"No Man's Sky, Post-Scarcity, & Future Societies " Topic

"Among the oldest feats of civilisation, and indeed of Human society in general, is the construction of cities. From the stone and wood of the ancient world, to the sprawling glass and steel of today, cities have always been at the heart of a civilisation's economic and political power, a nexus of wealth and culture. There are exceptions of course; the nomadic hordes of Genghis Khan for one, and many nomadic tribes of Africa. As a rule though it has been the city building cultures that lasted longest, and grew the largest.

There is a solid reason for this to be the case. With people gathered into larger communities it is increasingly easy to support people who are not directly engaged in the production of food and other basic necessities. These people, freed from the daily struggle for survival are freed to work on other things, such as developing better building techniques, better tools, or new medicines. There are also economic advantages to cities as hubs of commerce, and advantages of security that high walls and a large force of arms can provide. Beyond these concrete benefits are those of culture and of art, accelerated and fertilised by the proximity of thinkers who can afford to think instead of working in the fields.

While some of these advantages have been left in the past, the economics and cultural attraction of cities remain. Even if for no other reason than the basic Human desire for companionship cities will always be a part of Human existence. Or will they? Many SF settings include technology that would make cities less advantageous, and that even might even create conditions under which cities are no longer advantageous…."
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Amicalement
Armand

Kind of interesting. It needs two things to work – the replicator device and FTL travel.

The idea of a Mongol like existence can be had with Uber like housing, dinning and travel. People don't need to work, just travel around from beach house to beach house.
Replicators may need an original to duplicate or need the plans. But the plans may not be free. Then there would be market forces in play for plans of never seen before devices.

Plus terrorism might be a reason for people to disperse and not come together as targets.

Glad you enjoyed it my friend!.

Amicalement
Armand

There are actually 4 basic commodities: Land, Labor (energy), Capital (money), and Ideas (like replicator printing files).

While ideas in general will never be scarce, GOOD ideas are scarce.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Oh, oops, missed a parenthetical for the 4 basic commodities. Should be: Land (raw materials), Labor (energy), Capital (money), and Ideas (of things to make).

When you get into replicator societies, raw materials is pretty much anything you can stuff into the replicator, energy can be close to free (depending on your background tech), and a medium of exchange can quickly get blown to heck when people can use a fusion-powered replicator to pull gold out of seawater or just recycle old computer parts for the gold (more efficient than mining seawater). Which leaves ideas.

Sadly, this also makes people who aren't making good ideas more or less out of the productive part of society.

Check out the Infinity Roleplaying Game, it has a pretty big section on what an iota-scarcity economy ends up looking like (probably 2/3rds of the population on a Basic Living Stipend because they don't NEED to work)

Just like bad money drives out good money, bad ideas drive out good ideas. We used to write code so our compiles were as small as possible and used as little storage space for data as we could. The classic example is the two digit year field.
Now there is huge amounts of memory and storage space. So thing are bloated. There's not time to do it right but there's time to do it twice.

One other basic is time. You can't depreciate time. So if bad ideas are cheaper and faster then they will supplant good ideas.

Speaking of money or capital right now there is virtually unlimited money. All that someone at a treasury has to do is type it into a computer. It is suppose to be backed by the goods and services that a country can produce. So in the future when there is almost unlimited energy and raw materials to throw into the replicator hopper money will also be limit less. I'm not sure what kind of society that would look like.

I think until human nature changes/evolves. Things will be very much like today. But with high tech, etc., … E.g. food, clothing shelter and money, ideology, conscience, ego … etc., …