Since the dawn of human time, civilization and resources have been inexorably linked, powering and making possible every part of our existence. As our existence has evolved and expanded, so too have our needs, making resources ever-more critical for the advanced, global societies we seek to continue building.
Resources have been the key to nearly every social and technological advancement we have ever achieved, and resource scarcity has conversely been the cause of major problems both in the past and in our time today. Throughout history, the societies and nations of mankind have all attempted to mitigate scarcity through varied constructs: laws and social policies; ideologies and political movements; technological innovations; the rewriting of borders; and, ultimately, war. Yet these approaches have almost universally sought to avoid resource scarcity by addressing its varied symptoms – rarely, if ever, have they dealt with the core problem itself.
It is for that reason why I believe they have failed.
A true solution doesn’t cure the symptoms. It cures the disease. In the case of resource scarcity, our cure comes from technology – and more importantly, how we can use it.
Technology provides the solution to resource scarcity because it allows us to extract resources more efficiently and with less expense. It also allows us to advance the means in which we acquire resources in terms of scale, sophistication and potential. Over time, we have developed and depended on technology to solve resource scarcities – which has led to breakthroughs that have changed the world, even if we didn’t realize it at the moment.
For example:
- The years following WWII gave rise to the threat of the first global resource crisis: food scarcity. Humanity was rapidly expanding in population and feeding the planet was becoming progressively more difficult. This crisis was detailed in The Limits to Growth,[1] a 1971 paper that predicted catastrophic consequences for humanity should it fail to curb population expansion. These predictions were well reasoned, yet they never came to fruition. Why not? Technology came to the rescue through industrialized farming techniques, high-performance fertilizers and genetically modified crops, all of which increased food production to the extent that Earth now supports 7.5 billion people and counting – twice the population of when The Limits to Growth was published.
- In the 1800s, aluminum was extremely rare, considered to be one of the most valuable metals in the world.[2] Today we throw it in waste receptacles. What made the difference? A method called electrolysis, which allowed us to inexpensively extract aluminum from its naturally occurring form, bauxite.[3] This method made aluminum extraction easy and inexpensive, dropping its cost to almost nothing. (Next time you throw away that soda can, though, realize that not 150 years ago it was worth its weight in silver).
- The need to obtain water by traveling to a location and carrying it back used to be a massive time expenditure for everyone within society, a problem that still exists within much of the developing world. Yet for the developed world, the invention of modern plumbing brought water to us on-demand. This collectively saved people trillions of hours in free time and removed a major impediment to cascading economic growth.
- Sugarcane was introduced to Mediterranean regions around the 7th century and thereafter remained a major luxury commodity. As a valuable cash crop, sugar was heavily taxed and was a revenue source for government, making it a driver of the slave trade. Yet when technology introduced the steam engine and methods of vaporization in the late 1800s, the cost to refine sugar plummeted to less than 5% of its former price.[4]
In each of these examples, a once-scarce resource was made both abundant and inexpensive as a function of technology, for technology has the unique ability to expand the scale of resource production while also lowering costs. But in the past, technology only really improved our ability to extract resources that were naturally present – and, over time, extraction has proven to be unsustainable as our natural resource supplies eventually dwindle. But what if we shifted gears to develop systems that could instead synthesize resources at scale?
For the first time in history, that’s a capability we now possess today.
The past three decades have seen transformational breakthroughs in several critical industries. Information technology has been transformed by the advent of high-performance computing at low cost, which alongside similar advances in networking, has ushered in an unprecedented capability to collaborate on state-of-the-art initiatives with sophisticated virtual modeling. It’s further enabled to-the-second global logistics and a degree of operational reliability that would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago. Polymer and material sciences have been transformed through the creation of synthetic substances that rival hardened steel in strength at a fraction of its mass, yet also present revolutionary benefits in terms of conductivity and flexibility of form.[5] Large-scale manufacturing can now rapidly build complex machinery on assembly lines at a level of precision that would have been nigh-impossible until the latest decades of our modern era. Combined, these advances allow us to engineer and build solutions to problems on much larger scales than ever before.
To put this in perspective, most nuclear power plants in the United States were built between 1970 and 1990.[6] That means a good deal of them were designed and built without the aid of a calculator.[7] The same is true with other types of power plants and larger-scale social infrastructure. Yet today, we have the capability to design a power plant on a computer and build it on an assembly line, much as we build a toaster.
To be sure, we can build many things with these increased capabilities. But the starting point is to build a system that can sustainably produce resources. And not just any resources, but the five most critical:
WATER, FOOD, ELECTRICITY, FUEL AND BUILDING MATERIALS.
Above all else, these are the most important resources for our civilization to operate. Without water, nothing grows and nothing lives. Without food, we starve. Electricity is the currency of capability and information, and is the glue that holds our modern social framework intact. Fuel provides high-density energy in standalone contexts where electricity is not present, and building materials enable us to advance, repair and extend the infrastructure that enables our civilization to flourish.
