Humanity+ = Plants+
For the future, the only future… we must become like plants
The Problem: The Current System of Humanity
Aspect 1: We each must work towards always making profit, to avoid death or slavery. Making profit can be by financial return on investment, or return on labour, or return on materials, or return on energy expended. For everything we win, someone else has to lose, sometimes even including life itself.
Indirectly, we must always enslave, and / or kill others, to survive.
Colonialism, racism, fascism, terrorism, criminalism, in fact just about every ism we can imagine, are instruments and outcomes of the for-profit system.
Aspect 2: For the profit model / system to work, we must be able to enforce scarcity. So we can only use things from scarce supplies to make profit. All capital is created from energy. We buy and sell all forms of capital, both that already in our hands, and that expected to be in our hands in the future, for profit. All of the energy we consume at profit is energy extracted from capital of Earth. So we are locked into a model of extracting all things including all energy from our planet.
By that we are practicing a Grand Energy Ponzi, since all things from Earth are from finite stocks of resources, we are consuming them with the obvious outcome that we will run out. But already, long before many things are exhausted, we are poisoning our environment, and depleting the natural filters of the sun around our planet, so now our planet and all plant life are beginning to burn under heat domes.
The Solution: We Must Become Like Plants
We have to transform our current system to reverse the way we are doing things, to work additively with nature, rather than being a negative burden on it.
Key to that transformation is our economy, built on the mechanisms of profit, the gearchain of capitalism.
The force driving the pedals of the gearchain of capitalism is debt, which has progressively increased according to the force needed to keep turning the pedals, whilst the gearchain took ever bigger scoops of resources to fuel an exponentially growing population.
We need to transform our economy from the system of rewarding scarcification, competition, and conflict between all people and our environment, to one of rewarding for all things made abundant to all.
To do that, we need to examine the system of nature, to see how we might Engineer such a scenario, because it absolutely does exist in nature.
The System of Nature: An Infinite Donation Economy, Sourced from the Energy of the Sun.
Plants take the energy of the sun and convert to different forms of energy needed by all creatures in nature including us:
Plants, are the interface between all life, including us, and the energy of the sun.
We have to transform, to change our activity (The negative energy and work paths shown by the dotted lines in red), from something which detracts from creation, to something which adds to creation.
The economic gearchain of profit and debt are the round tripped negative paths shown in red, between industry and us. We are locked into the loop of driving industry to keep extracting energy from the planet, with the result that an ever increasing demand is placed on all resources, not just fossil fuels, but all things.
Our effort, as a species has to become additive, to the work done by the energy of the sun, rather than subtractive.
Additive energy, work, and money, is that which we might define as positively creating.
Conversely, subtractive energy, work, and money, is that which de-creates, working contrary to the creative action of the energy of the sun.
Currently, all of our activity is subtractive, negative.
As yet, all of the energy used to do everything the vast majority of us do, no matter how well intentioned, has to come from the finite stores of Earth, which the sun put there, and we are taking away.
We drive to our local supermarket, burning a quantity of fossil fuel which took millions of years of sunlight to produce, it cost us the equivalent of a few cents, and generated enough poisonous vapour to instantly poison us if we breathed it directly
We must convert that activity with negative effects to something which has an additive, positive outcome.
We could drive to our local supermarket using hydrogen fuel that we created ourselves from sunlight. Then we might notice the fumes from that drive comprise only breathable oxygen, and water. This time, instead of polluting the atmosphere by our industry of driving to the supermarket, we actually contributed towards improvement of the atmosphere.
To do this, is critical that we must use the only source of energy not on Earth, the sun. That is the only energy we can consume at zero cost to Earth resources, in fact by doing this we add to Earth’s resources, rather than consuming them,
This is what plants do.
We must imitate the action of plants.
We have to use our ingenuity and industry to become a second interface, contributing additively to the creation activity of nature, complementing plants, as a kind of human-made version of plants.
Look at how a tree works; From seed beneath the surface of the ground, it sprouts a shoot. To do that, it draws energy from the Earth, in the form of nutrients. The shoot grows through the surface of the ground into the air, and upwards, sprouting more shoots, and eventually, leaves. All of this it does by extracting from the energy of the Earth. During this phase of its life, the energy flow through the shoot is from roots to shoot, upwards. That is in the opposite direction of the flow of energy from the sun to Earth, so we can mathematically define this energy flow as negative, whereas the energy flow from the sun to Earth is positive.
Extracted energy is negative.
Next the tree begins to form leaves, and the leaves begin to absorb energy from the sun, and new energy flows within the infant tree form, changing the net flow of energy through the tree, from leaves to shoot. In other words, the energy flow through the tree becomes positive. It is no longer extracting energy from Earth, but donating energy to Earth. It does this for the remainder of its life.
Donated energy is positive.
All plants do this, extract a little energy from Earth during infancy, then donate energy to Earth thereafter.
So the net behaviour of plants is to donate energy to Earth.
This is the opposite of what humanity has done, until the advent of solar panels.
For our entire history, we’ve extracted energy from our planet, without ever putting it back. There, we see the real Ponzi, an energy Ponzi.
To stop the Ponzi, we have to become like plants.
We have to become the second interface shown in the system below.
This is humanity+:
The system of Humanity+ above, is what we need to move to, to defeat the forces currently working to destroy us and all life on Earth.
The second interface comprises Money-Fuel Trees, (alternatively named “Kardashev Trees”).
The diagram of interest in the Money-Fuel Tree is below
Bitcoin is shown as the currency being generated in the Humanity+ interface, but could just as easily be any proof of work currency or combination of currencies, as shown in the Money-Fuel Tree diagram.
It could also include fiat currencies, as far as banks and other conventional money issuers might wish to participate, to displace cryptocurrencies, as happened on the issue of the first $4Tn stimulus in US (When oil prices went negative).
Kardashev Engineering
This story is presented in terms defined as a new specialism of Systems Engineering, named “Kardashev Engineering”, that we need to begin using, in order to move to Humanity+, which is the only route to a Kardashev 1+ civilisation, as should be apparent from the analysis above.
Humanity+ by Kardashev Engineering, means humanity using energy positively, as opposed to negatively. The principle difference is that the energy of the sun is used directly by Humanity+ to do all things, resulting in the work and creativity of humanity being added positively, complementing the work done by nature, using the energy of the sun.
This appears a more mathematical, though complementary and absolutely necessary view of Humanity+ as envisaged by the formal organisation named Humanity+, since there appears no other truly sustainable future for humanity.For now, thanks for reading, hopefully now you are well on the way to understanding Kardashev Engineering, and Humanity+.
All comments welcome as always, getting to the truth is a collective affair.
For more information on the details of how Bitcoin fits in, see the story “Bitcoin, Kardashev Hinge”, linked below.
Another story with some recent clarifications is this one:
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Revisions History
01/05/2022 Updated to include the Money-Fuel Tree, the principle subsystem of the Humanity+ interface, which was decomposed in a subsequent separate story following the first issue of this story.
05/05/2022 Updated to include detailed description of the operation of a tree, to clarify the difference between negative and positive use of energy.
