We are in an accelerated phase of technological development, which brings benefits, but also serious dangers and questions about our species' ability to survive its own excesses. Reassembling garbage into usable material, eliminating fossil fuel byproducts, and the like SHOULD be our primary focus in the survivability game. We need some serious priority shifting in our ruling class, but the motivation for them to do so is contradictory. They enjoy ridiculous luxury, but more importantly keep the majority of the species on the brink of starvation, death by disease, or obliteration by war or civil conflict. This is by design, because historically and logically the greatest threat to an established oligarchy is a well-educated, well-fed middle or upper-middle class. People who can escape ignorance and fear, who can move past the struggle for survival, can then begin to ask important questions about equality and the common good. Technological advances have already been made, I am quite sure, and are sitting somewhere in a warehouse, blocked from development or disbursement to the general public. Universities make advancements every day, but thanks to lobbyists, the grants those federal land-grant schools receive come with stipulations galore. I have witnessed this process personally, it's not a paranoid theory. One of my family members is a department chair at one of the oldest federal land-grant universities in the country, and has overseen development of things like immediately biodegradable plastics for use in a myriad of applications. The research has been blocked from commercial or academic development every single year in the decade since its synthesis. Why? Old-design plastics are manufactured using petroleum products- it's a large amount of the petrochemical industry's income. Other developments have been made and stymied, like bacterial soil phytoremediation- but some, like that one, baffle me as to the motivation behind it. Are there large companies who come through and "clean" the soil from harmful toxins? Would the transformation of highly alkaline soil to arable land or toxic chemicals being leeched out make "too much farmland"? Worried about food prices? No idea, personally. If anyone has an insight on that one, I'd love to hear it.
Again, the point being- innovation, like most statistics of positive human growth and development, is more favorable in societies with a greater degree of equality, a much lower gap in socioeconomic status. Examples include Japan, Finland, and Germany. There may well exist governmental regulation in these nations, but the absence of a controlling mercantile power structure allows for greater prosperity as a whole. The age-old myth that capitalist competition breeds innovation and progress is a pile of steaming horseshit- it just breeds planned obsolescence and collusion for price fixing, all to the greater cost of the population as a whole.
Rant ends.
Much love.
HA!
