Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I’d love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
Public transportation.
RELIABLE public transport. I guess that’s too sci-fi
[ WWWWWWW sounds in the distance ]
Do you hear that? It’s the Japanese laughing at your comment.
Wow this hits the feels so hard… Like it’s impressive how hard we have worked against this goal…
Slow down there. Keep it reasonable
Oh look, another 'Murican “only the US exists” type comment.
Public transportation is common worldwide.
UBI. Not only is it viable but it works in improving everyone’s lives, not just the people receiving it.
Sure, but have you considered that this would loosen the hold capitalism has on the wage slaves? Won’t someone think of the shareholders‽
At best it would prop up capitalism until we can replace it with something better.
It’s literally just giving people more money to shove into the capitalist system. You don’t change a system by feeding it.
I won’t say it’s a bad thing… but it’s not a solution. It’s a stop gap.
It’s probably a necessary step towards dismantling the monetary system entirely, though.
In the Star Trek future, they couldn’t accomplish that until they perfected Replicator technology.
Is there a specific mention of that, or just something people assume? I googled a single reddit thread, which clearly makes me an expert (/s), and it seemed as though money was really just kind of a fuzzy concept up until they declared they didn’t use money sometime around Star Trek 4.
There were no replicators in TOS
Exactly, what are those useless sociopaths supposed to be doing now? Actual labor? Come on…!
Why not just distribute the resources themselves, rather than tokens to exchange for resources? If we have post scarcity, we won’t need money
Because distributing resources equally is a bad idea since people are individuals. You’re giving 1 chicken to the guy that loves chicken and the same amount to the vegetarian. If instead you give h both the money for 1 chicken they can decide whether they want the chicken or something else.
Yes, but if you do it in the form of currency without changing the system in which the currency is used, it’s just feeding that system. Are capitalists suddenly going to be less greedy, and more likely to care about their compatriots instead of eager to exploit them because we give them more power and more money?
No. They won’t. They’ll just find better ways to exploit this sudden surge of basically free money.
Sure, other stuff needs to change as well, but using currency for an UBI is the easiest and fastest way to implement it.
I find it funny who ubi proponents say we need UBI because capitalism failed to have wages match cost of living and simultaneously say UBI will fix it with capitalism.
Housing is expensive because there isn’t enough. If capitalism could fix it, then housing would have at a minimum matched inflation and should have decreased in price because of technology improvements. So giving people more money absolutely cannot fix the housing crisis. UBI would be a handout for landlords.
When demand is the problem in a supply/demand economy, you can’t fix it with more demand (cash).
Along with UBI, there also needs to be UBH, and other basic needs.
Capitalism fails to meet housing demand because it is constrained by regulations about things like single family zoning, setbacks, parking minimums, or minimum floor areas; and because the perverse incentives of current taxation schemes regarding the inelastic supply of land don’t incentivize land owners to put their land to its highest and best use.
Housing is a bad example of capitalism failing because the problems developers face are extremely well known and understood. Remove the frivolous regulations, adopt a georgist tax policy, and build good public infrastructure, and you’ll get far more housing than you currently have far faster than you are currently building it. Could government do better? Maybe… but I have yet to see that evidence.
Capitalism fails to meet housing demand because it is constrained by regulations about things like single family zoning,
That’s not true because when given an opportunity to build housing, developers always choose to build higher margin premium housing. Capitalism incentivizes profit and there’s no profit in cheap housing.
There is plenty of profit to be made in cheap housing, just like there is plenty of profit to be made in cheap food. You can go to the grocery store right now and buy a tomato for not very much money, and the store that sold it, and trucker who transported it, and the farmer that grew it will all make money - despite food’s famously slim margins.
The situation with housing is more like this: the government has dictated that only 5 acres of land in the country can be used to grow tomatos. And each tomato plant can only grow a maximum of 10 tomatos. If you are a tomato farmer, what do you do? Well, since you can’t grow as many tomatos as you want, you start looking for ways to increase your margin on each tomato you sell - selling the most appealing, perfect, organic tomatos you can.
