It might be 100 years, but in the long term I think the wealth transfer mechanism will be in delivered energy. Barrels of oil work well for now, maybe we'll switch to Joules eventually.
Exactly. My point is that energy is the only thing we have that is scarce. There's water, perhaps, but we can convert salt water to potable water with enough energy. Why abstract away energy with bills or metals?
Energy isn't that scarce, actually. If we eliminated our military, for example, there would instantly be a 100% surplus as the military accounts for about 50% of the fuel this country uses. As for why we abstract energy with bills, it's because people are easier to control that way. Plus you need to account for the not to easy to calculate idea of "human energy" represented by money. If China's population doubles, bankers can increase the money supply to account for their economic activity - to a point. But how can we increase the energy "things" to do that? A bit harder.
Of course energy is scarce! We can't afford to send very heavy things into space. We can't send a radio signal into space that is so loud that you can be sure as hell everything within 100 light years is going to know we are here. We can't build superstructures, even if we got rid of the military. We could probably build a huge particle accelerator if we got rid of the military though...
Well, if we use energy for stupid, wasteful projects then of course energy is scarce; if we use it more effectively/efficiently, then less so. It's all based on how/what we use it for.
>We can't build superstructures, even if we got rid of the military.
Research Dubai. They're building the world's 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and fourth greatest structures at the same time. The #1 building is almost twice the height of those towers in malasia.
> We could probably build a huge particle accelerator if we got rid of the military though..
personally making scooters and small hatchbacks sexy like they do in Europe would be a good idea, as would coordinating flights better to not have half-full jets wasting fuel taking off ...
Energy is fundamentally scarce. I am thinking about much larger scale uses of energy than anything humans are doing right now. Check out the link to the Kardashev Scale posted above, we need orders of magnitude more energy to build something like a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
What the hell is the basis of downgrading this post? Seriously I come across posts like, "It depends" that have like, 46 points next to them. I put up a post, short, long, on point, off point, boring, interesting, and there's like a 24-hour army of down-modding ninjas tracking my every keystroke just waiting to pounce on me and downgrade ... get a life you haters!
But I get downmodded no matter what. It seems like there's a conspiracy to make sure I never get above mid-50s. Heck, I think if I add all the 30-to-50 variances I'd be up to at least 500 by now. Okay. Fine. Um, "Me too. I agree. What that guy said reminds me of an article by Paul Graham ... BTW, I was using all these cool new startup apps, then I found out they were all started by this incubator, Y Combinator, which just happened to be run by the guy who wrote most of my favorite articles on the whole wide internet, Paul Graham. Did I mention I can't wait for someone to do a mashup of Xobni and RescueTime and Reddit? Also, a random thought occurred to me: without Viaweb, Yahoo would probably never have gotten off the ground. Also, last, I would upmod everybody if only I could, especially pg and rms. Have I mentioned how clean, fresh and well-thought out the design of Hacker News is? If only all forums were this elegant. There! Can I please have a few extra points now? My dream is to someday break the magical (for me) "60 barrier". I've heard tales. I believe it's possible, somehow, someway. I love all you guys, even the band of down-modding ninjas tracking my every move. May you all have many buyout offers from Google and Microsoft, but enough customers to be able to turn them down and go on to bigger, better things.
Obviously karma is very important to you, I gave you as many points as I could.
Just say what you want and don't worry about the karma. You've got something of a stream of consciousness style going on; your posts are longer than most here. My advice is to try and make your posts more concise. If they were shorter, people would be more likely to take the time to reply rather than just downmod you.