Marjan, thanks for writing, inspiring others to think about this.

I have always been a technologist, first being inspired by sci-fi, I was a sci-fi bookworn from a very early age. Now, having worked the past thirty years or so "At the cutting edge", I've witnessed so much brilliant technology (Truly benefiting humanity), being asset-stripped, neglected, shelved, rejected, decommissioned, defunded, suppressed, knee-capped, sat on, all because of one necessary thing missing - profit. The prospect of quick, easy profit has won in every case. I can't think of a single one that survived after the promise of a shinier looking profit case was seen elsewhere, even when mass lives are at stake, and all it takes to attract the attention of investors is a nice shiny ad, mentioning nothing about the downsides. In fact this has even gone further now, we can see how various high value projects by "Competitors" are deliberately knee-capped before even having alternatives, just because they are being done by competitors, rather than us. Huawei's 15 years in the making 5G being trashed, and the knee-jerk instant US replacement, Starlink is one of the most recent examples (My own experience in the satellite industry tells me Starlink won't last long, and it will end in tears), but there are more lost than we can shake a stick at, both publicised, and unpublicised.

From supersonic commercial flights, space shuttles, and walks on the moon in the seventies to now pretty much all capabililty of anyone to travel by air being in the process of disappearing.

So much of the technical gains made have been undone. In fact, it is actually surprising we even got as far, the technical developments made which are truly beneficial to humanity are only a tiny subset of what we could have had, if we were not addicted to, and even enslaved by the profit driven system.

The Webb telescope is a very rare exception, I hope it lives up to expectations.

To me it seems we slipped off the rails of progress when Nikola Tesla was defunded by his only funder, JP Morgan, about 120 years ago.

If Tesla had been allowed to deliver his vision of internet-like connectivity combined with solar power for all people, things would have been very different, see Tesla knew that free power meant also free money for all people, and when he informed JP of this, JP realised his bank might have a definite sell-by date, so he defunded Tesla.

The difference between the mindset of Tesla and JP could not be more stark, Tesla thought in terms of projects, each one with itself a limited life, to add further value to humanity, whilst JP thought in terms of an everlasting profitable business. Tesla would have had no idea that JP's reaction would be to defund him.

The irony is that both Tesla and JP might have been still with us now, flying interplanetary to other galaxies, together with countless other geniuses from parts of the world now decimated by war and starvation, if Tesla had not been defunded.

Instead we've had two world wars, nuclear weapons, nuclear power (Which isn't good btw, it perpetuates the system of capitalism), detonation of all kinds of weapons and biohazards, killing millions upon millions of people unnecessarily, and now a burning planet with yet more wars cooking.

That, is how I see the last 120 years history.

But we seem to be finally making the needed change, the switch to solar energy, like the shoot of a new tree, we have just sprouted our first human equivalents of leaves in the form of solar farms all over Earth, all we need to do now is switch money to reflect that energy, to conduct the energy in the same way as the flow of nutrients in the tree conduct the energy of the sun to Earth, and we will be back on track, a little battered and bruised as a species, but older and wiser, and able to get back to progressing as we should have, from a hundred and twenty years ago.

That is why I write about Kardashev Money, and all things related in Medium.

Right now, our task should be to convince the banks that it is time for them to switch over the issue of money to the energy coming in from the sun, and just walk away, and enjoy the benefits we will all quickly see afterwards, it seems to me.

https://eric-bott.medium.com/kardashev-money-is-the-future-8b8ad772772