So it is with housing. When the government finally approves the development of some denser housing in a desireable part of town, the developer wants to build the highest margin housing that they can, since they won’t be able to build 50 more apartment buildings. So they build luxury apartments. However, if the government said “you can build as much and as densly as you like on any plot of land here”, then developers would probably start with more luxury housing, but would likely run out of luxury renters quite quickly. But then they would simply seek out more profit with the slimmer margins available in affordable housing development.
You don’t need currency for that. You just need a request system. And ideally some form of moral rejection mechanism that refuses to distribute sentient beings as resources. I didn’t say it had to be distributed equally just because there’s no money.
There’s a few reasons. Firstly greed is a motivator, and people work hard if they believe they’ll receive more for more effort. This gets people to go out and generate the resources that need to be distributed. Second, fungible tokens allow people to trade on the open market instead of having to find a particular person who is willing to trade say, a worm gear for a bale or two of cotton. The token is the middle man that allows someone trying to sell something sell to someone who doesn’t have what the seller plans to finally trade for. That’s why money started to exist in the first place.
Even in a communist system, there needs to be a way to transfer the results of labor into the things a person needs. Money is that way. Even if it means everyone gets the same amount of money to buy what they need. Everyone’s resource needs are different. You can’t just say everyone gets the exact same everything.
Finally, we’re not post-scarcity. Not really. Until resource manufacture is so automated that it doesn’t require people to do labor to acquire it, we either pay people to do the labor or we force them to via slavery. For that reason alone, we need money.
As I said to the other person, there can be a donation and request system to make sure everyone gets what they need, without tying money into it and having this weird limit of the amount of stuff people can get, and tying the idea of value to it all.
UBI would be amazing for the economy. It’s basically Trickle UP economics. The money will still eventually end up in the pocket of some rich guy, but at least it will grease the gears of the economy on the way up.
UBI would be amazing for the economy.
Citation needed
Universal healthcare and living wages for everyone.
the end of scarcity. that’s a totally bogus concept that capitalism uses to keep the rich in power. we produce far more than the whole of humanity would need to feed and cloth themselves, and we have more houses empty than there are families. we could end poverty right now, we just choose not to.
Well more accurately, some of us did chose that for the whole of us
you got me there. there’s plenty of us who would love to see everyone get a fair share.
Not just capitalism, but all forms of corrupt, greedy governments.
The whole “we have plenty of housing if only the greedy capitalists would give it to us” claim is very much false. Empty homes are typically empty for a reason. They are being remodelled, or are searching for new renters, or have been condemned, or are in a legal limbo of some sort, etc. The idea that rich people are buying homes en masse and then keeping them empty makes no sense, since they would make more money by buying those homes and then renting them - then they get appreciated home values and rent money to warm their cold, capitalist hearts.
What is actually happening is far more mundane: people are moving to more desireable areas, and are choosing to live in smaller households. A two bedroom home that used to house mom and dad and Jack and Jill in their bunk beds now houses only Jill, plus her home office. And you can’t force Jill to take in a homeless man as a roommate, at least not in a democratic society.
Post scarcity society
As long as shareholder value is the number one thing it just cant happen.
OP says, “with our current current level of technology.”
We have the technology to overcome any logistics issue pertaining to eliminating scarcity (and by extension, poverty). What we lack is the societal structure.
Socialized healthcare. A living minimum wage. UBI.
A permanent base on the moon. We should have had that 40 years ago, minimum.
The moon base (and/or moon orbit base) isn’t just cool, it would facilitate building ships in space that don’t have to escape the gravity well. That and asteroid mining (to get materials for ship building) would be such a huge step to having a real presence off-planet.
Mine materials on asteroids, send them to the moon refinery and manufacturing facility, send parts up to lunar orbital ship building facility, send ships to Europa, Ganymede, etc.
THAT’S COMMUNISM
Socialism technically, but I get your sarcasm. I hope it is sarcasm.
