I'd like to invite all of you to write up your visions of what a new
civilization would be like.
You don't have to be able to defend the feasibility of a vision. It is
simply a picture you have of a future world AFTER some significant and
unspecified shifts in a positive direction have taken place. How exactly to
get there is a different discussion.
We don't all have to have the same vision, so there is not a lot of point
in arguing against somebody else's vision. Present your own, and through
the process of sharing our various visions with each other we might find
more common ground on what values we share.
You might of course have many different visions, relating to different
aspects of a future world. You don't have to give it all in one chunk.
So, anything goes, what visions do you have for the future?
Depending on the volume of answers I will either post them here one by one,
or collect them for an occasional posting.
To start off, below is an entry from me.
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I envision a future where most relatively small communities are
self-sufficient in terms of most ongoing needs.
A community of say 100 people would have its own solar power panels or wind
generators, with the capacity to cover typical requirements of the
community.
Hydroponic gardens would be able to supply food for the whole community for
any length of time.
The community has its own water well. And it has a scheme for recycling
water so that it can be used over and over again.
There would be no need for carrying away waste. Organic wastes will be used
as fertilizer. Plastics and other materials would be reconstructed and
re-used.
Mechanical devices would either be very modular so that they could be
updated and maintained easily, or they could be deconstructed and turned
into other devices. Possibly by computer-aided devices that would carve out
mechanical parts from raw materials, based on stored blueprints.
There would be means for home-education. For example by a comprehensive
local CD-ROM library.
There would be communication means that aren't vulnerable to local outages,
such as for example wireless networking.
Each community would network widely with other communities and would also
be tied into networks for sharing resources. I.e. there would be an
electricity grid that each community could feed into when it has a surplus,
or draw from if it has a shortage.
Society would be made of many cells that each can be self-sufficient when
it needs to be, but which can draw advantages from being connected with
other cells that emphasize different products.
- Flemming
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/ \------------------ Flemming A. Funch ------------------/ \
/ * \ World Transformation/New Civilization/Whole Systems / * \
/ * * \ ffunch@newciv.org / * * \
o-------o ---------http://newciv.org/worldtrans/----------o-------o
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