This episode is brought to you by World Anvil.
Many of us dread a future in which we don’t
have any money. But that might not feel so bad actually, as long as the rest of the
world doesn’t need any money either.
So a topic that comes up a lot in discussion of
the future is what the economy might look like and how money might change in the future, or if it has
any role at all. A look at a future without money is probably one of our most requested topics,
from both advocates and detractors of the idea. So I thought we would try to address all
of that today and not ask ourselves if a society without money is good or not,
or even just if it’s possible or not, but how it might come about and function.
As we do in our alien civilization series, where we’ll take a hypothetical type of civilization and
ask if the scenario makes sense or how it might exist. Needless to say this is a touchy topic
and I’ll do my best to present it neutrally.
Where money is concerned, the reason
people hope it might cease to exist is usually the easiest part. A lot of folks
feel money is bad in and of itself -- or at least that it’s a poor choice of a life goal or
becomes the life goal of far too many people.
Of course they say money is the root of all
evil… except they actually do not say that. The quote is from the Apostle Paul, and is in
Greek so translations vary, but the original is “The Love of Money”, specifically calling out
greed not the concept of currency, and it isn’t “All Evil” but “all kinds of Evil”. This seems
like an important distinction to make since if we’re assuming money is the root of all evil, then
we must get rid of it. Whereas if we’re saying greed for wealth spawns a lot of bad things,
then our focus is more on ridding ourselves of a behavior manifested around a tool, not the tool.
That’s not unique either, and it comes up in regard to a lot of future technologies or
challenges. We often worry about how to handle poorly understood potentially dangerous
new technology that might end world hunger or might bring about the apocalypse. Or both.
Whether it is a pen or sword, money or guns, axe or keyboard, many tools tend to have large
amounts of bad behavior manifested around them. And it would be equally overly simplistic
to say either ‘the tool isn’t to blame’ or ‘remove the tools and the problem goes away’.
Obviously an inanimate physical object can’t be blamed for anything, you decide
how to use a knife or dollar bill, but it would also be dishonest to pretend they
don’t affect us. In an obvious and extreme case, we know that strong addictive narcotics can affect
our behavior and decisions in ways we won’t have the strength to control, so most of us voluntarily
decide to just keep them out of our own reach, and there’s at least a case to be made for
keeping them out of everyone else’s as well. Once you’ve done that, it’s legitimate to at least
examine the question of what else society might be better off finding a way to live without.
Such a civilization might decide it needs to do without other advantages, like people
born more attractive or smarter than others, rather than born to a wealthier family.
And they might be able to do that too, setting everyone to the same high IQ or
attractiveness, or permitting variety in both but scoring it, like the point buy system many role
playing game use for character building, you make a character and assign more points to intelligence
or charisma or physical strength and so on.
That is not specifically pertinent to a
lack of money but it's important to ask why or how a civilization has done away money,
or maybe never had it in the first place, and if that might lead to the pursuit of
parallel concepts. They probably would have the cybernetic and genetic technology to make
folks smarter or stronger or better looking, and also probably to alter people’s thinking
so they just weren’t greedy, or weren’t heavily impacted by other people’s looks or charisma.
Or they could approach the problem from the other end and alter people’s thinking so they’re
no longer bothered by inequality. That’s a bit of a frightening idea to say the least and
it dovetails into one of our favorite sinister concepts on the channel, the Post-Discontent
Civilization, in which everyone has been made content through neuro-hacking, whatever
their workload or social status. They live in a slum when not working 16 hour shifts,
and they’re perfectly content with that.
But even if our hypothetical enlightened
civilization just sticks to doing away with money, we need to ask what they are replacing
money with because they probably do need an accounting system. Your civilization might
have such abundance that food, water, shelter, medicine, computers, jetpacks, and flying cars are
all too trivially easy to get for anyone to bother selling them. They may have local councils
that vote on what to do if someone asks for something atypically big, like a house made of
solid platinum, or who controls a finite and locked resource like a particular parcel of land.
They may pool resources to build megastructures the size of continents. But all this still
needs to be accounted for and prioritized.
Let’s pause to ponder
exactly what we mean by that, money as a tool for accounting and prioritizing.