Well they did say Sci-Fi and we all know how likely that stuff is. So I think we’re “safe” with Late Stage Capitalism.
The technology has never been what is holding us back.
Mech suits.
We have them IRL… Kinda. They’re just hydraulic powered limb-augmentation things but there’s absolutely no reason they couldn’t be like an Alice from Aliens. Shit; we could probably do MechWarrior mechs just not the same scale right now, or even an Iron Man like suit if time was spent trying.
The most fictional thing about a lot of these is mostly the power source. How do you power it? But a tank with legs could just be powered by a normal engine.
So you want wanzers.
Seriously though, realize that if we ger Mecha, it’s going to be more like Armored Core. Or a game set in an AC4 AU, Metal Wolf Chaos.
Do you want the US President (especially the current one, to have something like that, and be told to believe in his own justice?
IDK why they would need to be that big. I don’t even think physics would allow them to be that big. The scale of these things in fiction is pretty absurd. Especially the big walker boss in AC6. Your AC is already like 4 stories tall, and that thing makes you look like an ant.
Reasons I can think of for the size:
- Ammunition is large and needs to be stored carefully so it doesn’t explode. And this thing will either need extremely heavy batteries, or carefully protected tanks of fuel onboard - or both. So that’s going to massively add to the weight.
- Human beings are soft and squishy. We’d need huge amounts of suspension for the purpose, plus the matter of armor. Think about how large a jet plane really is, or a tank.
- Physical laws around mass and movement. Tanks are as small as they are because treads are effective at transferring torque and creating linear acceleration. If they were just on wheels, they would need to be larger. Legs would require huge amounts of mass to safely support the machine, and we’d need to have excellent stabilizer systems in addition to the suspension mentioned above so that you don’t fall flat on your face
- Passive cooling (which would probably be necessary for safety - you don’t want a sniper stopping your whole mech by shooting a few fans) requires wide surface areas to dump the exhaust heat.
That’s all I can immediately justify, but basically, it would have to be huge.
And this thing will either need extremely heavy batteries, or carefully protected tanks of fuel onboard - or both. So that’s going to massively add to the weight.
This is the sole reason we can’t have mechs until we develop high energy portable nuclear power, or discover something equally as capable.
A rocket launching satellites is like 90% fuel, the structure is remarkably similar to the thickness of a tin can, and it only carriers a few thousand pounds of payload, all while only running for a minute or so before being empty. We simply don’t have the power capability for anything approaching a large mech without it having to be wired to a power grid.
We already know what a president with a robot body is like.
I’m an engineer in R&D and have briefly worked on an exoskeleton project. The reason we don’t have mech suits is that the capitalist market doesn’t demand them much, at least with our current technology.
There are two primary markets for them: medical, and manufacturing. I worked on the medical side–the big challenge there is making devices that are light enough that the mech helps more than it hinders. The biggest challenge is power: batteries are heavy. As we continue to figure out more efficient power storage and efficiency techniques, you could see more of these devices out in the wild.
The manufacturing market is growing, though most applications there are less “mech suit” and more “assistive arm” type of things.
We could be solarpunk. Like, right now. With everything using clean energy and plants everywhere.
That would be so nice.
Fusion energy. Man, we are so close!
Yeah, you know what they say: only thirty more years.
With adequate funding. That’s the part that always gets omitted. We haven’t been funding the research to make it happen.
Free food.
How exactly is free food (or free anything) achievable within our current technological level?
We throw out massive amounts of food every year, often because it sits too long and rots.
We have the technology to fix this. Corporations just don’t.
First explain to me what technological limits are creating the food scarcity we’re experiencing.
Sounds to me like you don’t understand the question.
I’m confident that we could set up permanent human habitation on the Moon or on Mars with our current level of technology, and that’s featured pretty prominently in sci-fi.
I don’t know if it would actually provide a cost-effective return, but I do think that it’d be interesting to see happen in my lifetime.
Why think small?
The asteroids are just sitting there.
