What would it be like if you could redesign civilization with high technology but an emphasis on simplicity and ecological harmony?
One way to approach this is to start with a self-sufficient homestead and expand it until it approximates a "unit" of self-sustaining high-tech civilization. You would need capabilities in your "tech tree" that covered things like advanced materials science, particle accelerators, biotech, etc. so that precludes the "rugged individualist" trope, and even the single family homestead.
G.I. Gurdjieff said that the "atom" of any phenomenon is the smallest amount of it that displays all of it's qualities. (I find this to be a very modern and sophisticated definition, FWIW.) I think we can rule out the individual and even the homestead as the smallest unit of human civilization. Individuals can't reproduce, and homesteads, while they could sustain humanity for thousands of years, couldn't build a rocket to the Moon or deal with massive natural disasters. They could, it's worth mentioning, sustain a global trade network, and many kinds of science.
Christopher Alexander has a site called "Living Neighborhoods" which proposes that the unit of development is the neighborhood, at least.
→ Building Living Neighborhoods, Christopher AlexanderAn example of an ecologically harmonious neighborhood:
→ Village Homes, Davis, CaliforniaBucky Fuller and Paolo Soleri proposed that whole cities should be the unit of development, each with his own emphasis. Fuller saw that the larger the size the greater the potential for efficiency, while Soleri had a more environmental flavor, integrating the flows of the city into the surrounding ecology.
→ Old Man River's City project, Buckminster FullerWe're talking about a global steady-state. If there is a plateau before the Singularity, we are speculating as to what we might find there. The reason is simple: if this (hypothetical) civilization of ours is NOT stable over transcontinental distances and geological timescales, then we are Olaf Stapelton's "First and Last Men" and I can't compete with sci-fi like that. I wouldn't even try.
I'm not a sci-fi author, nor a futurist. I'm *conservative*. I want to figure out a stable situation so that we don't eradicate life (on the only known living planet!) before we get our act together and sort the rest of our sh!t out.
You could go live on a tropical island, except they're going to be underwater soon. Ecological stability (really meta-stability) is a global property. The world is a single bubble-shaped volume between hard vacuum and magma. The ecosystem is unitary. "All are One." is literal.
So what does "ecological harmony" even mean? What does it look like to live in harmony with Nature?
No need to guess or pontificate. We have a living example: Findhorn
→ FindhornA recent independent study concludes that the residents have the lowest ecological footprint of any community measured so far in the industrialized world and is also half of the UK average.
They don't talk it up so much these days it seems to me, but they got their start by communing with Nature Spirits who told them how to plant gardens and raise vegetables in an inhospitable Scottish coastal climate.
To me this reinforces the idea that our current problems are emotional, psychic, epistemological rather than technological. Science has delivered on the technology, and the vast majority of our (physical, secular) problems are now rendered moot, if we can just get our act together and *do it*.
This leads me back to talking about e.g. Core Transformation Process, as well as forgiveness, atonement, oneness and unity. And again, we have the "technology" to advance rapidly here, and people are already doing it out there in the world. From the point of view of the idea of "minimum viable civilization" though, there's not much to add. This is something that can be carried out, and indeed to some extent must be carried out, at the individual level. Each and every one of us is subject to the human condition, we are simultaneously a part and apart. We can't enforce spiritual growth by any means, but we shall presuppose it for the sake of this discussion, eh?
So what are some concrete (no pun intended) technical aspects of building an ecologically harmonious minimal viable civ?
Another way of saying this is that it should be easy to construct our buildings and infrastructure, and perhaps more importantly, it should be easy to disassemble and reconstruct our buildings and infrastructure! Our technology should be like LEGO bricks. Not to say that buildings that are meant to last a long time in their present form shouldn't exist: the first example that springs to my mind is the Cathedral and other Holy buildings.We can and should make things to last (like the Roman concrete. Bridges and piers that last for thousands of years are fine if you're *that* sure they are where you want them, eh?)
We can and should put sensors all over the place. The resulting information can be used to understand and predict the consequences of our actions. This is another thing that Bucky anticipated: we can just program our needs and our existing resources and capabilities into, in effect, a giant spreadsheet and have the computer solve the logistics for us.
Now of course there are sticky political considerations here, eh? But if we are postulating a kind of spiritual maturity then that's much relieved, yes? Government in general is necessary only due to human wickedness, good people need no lords, no police. I don't think there's any way around the technology: already sensors and computers and radio networks are becoming ubiquitous. So this is a problem to solve, or at least manage, rather than an optional condition we can avoid. The tech is there and economic considerations are already driving saturation.
Granted that we develop the maturity and wisdom to manage it at all, we can use the flow of data to inform the large-scale gardening of the environment, as well as medical applications. A couple of years ago medical applications might have been considered more airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky, one side-effect of the global pandemic has been a widespread understanding of the potential of mass medical monitoring, eh? It's an open question as to what form of government and economic system will get the better advantage from these new systems. Answering that question also requires information.
Openness and transparency in a context of mutual trust and respect is honorable, and economically highly efficient. It also feels great.
So we are postulating a technological global grid of communications, and we should probably postulate a "world grid" of electrical power distribution. In terms of transportation it seems to me in the light of the recent global pandemic that we should postulate either a much reduced level of global traffic -or- a greatly increased medical monitoring and response system. It's easier and cheaper to reduce transportation, but people like to travel.
The other major reason for international transport is trade, due to the "division of labor" leading to economic specialization. We should recognize that the advent of advanced automation should to some extent level regional variations of much production, while rapid climate changes will cause massive changes to regional advantages. This doesn't mean that all economic specialization will disappear overnight.
Let's approach it this way, let's ask ourselves what "big" technology would we want to retain?
Now then, what do we need to support those projects?