Imagine for a moment that you are the enlightened organizer of all production for an enlightened,
non-greedy but still productive civilization. And let’s start with a simple problem like how
much steel your society should produce next year and of what types. Well, your upper limit would be
your maximum physically possible steel production, a limit that could be set by a number of factors,
including the number and size of foundries, the amount of iron ore coming from the mines,
and scrap steel coming back from old projects, or the amount of energy available to melt
all that metal and operate those foundries. Indeed it could include devoting
huge portions of your other resources to ramping up steel production as a crash project
if you suddenly needed a few trillion tons more.
However, it is unlikely you’ll run every
industry at maximum capacity every year, so you’ll need to figure out how much steel you
really need. You’ll probably figure this out by breaking it down by product. How many steel
ball bearings, razor blades, hood springs, harvester blades, deck plates, helicopter
engine blocks, two-inch nails, and steel cable does your society need next year? So you
start with the first item on your long list, ball bearings, so you ponder how many bicycles,
water pumps, wood lathes, and fan motors you’ll need bearings for? How many bicycles you
need is an even more complex question…
And I’m sure you see where this is going. You
would need unfathomable amounts of up-to-date data about every detail of our economy before we could
even begin to develop fair methods of deciding if one person’s need for a bicycle outweighs another
person’s need for more razor blades, or how to prioritize one city’s need for sewer grates vs a
farm’s need for harvester blades. And we haven’t even talked about the manpower necessary to gather
all that data and make all those micro-managing decisions. Neither have we talked about how much
energy the steel industry even gets next year, since the food, manufacturing, and military
sectors need energy too. Oh, and all of this comes after you’ve somehow made your subjects not greedy
and your legion of bureaucrats incorruptible.
And we can’t just dismiss this concern by saying
that money will go away when we’re post-scarcity and there are no more such conflicts
over resources, because even in a post-scarcity society, demand for goods may
rise until there may be such conflicts again. We always say on the Show that ‘The Sky is
not the Limit’ and people can dream big, like terraforming or building entire worlds simply
to allow it to be used as a nature preserve.
And untangling this sort of mess
is exactly what money is handy for. If the ball bearing industry outbids the engine
block manufacturers for the available steel, that can be viewed as a tacit decision on
society’s part that ball bearings are needed more at this time than additional engine blocks.
And if the steel industry buys up all the energy and leaves less for agriculture, food prices will
rise presumably until agribusiness can buy up more energy and a new temporary balance or equilibrium
is achieved. It’s a far, far from perfect system that gets priorities backwards quite often, but
it spares us needing that vast army of intrusive data gatherers and micro-managers. Such data
gathering or micro-managing might be done anyway, but money is the default way of doing this.
Now the two common objections I and others often make to hypothetical moneyless societies is that
frequently folks achieve this moneyless society on paper by either utterly ignoring gaping flaws,
plotholes, or issues with their concept or by basically just renaming money, such as your
VR or holodeck time. As an example having some ration tokens in a post-scarcity everybody got
that you could apply to atypical acquisitions, things beyond normal need for living comfortably,
is not the same thing as money but mostly in that it is inferior to it, lacking quite the same
flexibility. So too, something like a social credit score, where how many likes or dislikes
a person got somehow translated to ability to acquire things, suffers from being like money
except most available to popular people, and a way of strangling those who want to be off
the beaten track, either by being unknown and isolated or by holding unpopular views or stances
or even just not wearing the newest fashions.
So we want to beware of ‘money by another name’,
but at the same time we don’t want to broaden the concept to the point of being meaningless.
Money is a nicely liquid and mathematical easy way to engage in exchanges or even monitor
inventories and production across the board. It also lets you often measure how effective or
popular a given product or community effort is as folks select to trade or give funds to it. However
simply being a tool for accounting or measuring is not money. If you have a million products all with
different and changing values, rating those in their dollar value is handier than measuring each
in terms of every other one, but this is simply assigning a new unit, no different than measuring
a thing’s mass or weight in kilograms or pounds, its length or height in feet or meters, its
brightness in candle-equivalents or watts, and so on. You’ve specifically declared a dollar to be a
unit of common economic worth in a case like that, and I don’t think you could be calling something
money if it was not functioning in that way.
So a civilization that holds a vote on whether
or not to approve someone’s atypical request – a solid gold house or a giant spaceship to be used
as a personal yacht for instance – could not be said to have their votes translate to money
equivalents. On the other hand, they presumably need some way to measure how much resources they
have on hand, and what their incoming flow of them was, to be deciding if they could approve the
1000 big requests they got that year and also how to rank them by effort or resources used and
possibly by how much that person or persons making the request had previously asked for or were
willing to promise not ask for down the road, in other words, a means of measuring debt.
