For the vast majority of their existence, peoples have always been just one crop failure, one war, or one natural disaster away from becoming a chapter in history with no future. Our planet is dotted with the ruins of abandoned settlements and vanished peoples who have fallen into oblivion.

Menschen im 16. Jahrhundert standen wirtschaftlich kaum besser da als die Menschen im römischen Reich fünfzehnhundert Jahre früher. Das änderte sich mit der Renaissance, dem Entstehen der Wisenschaften und der industriellen Revolution. Das letzte Vierteljahrtausend hat die Menschheit zivilisatorisch weiter gebracht als zigtausende Jahre davor. Was uns heute als selbstverständliche Alltäglichkeit gilt, waren selbst noch vor hundert Jahren ein unerreichbarer Traum. Den alltäglichen Überfluss, den Menschen heute genießen, war selbst Königen nicht zugänglich oder galt als extremer Luxus.

Although the Earth’s population today—at over eight billion—is five times larger than it was around 1900, we have more energy, more raw materials, more edible calories, and, in general, more resources at our disposal than ever before. And not only that: all these abundant resources are also cheaper. All this despite the fact that we consume more of them per capita than in the past.

Infinite Light

The best example is the price and availability of light. Who even thinks about how much light costs us these days when we flip the light switch? This is not something to be taken for granted, because just a few centuries ago, people spent up to twenty percent of their income on light—which modern people today would consider to be of poor quality. Today, it costs fractions of a cent, and the quality is high.

The graph above shows the price trend for 1,000 lumens of light output from the early 19th century to the early 21st century. From 1800 to 1850, the price of gas and tallow lamps, as well as tallow and oil candles, ranged from 18 to 160 cents, and by 2015, the price of LED lighting had fallen to just 0.004 cents. Note that the Y-axis of the graph is logarithmically scaled, which “flattens” the exponentially declining curve into a straight line.

Not only has the price of lighting fallen by a factor of 40,000, but real incomes have risen by a factor of 13 to 18 over the same period. Taken together, this means that real purchasing power for lighting has increased many times over—mathematically speaking, by several hundred thousand times. In addition, we now have significantly better lighting technology at our disposal. LED bulbs are not comparable to candles or oil lamps. While 200 years ago people still had to carefully consider how many candles to light for what purpose and whether they could afford it, today we no longer think about whether we can even afford light when we flip the light switch.

This trend is exponential. We just haven’t noticed it yet because we’re only at the beginning of the curve, which will then skyrocket. This phenomenon is driven by advances in and the development of new technologies. Wind and water power enabled people to harness energy in mills and to lift heavy loads. Steam engines multiplied the energy we could access. Engines brought us the next leap forward, followed by electricity generated from these earlier technologies and new ones, such as nuclear power plants. Each new technology enabled a quantum leap in the amount of resources available to us.

As demonstrated by the cycles developed by Soviet scientist Nikolai Kondratiev and later by Joseph Schumpeter, the rate of innovation in new technologies rises until it levels off and declines, only to be replaced by new technologies. The individual cycles exhibit increasingly shorter durations.

Infinite Computing Power

Today, we are on the verge of breaking into new dimensions on multiple levels. The most obvious advances in recent decades have been in computing power. Moore’s Law is probably the exponential law best known even to laypeople—one that we have experienced firsthand. Even washing machines today have more computing power than NASA’s entire Apollo moon landing program.

By the middle of this century, today’s computers will seem to us like simple pocket calculators, and we’ll wonder how we ever managed to keep a modern society running with them. With quantum computers—some of which are already claimed to have achieved quantum supremacy—we’re catapulting ourselves into entirely new dimensions of computing power. Calculations that would take thousands of years on today’s processor-based computers—whether CPUs, GPUs, or tensor processors—are completed by quantum computers in seconds.

Infinite Intelligence

Along with this comes the latest technology that has captured humanity’s attention over the past three years: artificial intelligence. We watch in amazement as it advances rapidly and becomes increasingly capable of handling, processing, and solving problems with ease. In doing so, we are expanding our cognitive capabilities and placing intelligence of seemingly limitless scope into the hands of humanity.

