Scarcity Zero is a framework designed to solve core human problems. Its intent is to provide blueprints for a system that can permanently address the maladies that have plagued our species since the dawn of time; software to support the foundations of the human condition. Further, it is intended to allow – as I believe it to be true – the best parts of our nature to emerge, and flourish, in a world where their absence has caused no shortage of rue and woe. But as a writing, The Next Giant Leap is intended to provoke thought, and the consideration of ideas. It’s meant to be a conduit for a conversation among ourselves about how we might evolve the hindrances of our existence, and build, truly, a better world.
To build a better world.
I have rewritten this chapter many times. Yet each instance I read those words I must admit I become pained in a way that is unique and profound. That such a conversation needs to happen in the first place is, on its face, a travesty of potential, and an abdication of promise. It was fifty-one years ago, nearly to the day these words were written, where mankind took its first giant leap and set foot upon our lunar surface. It was a moment that reflected the culmination of unquantifiable sacrifice, and immeasurable investment, into our ability to accomplish the impossible. 200,000 years of human evolution and the lives of billions converged at a single moment in time – and we leapt forward.
That was the hope our future was meant to be built on. That was the light by which we were meant to find our way.
Now in the decades hence, where the problems of our time command headlines of newspapers instead of chapters of history books, I am haunted by a deeply lonely and desolate sense of shame to think this future might be forsaken. That for all of the nameless sacrifices people made throughout history, the future they died for would nonetheless yield to a world where billions of others wallow in needless, purposeless suffering. Where our ecological home is dying. Where the possibility of nuclear extinction is an everyday fact of life. Where we are dominated, again, and again, and again, by the petty conflicts that for millennia have devoured the brightest elements of human potential.
Yet even in the face of these circumstances, I refuse – to my core biological basis – to grant them surrender. Because our future is not yet forsaken. Because that light has not yet left us. I believe it is still a guiding beacon, waiting to be once again embraced as torches in our hearts, small as they may be against the shadows of our time – yet together bright enough to beat the darkness. And with the tools that can today be in our hands, I believe sincerely through every fiber of my soul and being that we can accomplish exactly that, once and for all.
Because “the way things are” and “the way the world works” are not reflections of incontrovertible destiny. They’re forces of circumstance, reflections of an old model that, for all its faults, got us this far – yet is now too broken to carry us further. We now require a new model, one that upgrades our existential framework on a civilizational scale. A task that, at the pinnacle of our technological prowess, is now at last possible.
It only takes our choice, like those who came before, to make that leap.
Thus, I am now speaking to you – as one person to another – in perhaps the only opportunity I can in such a context to tell you that there is still a way to fix this. We can still build a future where we can strive for higher aspirations and retire each evening feeling legitimately hopeful for the days ahead. To hold belief that we can embrace our full potential as a people and reach a harmonious plane of existence with our environment, with our planet, and, most of all, with each other.
These aspirations are not “lofty,” nor are such appeals evocative of flowery rhetoric or emotional cliché. They are core perspectives. If there is meaning to this life, if life is precious and worth cherishing, worth empowering and worth saving, then there is no greater goal we should have for ourselves. There should be nothing more important that we would see achieved. This is the foundation of existence. And by engaging these newfound capabilities at this critical time, we can evolve the fundamental structures on which that foundation stands.
This mindset encapsulates an expansion of perspective that our nationalist, tribalist tendencies might consider unrealistic, cynically ignoring that the blood spilled and resources wasted by their tenets may, in fact, have been better invested in causes other than our own destruction, or annihilation. This mindset looks beyond that, into something greater and something deeper.
In 1964, a Soviet astronomer named Nikolai Kardashev postulated the idea of civilizational “tiers” – quantifiable metrics of how objectively advanced a civilization has become or could become in the future – based on the perspective of a sentient, carbon-based biological lifeform.[1] Known as the “Kardashev” scale, his model had three tiers:
Type I: A civilization that sources its energy and resources from its planet.
Type II: A civilization that sources its energy and resource from its star.
Type III: A civilization that sources its energy and resources from its galaxy.
Other scientific philosophers, Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, John Barrow – and several others[2] – have made their own models using their own insight and expertise.[3] Even if I had the intellect or standing to disagree with any of them, I don’t. Yet deep within my mind is another tiered model, one that has influenced my worldview and perspective starkly throughout my life. It’s not much different than others like it, but it is a reflection of who I believe we are, what I believe we are capable of, and what I believe we can become – should we so choose.