However this is not automatically money, even if in many setups it will be as near enough
as to make no difference. But not in all cases. If we imagine a civilization with a Star
Trek Style replicator that converted matter to energy and vice-versa seamlessly, then your
only issues are available mass to use and the time it occupies the replicator performing
that service, and that latter might not even matter since you can presumably tell the machine
that its next task is making a copy of itself. This isn’t a story or game after all
that needs a rule about not asking the genie for a million wishes as your first wish.
In that case, all that matters is if the process is causing a permanent loss of mass and energy,
and how much. We already have units for mass, energy, and time, something which is exactly
identical to one of those is not money. And I’d further justify that by looking at
what such a civilization would be like, something Charles Stross examined in his novel
Singularity Sky. If you’ve got a machine that can make anything, indeed which might not even
be bound by Conservation of Energy or the Laws of Thermodynamics for all we know, then it’s a little
hard to figure out how such a society would even operate, let alone how its economy should work,
given that supply and demand are key to that.
A Hive Mind, like the Borg from Star Trek, has
plenty of interactions and also presumably keeps detailed inventories and analysis of its resources
and expenditures, and of how efficient those are, but it’s not using money or doing economics.
By this same reasoning then we could say a civilization where everyone has identical or near
identical goals doesn’t need money either. Note by identical goals we can’t be ignoring individuality
here, since two people with the goal of personal survival very much do not have identical goals,
anymore than the cat and mouse or spider and fly do. However if we are contemplating the classic
super-enlightened society we often see in science fiction – what are often called Space Elves – then
they might genuinely not need currency for the same reason a Hive Mind doesn’t. None of them have
any conflicting and competing ambitions and goals. We could also argue that a society that so rarely
had conflicting or competing objectives, and those minimal and easily resolved by some process
of arbitration, is not using money either.
Just as a sidenote, as we go through these kind of
examples there are going to be bits that stick out as ‘ah-ha’ moments, like when I said arbitration I
imagine many of you thought “Courts arbitrate but you have to hire a lawyer or pay them from the
public coffers, and free lawyers appointed by the state aren’t as good as some expensive legal
team”, and that is certainly true. However, folks by and large do not like the idea that the success
of one’s case should hinge on how much lawyering you can buy, so a post-scarcity civilization might
decide to take things a step further and use an AI or have every advocate randomly assigned to
each dispute like judges and juries usually are.
Of course, unless your lawyer is one of those
incorruptible devoted-to-duty Space Elves, the only incentive that advocate had
then for doing a good job is reputation, and while that might be enough that also raises
another common example of ‘just money by another name’, in this case your social reputation. Now
reputation is not the same as money but has a lot of parallels and a lot of modern marketing
is just reputation-building for a brand name. It’s also critical to exchanges in small groups
like tribes or clans where favors and social status are the primary currency, though again
that’s getting a bit broad with the term money. Reputation is also hard to do math and
accounting with, though many a marketing firm would love to be able to change that.
It's probably worth asking if that is fair though, if we really should be using those broadest
definitions for money in contemplating a society without it, and to that I’d just say your mileage
may vary. We have no universal definition for money and nobody has some exclusive right to set
that definition either. Nobody anointed a given dictionary or economics professor the exclusive
right to set an ironclad definition across all time, languages, and cultures for what is and is
not money, or any other term for that matter.
So if someone wants to use a definition so broad
that it would include an accounting chart for inter-family activities and exchanges, then I
can’t say that’s wrong. Nor could I say it was wrong if someone wanted to limit that definition
specifically only to voluntary exchanges of goods and services between entities. I’d just
point out that in the former, you now need to be able to justify a parent hugging their kid
as an economic transaction, and in the latter you presumably need to justify paying taxes as a
voluntary exchange, which requires some caution so you don’t accidentally also include
getting mugged as a voluntary exchange.
For today’s purposes we will assume there’s some
definition of money in there which is not so broad as to include every human exchange of any kind nor
so restrictive it starts ignoring obvious examples of money. We will also bypass systems too small
or primitive to bother with creating a medium of exchange and accounting, for instance you can
argue that many civilizations didn’t have money, they had barter, and this is true but hardly
indicative of some great enlightenment, but rather of just not having developed currency
as a technology or practice yet. When their chieftain or warlord rolls up to your village gate
demanding fifty wagonloads of grain or he’ll torch your town down, that’s not enlightened by any
standard other than maybe the Klingons, and I don’t think him demanding a signed promissory note
for the grain or its equivalent in other goods alters the morality, merely the sophistication.
