Removal of Planetary Boundaries: Space & Virtual Economies

Current planetary boundaries are being reached by the global economy and resources are being overstretched. Individual countries' growth will be hindered by these boundaries as well as the global economy as a whole. Large countries with vast resources and large populations, have an economic advantage in the modern but still developing world. This does not mean that the world economy will come to an equilibrium that prevents further growth, because planetary boundaries have been reached. Energy can be unlimited from both renewable and nuclear power sources, it depends on investment, technology and scientific progress which will not be impeded. Material resources can be obtained from the ocean, mined on the Moon or captured asteroids.

Stratospheric ozone depletion boundary has been exceeded by 1990, but then reversed to within reasonable limits by present day. Existential dangers to the biosphere and biogeochemical flows having been identified are being addressed just as climate change is, and like ozone depletion before it this damage can be reversed. A sustainable world economy in the physical sense, can continue to produce GDP at a faster pace as products are recycled and new upgraded versions are made. The speed at which this happens can make the global economy grow due to increased technological advances, sophistication and utilitarian value of products, but new resources are not necessary. For instance, a world economy where everyone has a car and keeps it for 10 years, will be a smaller economy than the same population size, with that car replaced every 5 years and the materials recycled. Regardless, limits do exist and the world is heading towards them. Many of these limits are psychological and biological on the consumer side, the obesity pandemic and world population growth cannot indefinitely increase Earth's market demand for food products and services.

Population size constraints are removed as computing systems increase in power and as the virtual economy and virtual real estate are populated with AI professionals. Countries will be able to compete on an equal footing, and creativity and ideas will be the main drivers of economic growth, not resources, landmass or the size of the labor force. A good example of this is Estonia. A virtual labor force and consumer base is only limited by computing power, this on the other hand, has increased exponentially over the last few decades and will continue to grow, which means that even small nation states can increase the size of their AI professional labor force to become arbitrarily large, if there is market demand. That market demand is global. Moreover, computing data centers are not built by nation states but rather by multinational corporations across the entire world. The cyberspace and virtual real estate is thus a global domain with a server side business model that can be accessed by any human from any nation state globally, leveling the world economy's playing field. On top of that we have just entered the age of quantum computing, which has long been touted as a leap in computing power.

Present day American confrontational approach to regain military and conventional economy global hegemony is wrong and doomed to failure. The way for USA to remain competitive is to embrace and heavily invest in the virtual economy which is transnational and requires global free trade, while building domestic self sufficiency for the human population of USA. Energy independence in only the first step. Long term energy sustainability with the use of 100% renewable power is a necessary outcome, if the US economy is to successfully compete against China, EU, India, AU or EEU in a world of ever tighter planetary boundaries. USA cannot compete against EU, China, India or the African Union in population size, but can try to stay competitive by embracing the supra-national common market model. The most obvious pathway for the US economy to compete in the global markets is to take advantage of the absence of planetary constraints in the cyber-domain.

The US has correctly set out to privatize space access and build a space industry world market that is competitive and innovative. Besides the virtual economy of cyberspace and AI professionals removing planetary boundaries, the efforts to colonize the Moon and Mars when they prove fruitful, will remove Earth's resource restraints as space mining, production and settlements' population growth with the use of indigenous resources, creates both new markets and a new supply line to the world economy. The economic growth of the British Empire, the Spanish Empire or the Portuguese Empire depended on access to additional landmass, resources and manpower. The world economy has been globalized since around 1900 and the colonization model of economic expansion was put to a definitive end by two world wars. After the second of which, the world transitioned to a jigsaw puzzle of modern countries.

Colonization of uninhabited worlds does not preset a similar constraint nor require investment in space military resources, if the world economy is able to make this expansion through international effort with the use of multinational corporations or crowd funded self sustainable communities as opposed to individual nation states making territorial claims which they will have to defend militarily. - Marcin R. Kubik