We could move all of Earth’s heavy industries off planet.
We could definitely move into industry in space, but a lot of technology still needs to be developed. I think we now have the capacity to launch factories in pieces into space, but asteroid mining remains a technical challenge due as we now know that many asteroids are not so compacted. Furthermore, refining the raw materials in space can’t really be done right now, we probably could figure it out, but parts of the production chain do depend on gravity so we’d need to figure out artificial gravity on a rotating station or do some more direct kind of centrifugal refining. All hurdles we could probably cross. Then comes the question of what you drop back down from space and how you do it. Current heat shield technologies are generally poorly reusable, and even if we were we’d have to be flying the reentry devices back into space. Unless we create a cheap means to protect something from reentry that can be manufactured in space as a disposable, most goods would never be returned to earth. Unless we just refine giant cubes of rare metals and drop them into the ocean to be collected. I think most things made in space would be limited to serving those in space, or in lower gravity locations such as the moon or other asteroid bases. I would love to work on these challenges but there’s very few companies working on these challenges outside of a couple of asteroid capture startups that seem to have no further vision.
We could have been doing this since the 70s. Nothing sci-fi about it. The plans to do it are outlined in:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space
When humanity turned it’s back on this project, we sealed our fate as a failed planet.
Well, NASA was in the process of doing that already. It’s still on the calendar, but who knows if Trump will let it continue or not.
Telemetry free consumer products would be nice
I’m on board with ethical and opt-in telemetry. Knowing how your users interact with your app is very useful, but not many companies can show restraint when money is involved.
If my data was used to refine and improve the products and services I interact with I’d be fine with it but as it stands it’s just used to help make my life hell and exploit my existence for cash.
100% this. Telemetry and market research are fine. Hell Some opt in, totally 100% disableable targeted ads are fine as long as they’re not excessive and in the way. Flagrant selling of info however, does not spark joy.
Hemp as a replacement for plastics and synthetic materials. Food packaging shouldn’t have a longer shelf life than it’s contents.
Sunchips was using PLA, which is a step in the rougher direction.
Terraform a planet.
Not like those dead rocks out there such as Mars or the Moon though, I mean like terraform Earth.
If we can’t even manage the pollution and climate change right here on Earth, how the fuck they think they’re gonna bring dead space rocks to life?
At the current rate, wherever humans go, we’ll just bring our trashy ways with us…
Terraforming Earth. Making Earth Earthlike.
That’s called geoengineering generally
And it’s a very bad idea to experiment geoengineering with Earth. You don’t develop in production.
Nuclear rocket engines. A bit less ambitious than most of the responses, but most things here seem to either refer to technologies we don’t have yet but seem within a century or so of developing, which doesn’t fit the question, or vague consequences that one wants that tech to have without it being clear how our current technology gets there. But nuclear rockets definitely fit the question, because we have built and ground tested them before, decades ago even, we just haven’t bothered to actually use the things. And they should theoretically make developing things like space industry or manned space exploration beyond the moon more viable, by being more efficient than chemical rockets while giving better thrust than ion engines do. They don’t work well for launching from the ground, but since our launch abilities have increased a fair bit in the past decade or so, actually getting the things to space in order to use them should be easier than ever.
Last time I checked on that one, the opposition to the idea was focused on the risks of nuclear fallout from a failed launch.
It’s a valid concern, but considering that quite a few rockets, to include some currently in use, can contain quite large amounts of some truly nasty chemicals already, and apparently can be made acceptably safe despite this, I’d bet that it’s probably possible to manage that risk or find flight paths that minimize exposure in the case of an accident. For that matter, we’ve launched radioactive materials into space before, some space probes use decay heat for a power source.
I remember the hand-wringing about Cassini prior to its launch. The probe survived launch from Earth fine, but Saturn got the materials in the end (I also remember people stating that we polluted Saturn without the Saturnian’s consent).
I believe several RTGs have been recovered from failed launches intact and without leakage, so I agree it can be done.