The Ten Tiers of Civilization
Tier 1: Fire and Stone: control of fire and the ability to craft stone tools, subsisting exclusively on a hunter-gatherer diet. This tier represents approximately 95% of human history.
Tier 2: Agricultural: the ability to grow crops and raise livestock, accelerating population growth. Social hierarchies and customs form, and the possibility of organized conflict becomes a fixture of life. Humanity reached this tier during the Neolithic Revolution, around 10,000 B.C.E
Tier 3: Pre-industrial: command of simple metallurgy with a basic understanding of math, science and astrology. Written language and laws are established, as are formal relations between governing regions. This tier was reached at the founding of Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia, roughly 4,000 B.C.E
Tier 4: Industrial: complex self-powered machines are invented, including mechanized assembly and transportation systems. Economic trade becomes globalized and conflict carries consequences of increased severity. We reached this tier during the Industrial Revolution, approximately 1760.
Tier 5: Atomic: civilization discovers atomic energy and has the ability to build large-scale infrastructure. Population grows exponentially. Potential for resource conflict increases, as does the potential for mass destruction. We reached this tier on 16 July, 1945 when the first atomic bomb was detonated.
Tier 6: Orbital: civilization can defy gravity and even orbit. Electronics and globalized communications emerge. Transportation over terrestrial distances becomes trivial. Population continues to grow exponentially. Potential for resource conflict is extreme, which for the first time can potentially be an extinction-level event due to nuclear arsenals and global delivery mechanisms. We reached this tier on 4 October, 1957 at the launch of the first satellite. This is the tier we are in now.
Tier 7: Ascendant: civilization has developed technology capable of synthesizing unlimited energy, resources and materials, thus ending resource scarcity and resource conflict. Maslow’s needs are met,[4] addressing most social problems and stabilizing population growth. In turn, civilization is able to devote the entirety of its resources to collective social advancement with ever-more sophisticated infrastructure. This is the tier Scarcity Zero bring us to.
Tier 8: Transcendent: civilization has crossed the biological threshold and is able to store and transport consciousness outside of a physical body (sophisticated brain to computer interface). Complex artificial intelligence exists and both biomass and bionic structures can be synthesized effectively, leading to the possibility of synergy between organic and synthetic life.
Tier 9: Interstellar: civilization has reached the mastery of planetary existence and becomes capable of inhabiting other planets. Intersolar and interstellar transportation is invented, as is greater command of nanoengineering.
Tier 10: Intergalactic: A hypothetical Tier 10 civilization is capable of intergalactic space travel and can artificially create habitable worlds. It would furthermore command a comprehensive knowledge of universal physics, both on micro and macro scales.
In this model, we first and foremost see that humankind has ascended at an accelerating rate. It took us ~190,000 years to go from Tier 1 to Tier 2, yet only 12,000 years to go from Tier 2 to Tier 6 – the tier we remain in presently. And while this is an impressive reflection of our capabilities, we’ve only come far enough to be forced to take another leap, for a critical attribute of our tier is that it’s inherently precarious.
Due to exponential population growth and the environmental changes and resource scarcities that come with it, a civilization can only stay in this tier for a limited time. It either ascends, or it falls to resource conflict and/or ecological collapse, which in the nuclear age carries extinction-level consequences.
It’s a reality that pays homage to “The Great Filter,” which is a derivative consideration of “The Fermi Paradox” – an essential philosophical question when discussing our seemingly isolated existence within the vast cosmos our planet calls home.
Postulated by the great physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950’s, the question can be succinctly paraphrased as the following:
How can our universe, in all its unimaginable vastness, present such an immense likelihood for sentient life, yet at the same time we can’t seem to find it?
I’ll frame this another way to help clarify:
Our planet, Earth, orbits our Sun along with seven other planets, comprising our solar system. It is only one out of roughly 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Our galaxy, itself, is only one out of some two trillion galaxies in our observable universe by the last known estimate.[6]
In another way of saying, if we were to take every person alive today and send them each to a unique galaxy, we’d only be able to visit about 0.37% of them. As each galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars and there are trillions of galaxies, it makes the odds of Earth being the only planet to support life in the cosmos to be nigh impossibly low.
Presently, astronomers estimate that our universe contains at least a septillion stars (that’s 24 zeros).[7] At this scale, if even only one out of one million stars had orbiting planets that sustained life, it would still leave ten quintillion planets that did (10,000,000,000,000,000,000). That’s ten million individual groups of one trillion planets. Think about that for a second.
