By Jeremy Batterson (This version was sent to Phil Rubenstein shortly before his death, to which he replied, "here's to that future!")
Half of all human beings alive on Earth today are 30 years old or younger. They have not experienced the last two generations of decline and pessimism. Instead, they are born into a world on the edge of the most fundamental scientific changes in the organization of humanity since the agricultural revolution boosted the human population skyward. The changes that these young people will experience during their lifetimes are not containable by an oligarchy, since they are so systemic. Once Ben Franklin and his collaborators helped bring about socially deployable electricity, the world was fundamentally and inevitably changed. The oligarchy could only delay the spread of these benefits to part of the population. Even in the impossible case that the oligarchy gained everything it desired in terms of global control today, it would inevitably lose this control for reason of these developments.
Thus, let us look at these key oncoming developments, and think of the future existence of the first generation of recruits to the ICLC within the context of this. These future ICLC members, should we decide now that they will exist, will be in 2069 the same age as LaRouche’s first crew of recruits are in 2019, looking back over their long lives, and contemplating their own role in the outcome of future history. They will be looking ahead to a humanity scarcely conceivable to most today. In this short memo, let us lay forth rapidly the key transformational technologies that, taken together, represent the most fundamental shift in all recorded history. We cannot look for past precedents in known history for such powerful changes, since they don’t exist. We can only look back to prehistoric comparable cases which we know must have existed, such as the first use of fire, the first use of tools or the already-mentioned agricultural revolution.
The three closely related areas in question are energy, food and biology.
ENERGY: On fusion itself, I will simply list in rapid order some key benefits before moving on.
⦁ Easy desalinization and pumping of water to any place on Earth means that the biosphere on Earth will increase in mass by at least an order of magnitude. There will be more trees, animals and humans on Earth than at any time in millions of years.
⦁ Fusion torch mining, including on planets other than Earth that don’t have the benefit of rich ores of particular minerals that were concentrated by living organisms millions of years ago. This also includes full recycling of all wastes.
⦁ One-Earth-gravity acceleration opens the entire solar system to access. Even the most distant objects in the solar system, such as Pluto are only weeks away. In addition, a 1-G craft can hover in the upper atmospheres of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, all of which have about Earth’s gravity at their cloud tops. A craft there can hover just above the planet’s own gravity, and separate both deuterium and helium-3 from the atmospheres of these planets, which are almost entirely hydrogen (including the deuterium form) and helium (including the helium-3 form).
⦁ Rapid tunnel boring by laser becomes possible with a higher energy source. We could combine tunnel boring with fusion torch mining in some cases. Since most of the mass of rocks is oxygen, the waste product of such tunnel boring mining would be mostly oxygen. On the Moon, Mercury, Venus or Mars, such oxygen would have uses in its own right, such as for breathing. In the course of digging tunnels on the Moon in this way, the excess oxygen would be dumped on the surface, slowing beginning to build up an oxygen atmosphere on the Moon.
⦁ Spacesuits that can produce their own oxygen by dumping rocks or water ice into a side compartment.
FOOD: A little-publicized revolution in food and other bio-products is underway.
⦁ A recent powerful biological tool has been added to biological science, called CRYSPR gene editing. Unlike Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), which adds the DNA of one species to another, this works by editing the existing genome of a particular species. A harmful stretch of DNA, such as one causing illness, can be cut out or other DNA can be added. This enables rapid evolution of new types of food, as one example. The kind of miracles, such as the Chinese development of a rice breed that can grow in salty seawater, will be developed in very rapid order. Crops can be developed that grow in the cold arctic tundra, and so on. There are thousands of plants in the wild that could be tweaked to form edible versions. Everything we eat today has been genetically modified by thousands of years of human cultivation. Now that cultivation can be done in one year, instead of in thousands of years. People will be eating new kinds of fruits and vegetables we never even heard of.
⦁ Fusion itself will make it possible to grow food in underground farms or in locations far from the sun. In a greenhouse, the CO2 content, temperature, humidity and even lighting can be tailored to a particular crop. In addition, there is no need for pesticides, since bugs can easily be kept out. A greenhouse grows crops year-round instead of during the growing season. In an underground skyscraper, with perhaps a hundred sub-basement floors, tens of thousands of people could be fed by one single such tower, using artificial lighting.
⦁ Cell-based meat. About 20 companies are racing ahead to market the first “cultured meat.” This means separating cells from, for example, a cow and growing them in a special incubator. The resulting meat is identical to the meat from a cow, but is done without killing the cow. More importantly, it is possible to produce meat for tens of thousands of people with one cow. Moreover, it need not be limited to cows. Once the science is perfected, it could just as easily be Rhinoceros or Armadillo meat as meat from beef, pork and poultry. That will add more choices for chefs wanting to add interesting tastes to their repertoire. Different types of meat are already being produced this way, but the cost has not yet been brought down to the level of traditional meat.
⦁ A-cellular agriculture. This is using bio-organisms to produce edible material, without those organisms themselves being the food. Already, yeasts have been genetically modified to produce either cow’s milk or egg protein. This is identical in nutritional content to the relevant material from cows or chickens, but is produced without either animal. Once again, once this science is perfected, it will be just as easy to produce Rhinoceros milk or Ostrich eggs as the ones we are used to consuming. Among other things, this will be an efficient means to produce protein for astronauts on Mars, and other places.
⦁ In addition to food, this method is being used to produce other bio-products, such as leather. You can grow leather from a cow or from a Moose, and make a coat without killing any animal.
⦁ (Addendum) A recent company has perfected a NASA plan which uses microbes to ferment a high-protein powder from hydrogen, carbon dioxide and nutrient. The finished product is a flour-like substance with no taste, 50% protein, 10% fat and 25% carbohydrates. This substance could be either an added ingredient for boosting protein content of common foods or used as a feedstock for agriculture, including cellular and acellular agriculture.
⦁ The above-mentioned CRYSPR gene editing can also edit out genes in humans with inheritable diseases. Recent experiment successfully removed genes from mice prone to develop deafness, with the mice involved retaining their hearing much better. Of course this will have to be regulated and done carefully with respect to humans.
⦁ A recent discovery that some plants cells photosynthesize with infrared rather than visible light opens interesting possibilities for food crops in deep, hot and dark caves.
⦁ Longevity. The human lifespan has been steadily increasing over centuries. Recently, use of NAD+ has been hypothesized for keeping people healthier as they age. Between better hygiene, better diet, gene editing and better understanding of the aging process, it is entirely possible that people 50 years hence will live an average of ten, twenty or thirty years longer than people today.
In short, all of the above tells us that we are on the edge of unprecedented leaps in the size of the human population. Relative potential population density will go three-dimensional in more ways than one. In particular, with fusion it becomes readily possible for people to live, produce their own oxygen and grow their own food virtually anywhere.
(Since this memo is bare reporting on these shifts, we leave out any implications of time-reversal until later.