I hate to keep picking on Star Trek, but in it the Federation is said to have no money
while folks like the Captains are regularly shown to have far more influence, resources, and
power than the average person. We’re told that humanity has evolved beyond accumulating things,
to quote Picard in the episode the Neutral Zone, talking to stockbroker who had been frozen for
centuries and revived. "A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are
no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need
for possessions. We've grown out of our infancy."
And yet we see Picard, and everyone else,
repeatedly valuing things and having prized possessions. I’m also not sure what that
cultural growth is, to be less driven by greed, when you have holodecks and replicators and
abundant clean energy, but isn’t it possible someone else would value Picard’s original
copy of Moby Dick enough to steal it? Also the writers never specify what that growth was and it
could be pretty sinister, like brain implants or genetic modification to make them less greedy or
ambitious or self-interested. However this access to abundance is critical to the concept. They are
clearly a post-scarcity civilization, and this is one where there’s just so much abundance there’s
no need to compete for basic survival needs, which a cynic might argue makes having ethics
cheaper. Their morality costs them nothing.
There are plenty of things that just
represent desirable items that can’t be subject to post-scarcity, fame, prestige,
unique items and so on. Here though is where Picard’s comment needs a second look, because
while its obviously acknowledged that they don’t need to struggle with each other for basic
survival goods, food and medicine and such, and thus there’s no grocery store selling
food anywhere, anymore than we have stores for air or encyclopedias anymore, he doesn’t say they
don’t have things they desire and strive for.
Instead he says, “People are no longer
obsessed with the accumulation of things.” This is probably the critical aspect for
contemplating how we could actually have a functioning society without money, you’ve
got to change how folks behave, and to do that you have to change how they think. Which is where
various forms of alteration to human education, genetics, and so on might play a role, sinister
or enlightened, edifying or indoctrination.
But we also need to ask what ‘things’
people were accumulating and now aren’t, given that we’ve already noticed the various
crewmembers accumulated plenty of stuff and they also clearly value personal comfort.
It is horribly over-simplistic and a false dichotomy to say human desires classify
as strictly physical and material or intellectual and spiritual, and that the
latter is inherently better in all cases, and presumably Trek doesn’t think so either though
it probably depends on which writer you ask. Humans do have certain primary focuses though.
There’s a lot of disagreement about what those are and how to classify them. The classic 7 deadly
sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth along with their polar opposite vices
is one example, and we have many versions of that outline and many parallel examples. Let’s borrow
from a more modern and somewhat controversial one, Moral Foundations Theory, which offers six
critical values humans tend to have. Those are Care vs Harm, Fairness vs Cheating, Loyalty
vs Betrayal, Authority vs Subversion, Sanctity vs Degradation, and Liberty vs Oppression.
And to show some obvious conflicts on priorities, we obviously think it wrong to inflict pain
or hardship on someone, or leave them in pain, care vs harm, but we will use them as punishment
in the Fairness vs Cheating or Justice value, and we often measure someone’s nominal sanctity
or purity by how much they’ve voluntarily suffered or sacrificed to maintain that purity. You
could also have a civilization that absolutely valued fairness at sporting games but applauded
trickery or cheating in other games or in war, bluffing at poker or ambushing an enemy,
so while a culture might be obsessed with one of these values over another, they also
might have a pretty broad spectrum of how, when, and what flavor they were obsessed with.
I’ve no idea which of these the Federation valued and when, it’s a fictional Universe of many
different authors, though I’d be curious in the comments which one or ones you thought the Star
Trek Federation of Planets focused on compared to, say, the Romulans or Klingons. But the Klingons
clearly like to accumulate ‘things’ only for them it's mostly martial victories and the appearance
of honor. An advantage of a post-scarcity society is that you probably can get away with having 99%
of your population be warriors too, especially given that this does not imply it is either a
full time job or interferes with learning other skills. But we couldn’t say that a civilization
focused on honor, as opposed to personal purity, doesn’t have a potential need for money. Even
ignoring that both might be quantities based on other people’s opinions, and thus subject to
marketing or bribery, it's obviously easy to win many victories with a bunch of warships and
combat troops, or to keep yourself pure by hiring others to do all your farming or cleaning
or less undesirable tasks which might taint you.
