Fundamental resources
Energy
We have these major sources of energy available to us: (in no particular order and not including fossil fuel)
- Solar: photovoltaic, solar thermal, solar power satellite
- Wind: Land-based wind turbine, off-shore wind turbine; jet-stream sky windmills
- Ocean: wave, tidal, ocean currents
- Nuclear: fission and possibly fusion in the future
- Geothermal: volcanic geothermal, 'deep rock' geothermal
- Biomass: vegetable oil, compost methane, burning of plant material waste, sustainable wood, animal dung and rubbish
These sources of power absolutely dwarf what is available from fossil fuel.
Material
Between air, water and the twenty most abundant elements in the earth's crust you can make almost everything.
- Food and drinking water
- Buildings
- Vehicles
- Industrial machines and robots
- Computers
- Consumer electronic products
Everything we could ever need. And those reserves of material are simply not going to run out - processing and using up the entire earth's crust would be quite a challenge.
There are other trace elements required for certain things - especially agriculture, but by the nature of them, correspondingly small amounts are needed.
Intelligence
Human intelligence
People may suggest this as the one fundemental resource that really is in short supply!
We just haven't been using it very effectively so far. Currently only small bands of people collaborate in any meaningful way. The development of most things whether they be products, services, utilities or agricultural processes tend to be done behind closed doors. This means that compared to what is possible, progress is sporadic and slow. With the involvment of all interested parties and using open and transparent development processes progress could be far quicker and more efficient. This would also significantly reduce the huge duplication of effort that happens today.
As well as potentially increasing the effectiveness of our current intelligence, total intelligence is growing constantly.
Worldwide education is become more pervasive and of better quality, meaning that a larger percentage of the population can effectively participate in developing solutions. The world population is still increasing too which increases the pool of intelligence and the proposed advanced automation will result in freeing a greater percentage of the population to work on vital solutions to hard problems if they so wish.
Machine intelligence
On the machine side, intelligence is increasing exponentially and will do so for the forseable future. Not only are the number of information processing units multiplying rapidly, but the relative computing power of each one is increasing exponentially too.
On top of that algorithms and programming techniques are improving all the time to make more effective use of the hardware, as are distributive computing techniques which are able to make use of idle processor time between connected units.
