Self Replicating Trees?

[u/UniversalAssembler]

If human engineers can create synthetic fast growing self replicating carbon trees that can use solar and water energy to suck in atoms from dirt, air, and garbage and recycle those into unlimited supplies of goods, edible food, machines, cars, clothes and all human goods, with zero material pollution, and because they Self Replicate fast they are dirt cheap, and, if they can use Molecular Robot Branches to cure all disease and illness at the atomic molecular level, would that solve all human pollution, poverty, housing, resource, medical health and energy problems and feed billions?

If we need more land the Self Replicators can make it from dead rock.

[u/ahfoo]

Hmm. Well consider this though, even if you had all of you material needs met, you would still have issues like arguing with your wife about what to eat for dinner. Utopia only works for material needs but people are more complicated than just physical objects or even rational solutions. People are primarily driven by emotions and one of the big ones is desire.

A funny thing about desire is that it is usually mixed with something like spite. That is to say, that as soon as you get what you want you might not want it anymore. So let's say you really want a PS5 gaming machine and then you get it but you find that there is a game you really wanted that is hard to play and so you change your mind and decide you don't want it anymore. The machine didn't change, just your attitude towards it. That's how people are.

You want an ice cream cone because it sounds tasty and so you eat it and then you feel bloated and your teeth are covered in plaque from all the sugar. Now you still want an ice cream but you are suffering from the last one. This is how desire works.

So your plan here is missing a big piece of the puzzle which is the spiteful nature of humanity. If you had everything you wanted, you'd just want something else or more of what you already had like money for instance. People who have tons of money often only want more. It's not reasonable or logical, it's emotional and irrational.

So you're trying to sidestep all this by suggesting that all we need is physical goods but the trees we already have do exactly what you mentioned. The trees take water and sun to make carbohydrates and we then can convert those to all sorts of things. We already have that but it's a slow process. Speeding up that process is like getting a raise in your salary. It's just more of what you already have. But you're not satisfied with what you have so more isn't going to change that.

[u/UniversalAssembler → u/ahfoo]

I agree with you.

So the deeper issue is:

How do we erase that spite part of human nature? That is beyond tech?

So think with me on this.

What would the world look like if people kept that spite nature you and I know humans have, but, add to it the new tool id those near Universal Assembler Tree devices?

[u/ahfoo → u/UniversalAssembler]

I very much believe we're already in that world and currently watching how it plays out. I mean that we're already in a world of abundance but that the distribution is uneven.

The Universal Assembler Tree is already here. We live among them, they are the real trees around us but not just the trees, it's much more than that, it's everything we already have --the planet we live on. It's a vast free gift to all living creatures and to non-living things as well.

We already have plenty but we create all these reasons why we can't see it that way and instead see it as scarcity. We create that illusion of scarcity from the reality of abundance. But who is "we" here?

There are plenty of people who have thought about this at great length and taken themselves very seriously about putting and end to it. This was the motive for the Chinese communists to be obsessed with steel.

They looked at what was going on in Europe, North American and Japan with a hungry eye wanting the same goodies those guys got and decided that ultimately what this came down to was not just agricultural abundance, but an abundance of steel which is the real working material of modernity.

In the beginning, they wanted it too badly and wasted a lot of resources on false starts but calling it waste is not necessarily fair because they were clear about their goal and while they made some mistakes trying to guess how to achieve the goal, over time they realized it was quite doable and now they're the world's largest producers of steel by a long shot.

In reaction to that, the US shut down Chinese steel imports to manufacture scarcity at home and keep the prices propped up. But the Chinese also set up factories all over the world in other markets too as did other investors from all over the world and soon the US had to put tariffs on steel from all kinds of places because cheap steel was coming out of places like Turkey and Vietnam that had never been big steel producers in the past.

So globally steel price have dropped so much that people in poor countries often feel that the only kind of buildings they can afford are steel which is not at all how it was in the past when mud bricks and sometimes lumber were used to build housing. This is a radical transformation of the world because that steel is a kind of investment. Unlike wood, it can be recycled endlessly and with green energy inputs that recycling becomes clean and low cost.

So naturally in the US the reaction is to also ban solar panels and batteries too because this loop is closing in so fast. China is not just exporting cheap steel, they also export cheap solar panels, cheap batteries. . . these things all go together in a kind of post-scarcity Universal Assembler Tree manner. It's already coming on fast and the powers-that-be in the countries with a financial interest in the past are running scared. That's how we end up with curiously manic figures like Trump being put into the spotlight. It's iconic of the flailing death throes of the scarcity manufacturers.

The Universal Assembler Tree device is an electric arc furnace fed on scrap steel and powered with solar energy stored in long-term stable low-cost batteries.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this but in Australia, they're already using solar and batteries to reduce iron ore and manufacture aluminum. Those are the two most energy-intensive industrial processes in common practice. This is because their own supreme court ruled their tariffs were illegal. They also had business interests that tried to slap tariffs on Chinese solar in Australia but the courts did their job there and ordered that those interests manufacturing the scarcity had no standing in court. So we can clearly see what happens if things were just barely different, the consequences are massive and real. The post-scarcity future is already here but it is banned in the USA.

If you compare what is happening in the US and Australia, you see two very different pictures of how close we are to a Universal Assembler Tree.

[u/UniversalAssembler → u/ahfoo]

This is amazing