It’s so impossibly unlikely that we’re alone, yet at the same time, we haven’t heard from another lifeform beyond our planet that we know of.
“The Great Filter” is a proposed answer to this paradox, theorizing that all intelligent life faces a threshold it must cross for it to ascend beyond its planet and survive for the long term. That in order to truly advance as a species, it must overcome a series of obstacles which would otherwise stop its ascent – or be the harbinger of its destruction.
Consider it another way, if you will:
If all of Earth’s history were reduced to the scale of one year, humanity did not emerge until 11:55PM on New Year’s Eve. We only reached the modern era at about 10 seconds to midnight. By 7 seconds to midnight, we had invented the means to cause our own extinction. By 5 seconds to midnight, we will have run out of the resources that sustains our rapidly expanding population. And if our dynamic remains unchanged, it will destroy us before the clock strikes twelve.
That is “The Great Filter.” It is something that we are facing right now, today. And it is our generation, our time, that is tasked with passing this gauntlet of unforgiving truth.
Yet it’s a reality that makes us brethren against the forces, natural as they may well be, which would otherwise erase what we have built and accomplished. That would extinguish the stories of who we are and who we could become, casting the ashes and echoes of the aggregate into a void where the culmination of our memory is to be forgotten. For this reason, this writing has conveyed a sense of touch in language that appeals to the power you bring to bear as a person, in hopes that it would inspire your choice of action towards building a better world and a brighter future.
I believe there is an ether in this world that embraces our sense of soul and what it means to be human. An ether that connects us on a core wavelength, where we all wish the best for ourselves and for others, and ascribe value to our sense of collective meaning and shared purpose. We find it, in moments, at high points in our lives and seek it still maybe through churches and community organizations, as acolytes of sports teams, countercultures or ideological tribes; striving for warmth and affirmation through what strings of connection we can grasp and hold close. Yet another torch in our hearts, perhaps, one that keeps the cold and loneliness at bay.
This ether is not esoteric. It’s not something that can be made, bought or bartered for – it’s been within us all along, an aspect of the human condition that we can engage in ourselves and others should we be willing; that like love, friendship, respect and honor is a conduit for connection, for inspiration, for belonging. It does not come from acquisition. It comes from choice.
The best parts of ourselves are made possible because we choose them. We choose to be better, to give, build, create and forgive, just as we choose to hate, steal, forsake and destroy. While perhaps inclined towards one aspect or another by our natural dispositions, we are ultimately manifestations of our choices – defined one way or another by the actions we take, the ethers we embrace, and the natures we feed.
The world that we live in, therefore, is a collective reflection of those choices – even if we didn’t realize that we made them, or that those who came before us made them, or those who came before them still. The world we wake up in tomorrow, accordingly, will reflect the same. But uniquely in our context is an unprecedented capability to expand the impact of our choices and the scope of options we have available. And of them, the most vital is the neutralization of the concept of need.
Human nature is commonly described in dualities: binary opposites that interact together as dichotomies of circumstance, character or choice. Rich versus poor. Success versus failure. Strong versus week. Good versus evil. Us versus them.
Such dualities define both ancient and modern frameworks of theology, law, nationalism, decorum, ideology – even technology, itself made possible by the application of binary numbers, 0 and 1, processed through transistors on a massive scale. When applied to the realities of our nature, each of these dualities have abstract merit in our world past, present and future. Yet none of them truly identify the core dichotomy of the human condition. Our world is not bound by good versus evil, or right versus wrong, or strong versus weak. It’s bound by supply versus need.
On any scale, especially national, need and scarcity – in either perception or reality, can be attributable to the cause of most any conflict, social fracturing, environmental pillaging, or lust for greed, power or oppression. I studied war crimes in university. To this day, it still haunts my dreams. What we have done to one another, what horrors we can justify, what choices we can accept and what abominations we can call weapons make any other logical reason incapable of defining the forces directing and binding collective human action. The horrors of such actions aren’t reflective of how far we will go, they’re reflective of how far we won’t go – limits that evaporate and emerge expanded, pushed time again by the merciless realities of scarcity-driven need.
