First off, everything you convert into something that can not be converted back. Most chemicals would not fit that group, most rare earths in extreme modernized production technology would. As you can no longer recycle the modern tech equipment properly in the newest and latest production technologies. How would you even begin to recycle a single consumer item with at least 600 different materials used in it? You would have to create specific extraction procedures for all 600 materials, and you would need billion times more energy than was used to create it.
Secondly, when something breaks in high technology, it can not be repaired. Or did you ever hear of someone repairing a broken GPU core or CPU core or a LCD screen?
While I agree with you in principle, my point was that the necessities we need to SURVIVE are all recyclable. You're talking about luxuries, which are important, but not as important as giving every person on the Earth a decent quality of living in terms of food to eat, clean water to drink, and a place to live.
I would sacrifice my quality of life if it improve the quality of life of the entire world - that's a small sacrifice to make and I would expect anybody to do the same.
Secondly, even the high quality materials are finite when you consider space travel. Back in the 60's when we were devoting all of our resources to the space race, look how much we got accomplished. Nowadays the U.S. spends less than .1% of their income on space-related projects. If the world spent all of its time and energy to exploring space and establishing new worlds, who knows where we could be in 100 years. This is the problem with Capitalism - there is no profit in researching the final frontier. Even now, the Dutch plan to send a permanent group of settlers to Mars in 2023 to live their until they die, and add more settlers every 2 years. The resources of space are infinite, we would never run out, but all of that will just be a pipedream as long as we belong to a Capitalistic society.
Drugs, Drug cartels, human trafficking, sex trade - unless you handily forget that neither of these crimes have their source in greed, but in a human caused demand. You may argue that the demand has to be fought, yet it is irrelevant, If I wanted I could probably think of at least a hundred crimes of all manners educated people commit, like murder out of jealousy, anger and greed.
I would attribute all of these things to bad education. People who are drug and sex trafficking, as well as slave trading, view human beings as objects or business models. This is absolutely caused by Capitalism. The people who step over everyone else to become rich and famous were badly educated, and that's all there is to it.
Find some examples of people brought up in good families and educated in The Netherlands, or other hybrid Capitalist-Socialist societies, who turn out to be murderers, drug traffickers, and rapists - good luck.
People are not born evil or seflish, they are educated and abused to that point. Take away the negative stimulus and replace it with a positive environment and most people will turn out well.
Because the people who love construction work are maybe 1 in 1000, the others only do it for the money. Remove money, and you have the few people who love doing it.
.1% of 7 billion people is still 7 million people. That's plenty.
And that life hasn't reached space for millions of years, until we came. Hasn't forged, smelted and created new compounds. Hasn't mastered light and fire quite literally. You are thinking of only food, water / electricity, the only 3 resources that are in relative abundance. The others have to be mined, refined, and are rare. Given that a resource economy would need to focus on a 100% recycle rate you will be fighting natural decay of materials and products. Loss of parts and thus, loss of resources.
Once again, most of this is nullified by space travel.
Besides, who knows what creative solutions we can come up with when we are all working together to find an answer. 1 man working in a lab came up with a food solution that has saved billions of people from starvation, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug1 man working in his garage came up with a solution to end world dehydration.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/613Imagine if we had 7 billion minds working towards the solution to these complex issues, we could have them solved within a generation.
See, this is the problem with society nowadays, everybody is so cynical. Everybody thinks "Things will never change", "There will always be poor people", "This is the way it has to be". But realize that
your attitude is a big part of the problem.
1,000 years ago, can you imagine how someone would have responded if you said, "One day, we won't have King and Queens, all of our decisions will be made by the votes of the people". Everybody would have laughed at you or worse. To be so closed-minded to think that we can't come up with solutions to these problems baffles me. Or to think that nothing will ever change for the better.
Maybe you have a point and that system is a good one, but you can not change the whole world. In so far as that is the requirement for this idea, it is a pipedream. The world will not change, you have to start regionally and independently to make ane example that your society would work.
I'm not so sure about that. In the age of the internet and cell phones, we have the ability to reach practically the whole world now. Look at the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, it's already worldwide and seems to be growing in strength everyday. You seem to have little faith in people, but I'm not convinced we can't all band together for a brighter future.
However, already that would require technology nobody has developed, the problem of food production would not even exist with arcologies, but you see any of those standing around? By idealists? By researchers? A lofty plan full of "if" and "eventually" does not make a good strategy for the future.
Refer to my example above. If you have 7 billion people looking for a solution, you'll find it very quickly. The problem is that we can't find solutions, it's that there's no funding for it, because there's no profit in it.
But there is no development that makes humans change. Humans if anything, got more contempt and care even less than they did 100 years ago. Though we think about the future we can not shape it, only stupid politicians can, and they will never do that. The Venus project is a extinction event post-society study. It can not, and will not work in the current world. And changing the world is out of the scope.
I don't think changing the world is out of the scope. Granted, there are a lot of obstacles - Corporations, Politics, Religion, and many more - but the worse things get, the more open people are to change. The world has changed in the past, I see no reason why it won't change again. Humanity and life in general is always evolving.
