Techno Hobbit
I love technology, but I also want to be a Hobbit. Is there a way to rectify these two seemingly contradictory ideas?
I dream of living in a cozy semi-underground house curled up by the fire smoking pipe-weed. And yet, I’m a realist. It is technology that keeps us from living like medieval peasants and living to the ripe old age of “died of an infected toenail”.
Tolkein’s vision of a utopia was Hobbiton in his books. A small tight-nit community of people living in harmony with their lands. No war, just vegetable gardens and good ale. He contrasted this with twisted mind of Saruman who was corrupted by machine and metal. The destroying of the trees brought about his downfall at the hand of the Ents.
But can’t we have both? Can we not have the clean technology that will allow us to grow food without destroying the land? Can we avoid damming the rivers and filling our atmosphere with smoke? I want my cake, but I would like to eat it as well.. in fact billions of people still need to eat. We have unleashed technological conveniences that we simple can’t put back in the bottle. However, can we shape to be more in harmony with our environment? Can we make more of them invisible so we can focus less on the technology and more on just have a good ale at the Green Dragon with our mates?
So, let’s imagine what the Hobbitopia would look like if all the technology simply blended into the hillsides.
Disease: This is probably the biggest hill to climb. If we didn’t have to worry about disease, dealing with a medieval peasant society probably wouldn’t be that bad. We can’t accept going back to a 1300s infant mortality rate. What is the invisible technological solution? Nanobots. Yep, a long running trope of science fiction these little buggers are getting real close. In fact some basic ones already exist. Eventually we’ll get the point where they are trained on your DNA and just told to keep things running as is. Fighting disease, repairing, replacing.. acting as a sort of catchall for helping your body do everything it needs to.
Transportation: Do we go back to horses? Would people willing to back to horses? Wouldn’t they also cause some catastrophic environmental issues? Think of the manure! So, maybe not. Maybe clean, silent electric vehicles are good enough? Another possibility that borders on the fantasy is using our power to alter genetics in a way as to create animals that operate more like vehicles. No, not horses.. maybe something a bit more user friendly?
If it’s still an animal.. we still have the logistics of the things eating/defecating. And animals need to be bred, born, raised, training. Even with a lot of fine tuned genetics it’s still a lot of logistics to deal with. What if vehicles were more like plants? Something that could be grown and that are “self healing” like humans? Maybe they could run on hydrogen that they develop themselves with the sun?
blah blah blah.. maybe I’ll write more about this later if someone actually reads this..0