What exactly do they value? Because it is probably
fair to point out that economics and money are not limited to trading widgets and material goods,
they are the exchange of valued things for each with relative values determined through supply and
demand. We already discussed how broadly we should define money today though, and so we can say
that the Federation could still have stuff they valued and exchanged around without specifically
needing money. If someone is a teacher who prizes knowledge and respect, and a student comes to
them offering respect and asking for knowledge, that’s certainly an exchange but it's not money.
But those 6 values or 7 deadly sins or whichever are important because a culture could, through
indoctrination or genetic alteration or surgery presumably remove or prune down how
much people wanted of such a value or to commit such a deadly sin.
Of course you can also correct needs for these by sheer technological abundance. So, let’s
imagine a civilization like the Federation where you really need not worry about where food, water,
and electricity were coming from, or any random widget. Either they are dirt cheap or supplied by
government, with replicators, 3D printers and vast fusion-powered hydroponic growth labs where robots
harvest food, and spin your clothes, and so on.
What actually needs to be bought or traded?
They’re a democracy and meritocracy where most folks are highly educated and community-minded
so where volunteers aren’t drawn to a task, they probably would have no problem
with conscription instead of taxation. That’s a classic approach in places where
trade and coinage haven’t really formalized and stabilized, all the small landholders owe their
feudal lord X number of days per year of service and by and large you can rely on their
personal ethics, pride, and sense of honor to tackle an assigned task with enthusiasm.
Robots help with that too, because if you drew the short straw and are assigned the worst job
around, you don’t have to clean the town sewers, just supervise the robots doing that. Amusingly
a moneyless society operating on this principle might view sloth as their new worst problem, over
greed, and suggest some evaluation system of work along with rewards and prizes. You want to avoid
sloth and seek to do so by appealing to greed, pride, gluttony, or lust for that matter. To put
it tactfully, many a young man who volunteers to help with a popular cause is often suspected
by his peers of hoping to become more popular with young ladies by doing so. On that topic,
same as we might contemplate eliminating money, it is not hard to imagine a future civilization
is one where culture and policy have little to do with romantic motivations because everyone
is glutted on virtual reality, sexbots, and emotional support bots. Or in someway satisfies
other needs, or limits or removes other needs.
Which is one way to be without money,
just create a society that can easily produce basic physical needs and strongly
disapproves of the desire for anything else. On the flip side, a hyper-individualistic society
might be one without money too. Let us imagine that by the year 3000 AD we have invented reliable
and non-rebellious artificial intelligences, cheaply abundant power like compact fusion or
matter-to-energy converters, gotten very good with automation and nanotechnology, and have very
good 3D printers and life extension technology. And even assuming we still had patent laws,
pretty much every technology or copyrighted bit of entertainment from a century earlier
till back to now was public domain and fit on a harddrive you could put in your pocket.
Anybody who wants has the ability to jump on a spaceship and fly off to any corner of the
galaxy with a tank full of fuel which can run their virtual reality utopias and 3D printers
and automated food production and maintenance and medical facilities for a million years
before needing to refuel. A refueling that could be done at any of ten trillion minor
planets with a bit of raw material or ice. They certainly might have plenty of reasons for
folks to interact and exchange, but it's really hard to imagine how a formal currency would
continue to exist especially on the outskirts for those folks who basically left because
they wanted to be away from civilization.
Time lag is also a real issue for maintaining
currencies between star systems, you almost have to have a powerful over-body dictating the
value of the currency everywhere and when, so that you could trust the money you
spent to buy something 100 light years away will still purchase it when your cash
arrives. Barring that you probably have to shift to a commodity currency – where some
specific item like gold or hydrogen or such is the money. That’s doable but probably
could only be reliable if technology had plateaued, since commodity currencies are so
vulnerable to any big shift in availability. Raw elements like gold or platinum or hydrogen
are fairly universal at the interstellar scale so a galactic empire is not subject to having its
gold standard or hydrogen dollar collapse in value from a sudden discovery of a large new supply.
But it is still vulnerable to disruptive technology, like a device that makes extracting
precious deuterium for fusion reactors from gas giants ten times easier, or opening a new
source, like letting you pull it from stars, or blowing up an entire hydrogen economy by
inventing a black hole power generator.
