Jacque Fresco envisions a global civilization in which science and technology are applied with human and environmental concern to secure, protect, and encourage a more humane world for all people. This book offers a possible way out of our recurring cycles of boom and recession, famine, poverty, a declining environment, and territorial conflicts where peace is merely the interval between wars. It outlines an attainable, humane social design of the near future where human rights are no longer paper proclamations but a way of life. The Best That Money Can’t Buy is a challenge to all people to work toward a society in which all of the world’s resources become the common heritage of all of the earth’s people. It is accompanied by 70 color photos of Fresco’s original designs, which illuminate the fulfilling lifestyle of a global, resource-based economy.
"01" - Outlining A Type One Civilization
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About Me
it's not Utopia. It's merely practical.
Creating a compassionate, rational, scientific Type One Civilization.
"The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet." - Stephen Hawking
"The generation now alive and our grandchildren are the most important generations ever to walk the earth. We are the generations that will determine whether we make the transitions from Type Zero to Type One or we destroy ourselves because of our arrogance and our weapons." - Michio Kaku
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Inspired by another post here on Tumblr, I decided to look into the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong a bit more, it truly was one of the most amazing and terrifying places on earth. Being slightly smaller than an NFL stadium, the structure was built of 350 smaller interconnected buildings and hosted, at it’s peak, a population density of 5 million people per square mile.
To put those numbers in perspective, this would be like taking the entire population of metro Philadelphia, the 4th largest in the US, and putting it in 1 square mile instead of 1,744.
The area was also largely ungoverned and unregulated. Factories, apartments, schools, temples, churches, shops, cafes, hotels and almost anything else one could imagine were housed within the structure that never had a full blueprint of it done. Buildings were built onto buildings, expanded, rebuilt, and re-purposed as needed without a central authority of any kind.
Within the structure, natural light was almost non-existent, and an unknown number of miles of jury-rigged wires provided electricity to everything. Water constantly dripped down to the lower levels from both rain and leaking pipes, while garbage filled every passage. A constant yellow haze filled the structure and there were never any government safety inspections.
The Kowloon Walled City was demolished in the early 1990s as part of the deal that returned Hong Kong to the Chinese from the British. The entire area is now a park.
I find places like this fascinating, it is just incredible what we, humans, build and live in. This, hive, for lack of a better term, was one of the most interesting structures I’ve yet looked at.
For a documentary shot inside of the Kowloon Walled City, check here:
(Source: theastralcity)
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Theology, allegory and culture aren’t humanity?
Nope, only technology is humanity. Like robots.
Robots are humanity, but our visceral attempts to grapple with the existential dissonance of humanity itself are not.
Alright secular humanism, looks like you need a time-out.
(Source: christinsanity)
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READ THE BEST MONEY CAN’T BUY
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"Think about the strangeness of today’s situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism."
- Slavoj Žižek (via ideasandopinions) -
Nanotechnology pushes battery life to eternity
(PhysOrg.com) — A simple tap from your finger may be enough to charge your portable device thanks to a discovery made at RMIT University and Australian National University.
In a crucial step towards the development of self-powering portable electronics, researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne have for the first time characterised the ability of piezoelectric thin films to turn mechanical pressure into electricity. The pioneering result is published in the 21 June Issue of the leading materials science journal, Advanced Functional Materials.
Lead co-author Dr Madhu Bhaskaran said the research combined the potential of piezoelectrics - materials capable of converting pressure into electrical energy - and the cornerstone of microchip manufacturing, thin film technology. “The power of piezoelectrics could be integrated into running shoes to charge mobile phones, enable laptops to be powered through typing or even used to convert blood pressure into a power source for pacemakers - essentially creating an everlasting battery,” she said.
“The concept of energy harvesting using piezoelectric nanomaterials has been demonstrated but the realisation of these structures can be complex and they are poorly suited to mass fabrication.
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Vertical Farms
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Dragonfly concept aims for ecological self-sufficiency in New York
The latest concept design from Vincent Callebaut Architects – the Dragonfly – has been designed with the intention of easing the ever-increasing need for ecological and environmental self-sufficiency in the urban cityscape. The proposed development, designed around the Southern bank of Roosevelt Island in New York, follows a vertical farm design which, it is hoped, would cultivate food, agriculture, farming and renewable energy in an urban setting.
The unique 128 floor, 700m concept design is spread over two oblong towers and suggests building a prototype of an urban farm in which a mixed programme of housing, offices, laboratories and farming spaces are vertically laid out over several floors and cultivated by its inhabitants. The architecture of the design proposes reinventing the vertical building, so associated with the New York skyline of the 19th and 20th centuries, both structurally and functionally as well as ecologically.
The functional organisation of the design is arranged around two 600m towers, symmetrically arranged around a huge climactic greenhouse that links them, and constructed of glass and steel. This greenhouse, which defines the shape of the design, supports the load of the building and is directly inspired by the structural exoskeleton of dragonfly wings. Two inhabited rings buttress around the ‘wings,’ and along the exterior of these are solar panels, which will provide up to half the buildings electricity, with the rest being supplied by three wind machines along the vertical axes of the building.
While most would argue that the unconventional design of Dragonfly would be more suited to Dubailand than New York, the conceptual design tackles the contemporary dilemma of food production and agriculture in a city sorely lacking in the horizontal space required to do so, as well as attempting to achieve this in an ecologically sound and renewable way by merging production and consumption in the heart of the city.
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