General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The World's Largest Solar Plant Started Creating Electricity Today [View all]hunter
(38,302 posts)What we've got now is primitive. Our "consumer" society is very twentieth, even nineteenth century "primitive."
A society worthy of the 21st century has people living in comfortable, attractive, walkable cities, using less energy, with no need for automobiles. I'm not talking about dense cities like Manhattan, but pleasant places with parks, private garden courtyards, sidewalk cafes, and so on. The high speed communication infrastructure would be "free," in the same sense sidewalks are free.
Perhaps the people would be mostly vegetarian so we wouldn't need to grow all that grain for factory farmed meat and dairy products. Our beef cattle would be grass fed, chickens open range, and dairy animals not crammed together on great hills excrement.
It would be a much more sophisticated lifestyle, easier on the earth, more comfortable, and much less "primitive" than what we've got now.
Organic farming as it is practiced now is a much more advanced technology than simply poisoning pests and "fertilizing" with chemicals. An organic farmer has to have a much more intricate understanding of biology than much of the farming we suffer now.
And so on.