Now realistically there is a point where either
your technology does plateau, in which case a commodity currency is more viable, or your
technology has just kept snowballing the way it’s been doing in recent centuries until you have
god-like powers that permit individuals options even a post-scarcity civilization couldn’t dream
of offering. That’s certainly another option for a society without money. Presumably a civilization
of demi-gods does not need money either. If you tend to subscribe to the notion that humanity’s
eventual fate is something along those lines, like the Q from Star Trek or the Ascended beings
from Stargate or many other scifi stories, then that would seem like one where money
wouldn’t be in play, though even there you might still have an informal currency
of favors owed and gambling debts paid.
So that’s some of the more abstract
paths to maybe not having money. One last one for the day. It is entirely
possible a civilization with good enough robotics might put a superintelligent AI
or group of them in charge of making sure everything was supplied and gave it some algorithm
for achieving optimum distribution of needs and arbitrating and prioritizing conflicting
or large requests. I’m not sure I’d want to live under such an AI’s thumb, even if it was
benevolent and competent, but whether I’d like that or not it is probably a doable setup
and one that would not require a currency. This is something we looked at more in our episode
Machine Overlords & Post-Discontent Societies.
I suppose as a whole, the take away from today
is that most of the suggested methods for going moneyless probably don’t quite work out in
practice, and maybe aren’t as desirable as they sound like, but that they probably could
be made to work if folks wanted it enough, or if their culture was different enough
– like a hive mind or ascended beings or ultra-individualistic post-scarcity loners –
that it simply didn’t serve a role for them.
Fundamentally though, the galaxy is a big place,
and offers us billions of worlds to try things out on, so I suspect we will see many try various
approaches to going without money and time will tell how successful or viable that might be.
…
I was mentioning earlier how everybody has
a different idea of a utopian future world, and wants to create that world, even
if just in their mind or a novel, and I also mentioned how certain technological
paths, in combination with certain social ones, for good or ill, might result in people getting
to assign points to various traits for themselves, or their kids, like we see with various point buy
systems in role playing games, both video games versions and classic pen & paper ones. I’ve played
my fair share of both down the years and tried my hand at writing fiction too. Based on comments
on the show down the years, I know it's a pretty popular set of hobbies with all of you too.
If you do enjoy worldbuilding, either for writing fiction or running games or just daydreaming,
then you know that a lot of the development time and mental energy gets burned up just trying
to organize your notes and build the framework, and there’s been a ton of attempts at making aids
and creative development tools down the years, but most have either had a steep and foggy
learning curve, or not really provided anything much better than pen and paper and
maybe word processor and paint program do.
That’s where I was amazed by World Anvil,
it’s overflowing with tools that help with worldbuilding, and while it is also quite
intuitive to use, they have a big arsenal of tutorial videos that that lets you quickly
create and easily organize all the ideas going through your head, and if you’re running
an RPG, of making it easily accessible and clearly understandable to your players.
World Anvil, the award-winning worldbuilding toolset, lets you quickly create settings and
flush them out to very deep and interactive levels, everything from leaving notes on
maps and smaller maps to alternate timeline tracking for your world’s history. Whether you’re
managing a campaign or writing a novel, whether you’re making city or dungeon maps or family
genealogies, whether it's scifi or fantasy genres, World Anvil lets you forge your setting better and
easier than anything I’ve ever worked with before, and it has a free version so you can
share it with others, and selectively, so they’re not seeing secret content. And you can
also incorporate ways to monetize your content, such as Patreon or Kofi or your own storefront.
World Anvil offers wikipedia-like articles for your world setting, interactive maps,
timelines, an RPG Campaign Manager and a full Novel-Writing Software, all the
tools you’ll need to run your RPG Campaign or write your novel, and never lose your notes
again! If you’d like to give World Anvil a try and let it help you forge new worlds, just
click the link in this episode’s description!
So that will wrap us up for September but we’ll
jump right into October by asking how in a vast space empire of countless trillions someone
could stand out, then on October 14th we’ll ask how we might feed all those folks, as we look at
the future of farming in the next few decades and beyond. Then We’ll have our October Sci-Fi Sunday
Episode, Sentient Planets & World Consciousnesses, on October 17th to discuss the popular
scifi idea of living and thinking worlds, and if they might occur naturally or be created
by high-tech civilizations. Then we’ll take a look at the concept of Convergent Evolution, aliens
who look or act like us, and then at artificial intelligence who might also act like some of us,
the misbehaving ones, with a look at Criminal AI.
Now if you want to make sure you get notified when
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media forums where you can get updates and chat with others about the concepts in the
episodes and many other futuristic ideas.
Until next time, thanks for
watching, and have a great week!
