Friday 28 March 2014

Food and water

The objective is not to remove money. The objective is to find a better way to live and money simply seems to be an impediment for this. It seems the phrase "money is the root of all evil" applies perfectly to my line of thinking. So removing money from the equation is just a means to achieve our goal.
So if there is no money, no one would go to work, so how does the system work? Well, there are some jobs that people will take voluntarily. Without money, social recognition will be very high in our scale of needs. So I'm sure many of us will struggle to stand out in whatever our field of expertise is. There will be no lack of artists or sports people, I can assure you that.
However, for the system to work, the basic needs must be provided to everyone for free. So what are our basic needs? According to Maslow all of our needs are divided in levels as in a pyramid:
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
At the very basic level, we have our basic physiological needs: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis and excretion. I would say that except food and water, we are all free to perform the others on our own.
So here is our first obstacle. We must provide free food and drinking water to everyone in the world.
I believe that the solution for this will come from automation. We should build "robots" or somehow automate the food producing process. Some secondary obstacles come up here.
Let's assume for starters that we can all survive solely on rice. The first thing we need is rice fields. So again, for simplicity, let´s assume that all the land in the world has the conditions to grow rice and that we have enough land to feed everyone.
We need someone to create a machine that produces rice and someone to maintain those machines. I may have watched too many sci-fi movies, but this actually does not sound very far fetched to me.
After that we need a delivery system to reach every city and town. Of course, to be efficient, there should be lots of production sites all around the world, so that you only need to send the rice a few kilometers from each one and not all around the world from a single site.

Going back a little, I don't think we can all survive on rice. But if we can build a machine that produces rice, I'm sure we could build other machines that produce different food types. I don't think everyone will be able to produce or maintain these machines, but the knowledge should be free for everyone that wishes to learn how to do it.
This rises an important issue: Education. It is not a personal need (not directly at least) but it would be necessary for such a society to survive. I'll ramble about it in the next post.

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