These are the resources that are most essential to powering our advanced economies, and these are the resources most likely to spark conflict when they become scarce.[8]
The purpose of Scarcity Zero is to act as this resource-producing system, and it works by leveraging three critical concepts: standardization, modularity and, with these two in place, cogeneration.
Standardization, in this case, is a way of building something to a universal standard that’s adopted society-wide. (For example, all of your electronic devices are charged by connecting a standardized type of plug into a standardized type of wall outlet.) Modularity is simply a way of deploying something that features the ability to rapidly change configuration or scale using a standardized means (think Legos™ that enable you to build whatever you like, a model city or model ship, with pieces that connect to each other in the exact same way).
Standardization and modularity allow us to take a technology and deploy it in a way that can be mass-produced, providing easy replacement of parts and driving down costs. Recent advances in technology enable us to apply these concepts on larger scales, especially within energy generation.
Our energy infrastructure today (and, by extension, our civilization as a whole) is powered by a hodgepodge of sources: oil, coal, solar, wind, uranium, natural gas, geological heat, hydroelectric, corn ethanol, and biomass.[9] Few of these energy production systems work with each other,[10] they barely even talk to one another.[11] And they are all implemented ad-hoc, meaning they were designed and built to order as unique systems with only minimal standardization and even less modularity in design. Each may reflect compliance with relevant building codes, but unlike most every other sophisticated product in our society – no one power plant is identical to another.
These factors make power-generating systems highly expensive to build and operate. It further prevents us from rapidly scaling them in size or extent of deployment, which limits the volume of energy available and thus raises its price.
There is a better way.
By designing the technologies within Scarcity Zero to incorporate modularity and standardization, we can leverage the concept of cogeneration, which is to use the waste energy of one technology to power something else. For example: diverting the waste heat energy from a coastal power plant to power a nearby facility that desalinates seawater into fresh water. Desalination is presently a costly and energy-intensive process,[12] yet when it’s powered primarily by waste energy, energy requirements and costs drop drastically.
Each technology within the Scarcity Zero framework is designed to easily connect and work cooperatively with others from the ground up, while maintaining the ability to rapidly scale in size on-demand. This empowers us to push the bounds of cogeneration, allowing our energy infrastructure to efficiently produce both energy and resources in the same footprint. This will do to energy and resource production what technology has done to most other consumer products: increase availability, lower prices, and advance quality over time.
The essential part to making this approach successful is identifying technologies that can generate energy in the way we need them to, which we’ll define as meeting the following criteria:
- The technology must be able to generate immense energy at low cost. In order to synthesize enough resources to satisfy all of our requirements, we’ll need to generate an effectively unlimited supply of energy. This means that energy will always be regenerated at a rate faster than that of consumption, regardless of how much energy is consumed. This requirement will set an initial target of 300% of annual electricity consumption in the U.S. (3,760 terawatt-hours as of 2015),[13] coming to a total of 11.28 trillion kilowatt-hours generated annually. (If you’re a little unfamiliar as to what a “kilowatt-hour is,” there is a helpful guide next chapter).
- The source of this energy must be abundant and sustainable. If an energy source and its corresponding extraction methods aren’t sustainable available after widespread adoption, we’ll eventually find ourselves in the same position we’re in now. As such, any technology we employ within the Scarcity Zero framework will need to be long-term viable, quantified for our purposes to be 1,000 years or longer.
- The technology must be safe and environmentally friendly. The energy production system, its fuel, and any waste must have negligible environmental impact and must further be carbon-neutral, meaning it does not emit carbon dioxide or methane which adversely impacts climate change. Additionally, it must not leave toxic waste that cannot be rendered inert in 300 years or less.
- The technology must be affordable to develop and use. Whatever benefits are brought by advances in energy technology will be irrelevant if they are not affordable, presenting the requirement for all energy-generating systems to have a realistic price tag.
- The technology must be flexible in where it can be located.There are already energy technologies that can fit the previous four requirements, but many can only function in limited areas and thus cannot be deployed in areas that are geographically remote and/or have rugged terrain. Universal deployability is vital for a modular and standardized energy framework.
- The technology must be deployable rapidly. Considering the state of the world today, the solution to resource scarcity and climate change needs to get here soon. If we don’t have these problems solved in the next 20-30 years, other solutions may not matter in the end.
The cost of this energy is intended to be no more than two cents per kilowatt-hour, down from today’s 10.53-cent average.[14] Reaching this target would provide enough energy at a low enough cost to allow large-scale synthetic production of civilization’s five most critical resources. (For those inclined, a detailed pricing model is included in this writing’s Appendix).
