anything like the past 1,000 years.

I believe the future will be focused on how we can solve problems through innovation, policy, aligned incentives and verification of progress.

For example, we can focus on building as many solar panel farms in areas that get the most sun around the world but also don’t disrupt city centers or nature. The energy will be provided to every home within 1,000 miles with excess being built up and stored in a state of the energy storage facility.

World’s largest solar panel farm in California

By identifying an objective that is clearly beneficial to society, a new solar panel that stores and provides energy to thousands, we are then able to address a larger objective of solving climate change and move to a fully sustainable energy source.

We are then able to create policy and subsidies that allow entrepreneurs and builders (engineers, scientists, machinist, etc.) to get funding from the government to solve this problem most effectively. In addition to developing concepts to build the best performing solar panels at scale, resources devoted to educating more people to work in the field and securing the set of raw materials will also be critical.

Everything about the solar panel development would need to be considered.

Problem solving and goal setting should be a new operating system for the next 100 years.

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Outline

1. The Next 100 Years

2. A System to Grow Our Civilization

3. U.S. Government and 21 New Age Development Goals

4. We Can Change The World. Let’s Do It

U.S. Government and 21 New Age Development Goals

For the purpose of thinking about a new way human civilization can operate, I will use the U.S. government as example since it’s the best I know.

The U.S. government’s super power is the U.S. dollar. We are able to create money out of thin air for the things that we think are critical for human kind. One of those things being our over $2B investment into Moderna to support our COVID vaccine development efforts which led to a vaccine that initiated the beginning of the end for the 2020 modern pandemic.

The U.S. government is capable of investing obscene amounts of money compared to the private world, at an incredibly fast pace, into our worlds most innovative organizations and companies, to #GetShitDone.

• Side note: The startup incubator I was apart of in college had #GetShitDone on the back of their T-shirts. This is one of my life’s philosophies.

Now imagine if the U.S. government outlined 21 New Age Development Goals to focus just like we did for vaccine development.

We could create a system that is focused on how we can solve problems through innovation, policy, aligned incentives and verification of progress in the process.

It would be an effort to modernize our society at a scale never seen before in human history. It would take an intersection of thoughtful policy, investors, company creators, engineers, and workers to achieve the mission.

The U.S. government currently holds a strong dollar value position, which allows the U.S. to continue to use their dollar supply to modulate their country.

Through policy a centralized U.S. government can focus on their objectives by:

Deploying capital into some of the top companies, organizations, scientists, academics, and workers in the world to use in the most effective way possible that’s carefully monitored and tracked, to address the 21 New Age Development Goals.

Through U.S. subsidies, grants and initiatives, the New Age public and private sector could solve great things.

Now I took a first pass at writing out a few of what these goals could look like so we could start to get aligned as a nation on what our focuses are.

These are meant to be somewhat flexible, with lots of subset goals. This would need to be modeled after the U.N. sustainable development goals.

21 New Age Development Goals

1. Reform the education system to help address the following 20 goals. The education system is first on purpose. As one of my semester at sea professors once said, “education is the key to solving anything”.

2. Everyone has access to quality food, quality shelter and quality water. We live in age where quality matters. Bad food gives us heart disease, diabetes and mental health issues. We can’t afford to give up quality in this New Age.

3. A fully sustainable energy system that relies on natural occurrences on the planet (sunlight, wind, water movement). The energy system will provide abundant energy for the entire nation at all times. It’s critical this system is designed to run for hundreds of year without effecting the long-term pattern of the planet.

4. Everyone has access to the highest quality healthcare to every citizen that is uniquely personalized to each individual. Every medical decision will be to ensure the longest possible survival of their wished human life. Cost will be not prohibitive. Daily and rapid diagnostics along with investment in literally life-saving therapies, will be critical to ensuring everyone will not die of disease.

5. Everyone has access to high speed internet, that is open and free. A thriving open internet, run by the people is critical. The internet is the true “gut check” on this whole process. By hearing what people are saying online, we are able to have a global conversation on whether we are hitting our 21 New Age Goals.

You get the point.

Once we can clearly identify 21 goals as a nation that are broad and again, will have many sub-categories, we can begin to create the right policies to incentivize everyone to work toward achieving them. The people will need to align on the 21 goals, and constantly be in check in how much resources is allocated to each specific one at a given time. The people can pay attention to the progress, and in a decentralized way, work at their own pace to address the goals.

I would love to live in a society that goes after civilization defining challenges in a truly collective manner that is performing in the most quality way possible for all of it’s citizens.

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Outline

1. The Next 100 Years

2. A System to Grow Our Civilization

3. U.S. Government and 21 New Age Development Goals

4. We Can Change The World. Let’s Do It

We Can Change The World. Let’s Do It

My incredibly idealistic-self gets carried away with musings of a world that works in miracles at scale.

Reality is much more complicated than that.

Now don’t get me wrong, reality has been dramatically alerted before in this country. The American Revolution from the monarchs of Britain which led to the previous creating of a “new world ”. Ending slavery and the civil rights movement which had to convince people that are humans are created equal. Winning World War 2 for the sake of freedom. Lastly, going to the moon and going out into the stars like Sagan said.

We have a history achieving seemingly unthinkable things.

Thus, I don’t want to say that I think this will happen or it won’t happen. All I will say is that the impossible is possible.

And that I wouldn’t mind living in the best possible 21st century future.

If you’re interested in this future, let’s talk.