I'm a Utopian idealist - prove me wrong!

I feel that the points he raises are well-reasoned, but are based on an insufficiently detailed understanding of my case. In this post, I will point out what he overlooked. I apologise if my use of the phrase "apparent scarcity of oil" led readers to think I meant oil is not running out. I do accept that oil is running out. I deny that this is problematic. Oil is good for two things: energy and plastics. Non-oil sources of energy are so vast that to call them "abundant" would be like calling Pol Pot "eccentric". Even if all we has was solar panels, converting just 0.02% of the sunlight that falls on our planet to electricity would more than meet our needs for the foreseeable future. Nuclear fusion (which was successfully done last month) can liberate as much energy from a litre of seawater as 300 liters of oil. (That is to say, our oceans contain 10^31 joules of nuclear fuel. ) Factor in space-based solar, wind energy, geothermal, wave energy, microbial fuel cells, nuclear fission etc. and we have a staggering abundance of energy. As for plastics, I challenge my opponent to name a single case where oil-based plastics are used where an alternative material cannot satisfactorily replace them. We are running out of oil. But that's ok, because humans are ingenious and can apply know-how to overcome such scarcity. Even if oil were irreplaceable (which I have shown it is not), scientists expect that we will soon be able to grow oil with bioengineered bacteria, and much progress has already been made in this direction My esteemed opponent has claimed that only 0.65% of water is "easy of access". This is a matter of opinion; it depends on what one means by "easy". I consider all the water in the air around us, all the greywater in our buildings, all the water in our lakes and rivers and all the water in the sea to be "easy" to purify. I make this claim based on the fact that the most required is some carbon nanotube filters (made of carbon, using helium - both extremely abundant elements) and some ultraviolet LEDs - a very cheap, abundant technology. Humanity's water resources and the technologies for harvesting water are analyzed in much greater detail at adciv. org/Water. You will find that nothing is needed that is not in fantastic abundance on Earth. My opponent believes that desalination requires "considerable amounts of energy, time, and money". Desalination was once energy-intensive - true. (Though if you think we lack energy, you ain't paying attention! ) But emerging technologies are changing this, specifically nanofiltration and microbial desalination. Nanofiltration slashes energy needs by a factor of four compared to the old membrane technologies, and microbial desalination actually generates electricity while desalinating. The claim that we can't desalinate water because we lack the time to do so doesn't merit refutation. As for money - money is not needed to desalinate water (nor to do anything else for that matter). Take seawater. Pass it through a nanotube filter. There, you desalinated it! The laws of physics (by which our technology functions) do not have meters on them. The laws of physics do not send us bills when we use them. They do not charge by the hour. Money is required by one thing and one thing only: the monetary system. An alternative to the monetary system is proposed in my first post; it is the free sharing of know-how and the local application of that know-how. My opponent has claimed that an insurmountable problem with minerals is that they are unprocessed. I don't know what to say to this, except that it is a problem that was solved by the advent of the Bronze Age. Mining and smelting are now extremely well-developed technologies that we know a lot about. We have invented plenty of machines that do most of it for us. Mining and smelting (along with every other aspect of our infrastructure) are becoming more and more automated with each passing year. Extrapolating this trend, we will arrive at full automation. (A general point about my thesis is worth repeating: it considers a world on the horizon in the next several decades. Some of the technologies I discuss are as yet in the prototype phase or are otherwise not fully mature. They are all very near though, and all considered entirely possible or inevitable by researchers. ) A weak point of our current automation is maintenance and repair. But scatter sensors throughout a machine to detect problems, have other machines ('repair bots') that can replace faulty parts, and build machines from smart, self-healing materials and there is no need for maintenance by humans. I do not claim that this has already happened; I claim that it is now possible with current technology and I expect it will be done soon. See adciv. org/Advanced_automation/Self-maintenance_and_repair for more details. (Besides, even if infrastructure is not 100% automatic, if it becomes ninety-something percent automatic, that is enough to create a leisure society. And this has almost happened already, with logistics, loading and unloading ships and other aspects of infrastructure now automated, saving enormous amounts of human labour. The main obstacle to the leisure society is the monetary system, which as I've said, can be bypassed if open culture generates abundance. ) My opponent claims that "the changes proposed by the theory requires large amounts of investments". Let's be specific: The "changes" my thesis requires are some successful open-source projects, ones that will create free education, free healthcare, free fabrication etc. If my opponent was referring to some other "changes", I would ask him to be specify what changes he means. At the risk of stating the obvious, open-source projects require very little money compared to private or public projects. In fact, they are often one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than equivalent private or public projects. This is because people work on them for free. Wikipedia has accrued over 100 million man-hours of labour for free. Linux is a world-class operating system (often considered better than Mac or Windows) put together by free labour. Open-source bypasses the monetary system, so money can be cut out of the loop in many areas. However, as of 2010, money cannot be completely cut out. It is true that open-source projects do need some money to manage. (I have managed some myself. ) This is because the monetary system is currently so dominant and so ubiquitous that one cannot avoid dealing with it. But the money is always forthcoming when the projects are worthy. The Wikimedia Foundation raised $8 million dollars in 2 months last year, surpassing its targets. OpenPCR raised 202% of its target. Diaspora raised 2006% of its target. (And all this happened in the middle of the most acute financial shortage in living memory! ) The investments are forthcoming and that is the fact of the matter. I challenge my opponent to name a single open-source project scuppered by lack of funds. My opponent was worried about population growth. Population just means having a lot of people around. I think having a lot of people around is a good thing. I find people to be hilarious and sexy. I think the problem you have in mind is not a surfeit of people per se, but rather a lack of resources relative to those people. Correct? If so, what resource is lacking? Minerals are not lacking; our planet is made of them. Water is not lacking; the surface of our planet is covered in it. Food (and land to grow it) is not lacking; we have enough farmland to grow food for 80 billion people (and enough plant nutrients to grow for hundreds of billions more with controlled-environment growing). See adciv. org/Food for a more detailed analysis of the amount of food that can be grown on this planet.