While its presence is undoubtable and at times unyielding, we as a people too frequently make the mistake of attributing to malice that which can be attributed to need because it’s easier – a simple designation of “evil” that avoids us having to look inward to what drives our adversaries in any given context. Outside of the subjective application of moral relativism or revisionist history, it’s much harder to see “them” as human and their needs as logical, to them – even if we are the target of their antagonism as we perceive it. It’s harder still to realize that most people, even in times of strife, are not acting out of wickedness or cruelty but are rather doing what they think they need to do in the context of what they perceive their needs to be – even if their actions manifest respectively as such. It’s simply our uncompromising reality as pawns of a zero-sum game.
Need is the driving adversary of the human condition; the core malady that has continually held us back as a species since the dawn of time, and has kept us fighting amongst each other instead of enabling us to realize that we can reach our true potential, and a new plateau, should we enact the means to make the concept of need irrelevant. Today, we now possess those means, and we can choose to wield them for that end – to defeat our ancient adversary with finality, and build a better world upon its ruin.
And to make that choice is what would I ask of you now.
It may not be easy, yet it’s incumbent on us to shake off the apathy and despondence our time has given us cause to adopt, and to embrace the better parts of ourselves the world’s cruelties have taught us to suppress. It’s incumbent on us to consider reinvesting in ourselves and our future with tools that can even the odds in our favor. To invest in the potential of each other, to understand their perspectives and forgive their prejudices, and seek to find common ground strong enough for us to once again start building. We may not be able to solidify all ground to find commonality, but we can solidify enough ground to build platforms on which we can extend our hands and, maybe one day, a bridge.
At the end of the day, deep within ourselves, who we are, what we care for, what we value, is that not the choice of life? Is that not what we want for ourselves, for our children, and for theirs? For thousands of years, people just like us gave everything they had for our future. Our time is the culmination of a billion sacrifices – every soldier on every battlefield, every martyr, every king, tyrant, slave, warrior, artisan, philosopher, lord or peasant. The sum of all their toils, all the sacrifices of their hopes and lost dreams are all boiled down to this moment, here, and now, and the choices we make with the time we have been given.
Simply stated, I can’t think of anything worse than failing them. To not carry the torch they have lit and carried for us to the victory they never could reach, the victory that we uniquely can. To me there is nothing more important, and I’m tired of being encouraged to ignore that. I’m tired of glorified ignorance to the reality of our world and our potential to change it. I refuse to continue granting meaning and value to society’s dog and pony shows: celebrity news, celebrated complacency and fleeting materialism – the choreographed wrestling matches of today’s bribed political dynamic – all washed down with diet cola and light beer.
We have one life to live, one life to interact with the framework of existence, and we find ourselves at the zenith of our capability to evolve the foundations of our biological constraints. To choose to take this leap, to reach a higher tier, and to live knowing that this was when our species made it. Where we passed the test life gave us and earned the right to continue our evolution not just within our world, but far beyond it.
That is the choice of our time – one that faces every one of us. And as one of us, I made a promise to devote my very best efforts to propose an actually effective way to choose for that end. Something that could be given away to anyone who wished to adopt – and evolve – these ideas, and begin discussing how we can work together to see them made real.
Nobody asked me, paid me or qualified me to make this promise. I did this on my own, and I made this promise, to myself, and to you, to see this task fulfilled because I chose to. I made this promise because I don’t answer to the cynics and the apologists of the status quo – I answer to you.
I answer to you because we are all in this together, and I sincerely and honestly believe in our shared capabilities, in the potential that we can have if we can set aside our contrived differences and work together to build what can become of the best of ourselves.
It’s the only thing that can save us. It’s the only thing that should save us.
And should we choose to make that leap, then our feet will land in uncharted terrain on a brilliant frontier. As technology expands and satisfies ever-more needs through indefinite resource production, conflicts will reduce, economies will grow, as will relationships and trade agreements. Development and modernization will begin in regions that were once war-torn, and the echoes of human conflict will begin to fade into memory, just like all other plights of our nature that technical means have allowed us to banish into the past. From there, as technology greater connects us and brings us closer together, exploration beyond Earth will become more and more sophisticated and we will find what there is to discover in the vastness beyond our planet.
We will reach not just the next tier of civilization, but also an essential realization: that we are not just members of individual countries, as this isn’t the label that should define us. We are all human beings; we are all people – that is the label that should define us. That is because we all share this rock in space together. And whether we live on it together, or die on it together, one way or the other, ultimately, it will be so together.
It is my greatest hope that we can be able to realize that one day. We place boundless faith in gods we cannot see to form our fate and future. Perhaps we could strive instead to see the day where we might place faith in each other.
So I will start by placing my faith in you.
