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Part 7:  Our Future Under the 4th Industrial Revolution

Change is coming. Not slow, steady, incremental change that we have grown accustomed to in the 20th and 21st centuries... those incremental changes that we saw in styles of clothing, cars, food and even of homes. Rather, true, rapid, fundamental change is coming, the kind of change that literally sweeps away old lifestyles and replaces them with new.

And why is this radical change coming? It is very simple. First, as explained earlier, the single largest financial mechanism ever built by man is collapsing. As it disintegrates, everything that has been built upon it will also quickly fade.

And, as explained earlier, if we do not take the proper steps to prepare, we could find ourselves in great difficulties with no means of handling them.  On the other hand, if we work together to begin to build the 4^th industrial revolution now, before the collapse, we will be in a position to eventually prosper and grow.

Effects on Transportation

Of all the areas that will be adversely affected, the one area that we will see the most profound, immediate effect is within transportation. And, in fact, we are already beginning to see the rumblings of this. People's driving habits have begun to change because of both the fluctuating price of fuel and the horrendous debt that the average American has.

This has also spilled over to long-distance travel...airplane travel has also been severely impacted, but this is only the beginning. In the not too distant future, we could very well see fuel prices move past $4 to 6, 8, or even $10 per gallon. And as this price runs away, fewer and fewer individuals will be able to afford the gas.

The rising prices will hide another problem from most individuals, and that is even for those who could potentially afford to purchase the gas, there will be a great reduction in the supply because the rising prices will have also led to the breakdown in the production and delivery mechanisms for fuel.

This system will no longer be able to move and process 20 million barrels of oil into 440 million gallons of gasoline on a daily basis, and move that gasoline to all the filling stations around the country. Nor will the system continue to be able to move 3 million tons of coal to the power plants and the chemical processing plants on a daily basis.

Trucking, rail, and shipping companies will find it more and more difficult to operate. We are already beginning to see this happen.

In fact, at the time of this production, the rail industry has seen traffic decline 15% as the same time period a year ago. To illustrate this, there have been 135 long-distance locomotives sitting in a rail yard in Bloomington, California for over a month because there is not enough freight to haul.

Within the shipping arena it was noted in February, 2009, that there were 392 container ships sitting idle in ports around the world indicating a serious drop in the demand for products. In April, the Los Angeles Harbor experienced a 32% drop in container volume from a year earlier and many of the longshoremen are working only part-time while the hub prepares for possible mid-year budget cuts.

The airline industry has also taken a huge hit. During the first quarter of 2009, air cargo was down 25% from the same period of 2008. At the Mojave Airport in California, just one of the commercial aircraft boneyard facilities found in the southwestern United States, there are several hundred jetliners that have gone idle and are now in storage.

So we can see that the beginnings of major change are already starting to happen. And they will continue to get worse as time goes by. However, not all things that will come out of this rapid change are going to be bad. In fact, some of the things that are about to happen will be extremely positive.

Presently, there are a few geniuses in our civilization that are fully aware of the potential of the next generation energy technologies needed to drive the fourth industrial revolution. Energy resources that are millions of times more potent than our present organic fuels.

However, there has been a deliberate and coordinated effort made between our current political system and the existing financial and energy mechanisms to prevent the rise of these incredible resources. But as the financial mechanisms break down, they will take the political system with it. When it disappears, so will the current restrictions that block the innovative work of these geniuses.

Our Future

At that point, the geniuses will literally be able to save our civilization if they have the right resources and are prepared for what is coming. They will be in a position to rapidly create next generation nuclear reactors...small, advanced, self-contained power plants...power plants that will destroy their own nuclear waste.

Once the geniuses have begun this process, and once all the horrendous federal government regulations are gone, it will lead to a quantum leap forward in the amount of environmentally clean energy produced per individual.

And once this incredible clean energy becomes a reality, the future of our civilization will be determined only by our limitless imaginations.

One thing that we can say is that the average individual living in this new world will look back upon us as we now look upon someone living in the 14th century. They will wonder how we got by with so little and how could we live with such restrictions and such limitations upon our lives.

The real difficulty is not for them looking back at us but for us looking out towards them. With the rise of the technology of the fourth industrial revolution, so many aspects of life will get better, cleaner, and more efficient that it may be nearly impossible for us to comprehend their existence.

Just imagine if you asked an individual in the age of Shakespeare to tell you what the world would look like in the year 2009. There is no way that he would have guessed the advances made during those 400 years. And with the fourth Industrial revolution, 40 years could become the equivalent of our past 400 years.

But the one thing that we can say with certainty from our limited perspective is that with the coming of the fourth industrial revolution, the concept of the average life such as getting up and going to work from 9 to 5 or retiring with a gold watch will begin to fade. Each individual's existence will begin to get more and more unique.

To describe what an average person's life will be 50 years from now is not really possible. The possibilities of what will be considered lifestyle will become staggeringly diverse once all of the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution kick in. And in the end, the final determining factors of what each individual's life will be like will be determined by the demands of the free market with emphasis on free and the wishes and desires of the individual.

Part 8:  Implementation of the Model

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