Scarcity Zero meets these requirements through a strategic deployment of five technologies: solar, wind, thorium and hydrogen, all interconnected through a revolutionary use of water. But before we see how they all function and work together in-depth, here’s an overview of Scarcity Zero’s intended deployment:
Integrated Renewables – The energy potential presented by renewable power is revolutionary, yet common problems with its use today are expense, land requirements, piecemeal deployment and material/carbon throughput in manufacturing. Renewables may be adopted by individual businesses, landowners or cities as they wish, but there’s not really a standardized method to deploy them nationwide on a large scale. Yet integrating renewables within urban municipal infrastructure – buildings, bridges, highway medians and road canopies – gives us a unique location for installation that critically eliminates the expense of buying additional land. Not only does this allow us to use the high costs of constructing public infrastructure to offset the expenses of renewable energy – it helps build a smarter and more resilient electric grid.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) – Thorium is a unique type of nuclear fuel that avoids nearly all complications inherent to our current approach to atomic power. Instead of uranium, which is traditionally enriched within highly pressurized reactors, thorium generates energy as a high-temperature liquid within advanced reactor designs that are not pressurized.
These reactors are far cleaner, far safer and more resistant to weaponization than uranium reactors used today. Thorium is also abundant – about as common as lead – which makes it thousands of times more sustainable than fuel-grade uranium. The waste footprint of LFTRs is minimal and short-term, rendered safe in decades as opposed to millennia. And because they can be built to small size and don’t operate under pressure, they can cost a fraction of what other approaches to atomic energy run. Just as importantly, they present a carbon-neutral energy source to manufacture and recycle renewables (and supplemental resources) on a large scale.
Water and Hydrogen – Our ability to extract fresh water and hydrogen fuel from seawater is well-known to science and industry.[15] The problem is that the process has thus-far been energy-intensive and thus expensive. Using the near-unlimited supply of inexpensive heat and electricity from thorium changes that, enabling us to desalinate billions of gallons of seawater at minimal cost. Of this water, Scarcity Zero devotes a portion to producing hydrogen fuel, with the remainder being transported nationwide through another central component of Scarcity Zero: The National Aqueduct.
The National Aqueduct – As a proposed nationwide delivery system for desalinated seawater, the National Aqueduct also doubles as a power plant and battery for renewable energy. Deployed alongside the pre-cleared and publicly owned land at the sides of our highways and high-tension power lines, it would be built via prefabricated, modular pipelines with embedded solar panels and hydroelectric turbines – allowing these water pipelines to passively generate immense levels of energy. Most critically, any excess energy generated by the system can be used to keep billions of gallons of water at high temperature, permitting us to use our fresh water supply as a giant “battery” by way of converting heat energy into electricity (thermoelectric charge).
How It All Fits Together
Scarcity Zero harnesses the limitless potential of renewable energy and significantly increases its utility by integrating it within public infrastructure to both increase scale and reduce costs. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) are deployed second to safely provide an immensely powerful parallel source of energy to complement renewables within a self-reinforcing framework. In doing so, these reactors act as a base load energy backbone. They also work as integrated power sources meant to desalinate seawater on a massive scale – a portion of which is then used to produce hydrogen fuel. This desalinated water is then pumped nationwide throughout the National Aqueduct, which further functions as both a power source and an eco-friendly storage battery for renewable energy.
Combined, these technologies are designed to work together in a decentralized, co-generating system that’s both modular and standardized – maximizing efficiency, flexibility and reliability. With Scarcity Zero, our power network isn’t built from piecemeal technologies that neither work together nor communicate with one another; it’s instead designed to work in tandem from the ground-up, dramatically increasing our capability to generate energy on a nationwide scale at substantially lower cost. An open-source and indefinitely extendable operating system for energy generation, one suited for the 21st century.
With this abundant supply of energy and water at our fingertips, we solve the problems of resource scarcity. We can grow food indefinitely in indoor farming networks near urban centers.[16] These indoor farms can be extended further to grow the organic substances needed to create sophisticated synthetic materials, materials that can revolutionize how things are built and recycled.[17] In aggregate, Scarcity Zero gives us nigh unlimited supplies of energy, water, food, electricity, fuel and building materials – enabling us thereafter to advance our manufacturing capabilities and build our civilization to ever-greater heights in a world spared of scarcity and need.
What About New Technologies?
As current technologies evolve and new ones emerge, the Scarcity Zero framework will adapt to include them. The goal is to generate enough clean energy at a low enough cost that we can inexpensively synthesize resources to effectively unlimited scales at minimal environmental impact. Just as players change roles in a football game, technologies will do the same within Scarcity Zero. As an evolving framework, Scarcity Zero will update to reflect the greatest available potential for clean energy generation.
The mindset behind Scarcity Zero and all it seeks to achieve is to rewrite the rules of our existence by systematically dismantling the challenges that have held us back since the dawn of time. If successful, we can position ourselves for a future where humanity – us, our children, and generations hence – not only survives on this planet, but permanently thrives. Where we can reach goals that were never before achievable and bypass the limitations of resources as we once knew them. The technical capability is here today. Scarcity Zero is how we can make it real.
