There are three inventions I would like to see brought into the world:

One is a 100% efficiency solar cell. Most solar cells these days only take in only a quarter or less of the sun’s energy. By increasing the amount of energy that can be captured at once we can vastly reduce the amount of fossil fuels we burn plus avoid potentially dangerous technologies involving fission, which produce nuclear waste which has to be handled with extreme care. You can’t build a dirty bomb or a warhead with solar power.

Another technology I would like to see is a “heat battery”. The idea of a heat battery is that it can absorb the radiant and conductive heat energy from environment around it and store it for later use. During the summer you would turns these on to keep your place cool, storing the unneeded heat for the winter, where you would then have them release the stored heat. This would vastly reduce the amount of energy we use to keep homes and businesses cool, and perhaps could even be used to power devices instead of just releasing the stored energy as heat.

The third technology I would like to see is a “energy to matter” device. This is of course an idea taken from Star Trek, but a device like this could end poverty and famine, end the mining and destruction of nature for precious metals, and in general end the morbidity experienced in impoverished areas and the drive for material wealth.

Now that I’ve said I’d like to see these technologies, I must add some reservations.

If humanity had these technologies and they were cheap and easy to implement, then humanity could live pretty much anywhere in as great a number as they please. In the past and present times the places people could live and the number that could be sustained there has been defined by environmental and material limits. The three technologies I just listed would remove those limits. Free energy, free heat and cool, and free materials mean that there would be no poverty, environmental harshness, or starvation to keep the number of people from growing. The end result could potentially be that every corner of the globe, even the North Pole and the driest desert, would be covered with cities and people.

Or will the world be eventually covered with people regardless of these technologies coming into existence, and they would just live horrible lives full of starvation and suffering? No matter what rules or attempts at enforcement are made on limiting human reproduction we are going to need to create the technologies and systems to keep tens of billions of people alive, and the fossil fuels and natural resources are not going to be enough.

Even beyond the issue of sustenance and human population growth, would these technologies put an end to the need for government and society? If people could provide themselves with all the power, food, and comfort they need would we need anything outside our own doors? Would these three technologies be the proverbial Shmoo that disintegrates our need to work together as a society? No need to get an education, job, or anything as all you need to survive is provided and will always be there.

I do not think that would be the true end result of these technologies, for the most part. Humans are as always a curious and explorative bunch who would not be satisfied with just surviving. With life on Earth assured they would then be free to explore more lofty goals, like space exploration and terraforming other worlds and creating new systems of life. Humanity would be no more fashion obsessed and idle than they already are. They would find plenty of things to complain about and try to change, even with having anything they could want.

So I say bring on these new technologies and lets get busy focusing on something else besides fighting over resources and good places to live.

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