But what are the greater implications of the expansion of materials and construction methods for smaller-scale residential dwelling? Most importantly, for a modest investment we can now provide quality living spaces for anyone who needs a home, such as:
Victims of natural disasters. As events like Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey, Maria and Dorian have demonstrated – alongside tornados, flooding and ever-worsening wildfires around the world – millions of people can be displaced from their homes after natural disasters. Displacement traditionally leads to depression, social unrest, higher crime, and reduced economic activity, among other social problems – all of which are often cyclical in nature.
While temporary FEMA trailers have provided some relief in the U.S., these shelters are only free to use for a limited time, and at $70,000 per unit, each costs several times as much to produce than a prefabricated living space of similar size.[18] Rather than using the more expensive temporary FEMA trailers, we can now deliver inexpensive prefabricated homes that can have integrated heat and hot water, giving a comfortable, warm, and private space to people who have lost their homes in the U.S. and abroad.
For example, during the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and its aftermath, roughly 105,000 homes were destroyed and another 208,000 badly damaged.[19] International governments devoted millions of dollars to assist, with some $93 million going to build some 2,600 homes – a cost of roughly $36,000 a house. Though approximately $13 billion in total international aid was donated so that Haiti could rebuild, much of the country today looks little different from how it did in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.[20] Had we been able to purchase prefabricated homes at $30,000 each, it would have cost $9.3 billion – meaning that we’d have provided living spaces to replace every damaged and destroyed home with another $3.7 billion to spare.
Low-income/fiscally reserved individuals. The average price for a single-family home in the United States is nearly $300,000 – an obstacle for even the median wage earner in this country.[21] The millions of families who are forced to rent are in an increasingly precarious financial situation, as rent prices have largely increased in inflation-adjusted dollars over the past 30 years while median income has not.[22]
Perhaps a family can’t afford to buy a house and are forced to rent at the expense of their ability to save money or invest in something they own. Conversely, perhaps a family wishes to purchase a modest home on a larger plot of land with more cash on hand as opposed to a more expensive house with a heavier mortgage. Prefabricated homes make either possible, allowing people to take advantage of the value of home ownership at lower prices than are possible today.
People experiencing homelessness. There are currently an estimated 565,000 homeless people in the United States,[23] and every year the Federal Government spends approximately $4.5 billion on efforts to reduce that number.[24] Assuming a cost of $30,000 for a small prefabricated home, we could provide a comfortable and private living space for every homeless person in this country for $19 billion. Assuming $10,000 for a 650 square foot 3D-printed home, we could provide the same for just $6.5 billion. That’s what the Federal government spends on preventing homelessness every 2-5 years. Also of note: that’s between 1-3% of the annual defense budget.[25]
It’s worth mentioning that providing a private living space to get people off the streets isn’t necessarily going to fix any underlying reasons for their homelessness, as afflictions like drug addiction and mental illness are often factors.[26] But reaching the ability to extend the most vulnerable among us a place to live and rebuild their lives is key to solving major social problems. The lowest a person in the United States (and perhaps abroad) would thus be able to fall to is a private living space with heat, food and hot water – a historical first.
Being able to accomplish these goals in aggregate is a milestone of major significance. It represents a massive leap in our societal advancement, and more critically, it’s the final nail in the coffin of resource scarcity.
By combining the systems described in this and previous chapters, we would have the means to synthetically produce everything we need to exist: electricity, fuel, water, food, advanced building materials, and now shelter, and we would have the means to produce them far less expensively than we can today.
Indefinitely sustainable production of the crucial resources and amenities our civilization needs to function would be revolutionary, completely changing how we relate to people within our neighborhoods, our nation and our planet.
Critically, this would allow us to reset our relationship to nature.
Since we evolved from hunter-gatherer tribes and started building societies, the environment around us has paid the price. We have razed forests, destroyed ecosystems and altered our planet’s climate. The rise of human civilization, in and of itself, has been an extinction-level event. Scarcity Zero allows us to chart a different course because it can provide every resource that we need to exist and advance without relying on perpetually invasive extractive technologies. This alone greatly reduces the damage we inflict on nature by decreasing our reliance on what are essentially finite resources.
It’s true that technological advances might increase the extraction of certain materials. But with superior recycling and manufacturing methods, this can be minimized and would ultimately pale in comparison to the other environmental benefits we would see with Scarcity Zero. We would no longer need to cut down forests for building materials, extract finite sources of oil and gas for energy, or devote swaths of land for farming. We would no longer need to deplete natural water sources for drinking, industry, or agriculture. We would no longer need to pollute our atmosphere or destroy waterways with toxic chemicals. Over time, the Scarcity Zero framework would allow nature to return to its natural state, and heal to a point before our hands scarred it.
And, this would remove the primary cause of human conflict.
For thousands of years, for thousands, we have butchered each other. Whether by the sword, the arrow, the bullet or the bomb, we have exterminated our brethren in every horrific manner we could think of. In this doing we have told ourselves lies, and allowed ourselves to believe that we were justified in killing and dying by the millions for causes that boiled down to nothing more than resource scarcity and the pursuit of the money, power and economic might it bestows on the winner of its zero-sum games. We have believed these lies and lived with these horrors because we had no other choice. And whether near or far from the results of their manifestation, we have been powerless to prevent it all from repeating for time eternal because we had no means to truly change how the world worked.
Now, we do.
Technology can finally empower us to evolve beyond the zero-sum game of resources. No matter how much energy, water, food or materials are consumed by society, we can always generate more. With that, we can not only build transformational things, but further transform the very means and tools with which we build them – and change the world from the old model to the new.