High
quality housing is a corner stone of civilization.
It is critical for developing the human potential.
It is a key investment by society into itself.
Scientific
and cultural development of the human being is not possible in an environment
of homelessness, slum living, rent slavery, and so on. For civilization to
develop, society needs to invest into its self-development. Society is its own
greatest asset. To develop this asset to its utmost potential is the
foundation for civilization. Without it, civilization cannot stand, and mankind
has no future.
Slum living, not to
mention homelessness, destroys a society. It disables the human potential. A
farmer will have a poor harvest if he puts no seeds into his fields, or just a
few seeds of poor quality. Civilization is society's harvest of the 'seeds' it
plants. The quality of housing is a chief factor in the dimension of
civilization. A lack of housing, or unlivable conditions, or unaffordable
housing, destroys civilization. This lack is therefore one of the greatest
barrier a society can impose on its self-development and the wealth of its
civilization.
But how can we upgrade
the current state of housing, which is in a state of crisis? The cost of housing has risen astronomically to the point
that society has become enslaved, just to meet the housing cost, and even then,
evermore people can't afford any housing at all.
On this universally
enslaving basis there is no economic recovery possible
whereby society is increasingly doomed to decay. Desperation becomes the
outcome, and crime, hopelessness, depression, and disease set in. By
society tolerating poor quality housing (or none at all) it is wasting the
most precious asset is has, which is itself and its human development
potential. This should have been
recognized a long time ago, and been addressed as a strategic defense of the
nation, and it can still be done.
Of course I' not
talking about cutting down trees and sawing them into planks to be nailed
together laboriously. Nor are there enough trees left in the world to meet the
global need, much less to facilitate the relocation of entire nations when the
'nearby' Ice Age glaciation stets in. I am talking about high energy-intensive automated
production. I am talking about highly modularized houses, constructed in
completely automated assembly processes. Wood construction is archaic. I'm thinking
of new materials, the kind that no one owns, a global resource that number of countries have in
infinite abundance. I am talking about building houses of basalt and glass. Basalt has
a ten times higher tensile strength than steel. I'm talking about the new
houses made cast and extruded modules of glass-fiber reinforced basalt. The modules would be fully
insulated, with basalt micro fibers. Basalt fibers are a
three-times-better thermal insulator than asbestos is, which is too dangerous
to use.
Sure basalt is just stone, a volcanic stone.
But it's more than just stone. It's an extremely fine-grained stone and is
very dense, and hard. Its stronger and less brittle than glass, and its
melting point is 500 degrees below the melting point of high quality glass so
that it can be reinforced with glass fibers when needed, for extreme strength. It's also nicely
fluid when melted. It can be extruded into fibers, even micro fibers, or any
other shape you can imagine, such as wall panels, roof modules.
Basalt is the perfect stuff for automated fabrication, and it's better in
quality than anything on the market is today. What makes basalt an even more
ideal building material is the fact that there is plenty of basalt right in
the backyard of the USA. The Columbia River Basin contains more than 150,000
cubic-kilometers of this top grade building material. That's enough to cover
the entire USA twelve meters deep. Nor would one need to dig into the ground
to get to it. It's sitting on the surface. All one needs to do is pick it up,
melt it, and reshape it into whatever one wants to make of it. And the material
is 100% useable. No waste products results, or pollution during the
processing. The only input that one
needs is basalt and process heat. Basalt melts at 1,200 degrees Celsius. High
quality glass melts as 1,700 degrees. One can easily get this kind of process heat
from nuclear power. Also, ceramic materials have been developed that
remain structural strong way past the 2,000 degree range to facilitate the
processes.
The leading edge Liquid
Fluoride Thorium Reactor, which has been tested successfully for five years in
the 1950s, would be ideal for that. It provides 500-degree process heat with a
high energy-flux density. The heat can be pumped up through heat-pump concentrators to get the kind of heat that
melts basalt, and also steel, glass, and a lot of other things as well. On
this basis automated mass production is achievable for the new housing units
that are urgently required as a first step to jump-start the world. The new
housing units would be produced with the same efficiency with which egg
cartons are produced today.
Of course,
one wouldn't build just those tens of millions of units needed to eradicate homeless
and slum living. I am thinking abut the need to create many new cities in the
wide open areas that are presently empty desert lands that are ideally suited
for the large-scale industrial development that new materials and energy
resources facilitate. For this also millions of new houses are needed of about
1,500 to 2,000 square feet in floor area for efficient family living.
The point here is that we don't just
face a crisis in terms of homeless living, but also in slum-type living, and
in areas far too distant to commute for efficient living. Many
of the slum places that people are forced to live in for the lack of anything else,
aren't fit for human habitation, much less for human development. In this
respect the housing
scene is fast becoming a crime scene of horrendous crimes against humanity. We
probably need to build several million new free houses to start with, just
to end this crime and dig the nation out of its slum hole. With large-scale
automated production, powered with nuclear power, that's easily
accomplished. It is even possible to make the needed furniture's in a similar fashion,
including beds, possible also clothing, and even shoes. I can see basalt
micro-fibers becoming the textile of the future.
Am I dreaming yet? No,
I don't.
It is also
politically necessary to
enrich our world from one end to the other, with rent-free houses and
entire new cities, just for the economic uplift and vitality the new places would
bring, with
rich human living. Soon entire free-city would then become incorporated
into the old cities to keep the old cultural diversity alive. I can also see
older cities not just offering free housing, but also offering advanced
environments in competition with each other to attract people. Once it is
becoming recognized that the people of society, beyond anything else, are a
society's most precious resource, then the cities will be in a general
competition with each other to attract more people with long-term promises and
long-term potentials, and free housing as a standard feature. The resulting
universal development process would most certainly transform America and the
world. And this is precisely what we need as political driver. The breakout
from the imperial monetarist mode will not likely happen on the negative focus
of aiming to avoid a new dark age that the imperial monetarist mode makes
inevitable. The driver for a breakout needs to be a positive impetus that
offers a powerful new future, that make the political effort to break away
from poverty intensely exciting and worthwhile, and thereby possible.
The General Welfare
Principle would then no longer be dead in America. Real healthcare and real
education would resume. Everything that a person needs to exist,
especially the basic necessities, such as housing, transportation, health care
and education, would by then be taken back out the hands of the profit engines,
like education for profit, health care for profit, etc., that soon thereafter most people wouldn't remember anymore. And this would happen worldwide. And if this became the reality, the return of the Ice Age, which is
already on the horizon, wouldn't represent a challenge then that couldn't be met
then and mastered, but would produce a still richer world by the developed power
for overcoming that still larger challenge.