Infinite Labor

Intelligence is not confined to computers; it is increasingly taking on a physical form. Physical AI—in the form of autonomous cars, machines, drones, and humanoid robots that move through our world alongside us and can manipulate objects—is providing us with more and more labor. One billion humanoids are expected to populate the Earth by 2050, and that is likely a conservative estimate by Morgan Stanley.

Infinite Energy

The transition from hydropower to nuclear reactors was already a major leap and took millennia. But a breakthrough is on the horizon for a technology that will likely free us from energy worries—and all the associated conflicts and restrictions—for a long time to come. We’re talking about nuclear fusion. Advances in AI, magnets, metal alloys, and laser technology are progressing so rapidly—thanks in part to other technologies like AI—that we can expect to see the first artificial suns on Earth within a few years. We’ll be able to do on our home planet what the sun has been doing for billions of years: generate energy that will seem almost infinite to us today.

Eternal Life

As recently as 1900, the average global life expectancy was 32 years, and a hundred years later, it has more than doubled. Today, we can expect people to live past the age of seventy—and in many countries, even past eighty. There are many reasons for this: better and more abundant nutrition, vaccinations and medications, better medical care, better hygiene, and better and safer living conditions.

Why shouldn’t this trend continue in the same way? If I were to claim that children born today can expect to reach an average lifespan of 250 years, we’d all probably be amazed. Perhaps they won’t live to be 250, but “only” 180—or even 370—but given the progress made in the past and the exponential advances we can expect in the future, it’s no longer so unlikely that, thanks to our technologies, we’ll be able to massively extend the quality of human life.

A concrete example comes from Australia, where a dog owner used AI to develop an mRNA vaccine for his dog, which was suffering from cancer; after the vaccination, the tumor shrank by 75%. When applied to humans, predispositions to certain diseases could be analyzed at birth, with both nutrition and necessary medical treatment tailored to each individual; furthermore, advances in aging research could lead to the life expectancy of people born today being extended by several years time and again over the coming decades. This brings a lifespan of 250 years within reach and no longer seems so utopian.

What impact would such a long life have on humanity? Well, we would retire much later. Instead of at 67.5, we might retire at 167.5. We could build generation ships for space exploration, where the original crew spends 25 years—that is, 10% of their lives—on board, yet still reaches the star in the other star system and is young enough to explore and colonize it. Could this also increase birth rates, if women could now have children up to the age of 150 and, instead of giving birth to just over one child on average, could have as many as ten over that span of time?

Questions About Infinity

If we take all these technologies together and extrapolate, we see a possible seventh Kondratiev cycle that could be driven by artificial life, nuclear fusion, and quantum computers. In this cycle, biological and technical systems also merge with one another.

What would the consequences be, and what could we do with infinite resources like these?

Nuclear fusion would have a dramatic impact on humanity. We would no longer have to wage wars, as countries would no longer need to fight over securing oil supplies and scarce energy resources. This could lead to a decrease in military spending. Since fossil fuels would no longer be needed, the primary cause of climate change would be eliminated. Nearly half of all ships on the world’s oceans transport fossil fuels such as gas, oil and coal and would thus become redundant. The energy produced would be clean. No CO₂ would be released into the atmosphere, no radioactive waste would be left behind, and landscapes would not be scarred.

Nuclear fusion also promises a dramatic drop in energy prices. What could humanity do if these prices fell to near zero? Perhaps we could create entirely new technologies that require vast amounts of energy, such as flying cities, as seen in the film “Avatar.” Or we could expand the desalination of seawater and the irrigation of desert regions. We could farm in regions where this is currently impossible due to climatic conditions by artificially heating and lighting or cooling the area. This would allow us to expand our food supply. We could also explore space and use this energy to make other planets habitable for us. The possibilities would be endless.

In Kombination mit unendlicher Rechenleistung, unendlicher Arbeitskraft, und unendlicher Intelligenz wären die Möglichkeiten für die Menschheit beinahe endlos. Steht der Menschheit mit dem Zeitalter der Unendlichkeiten das Schlaraffenland offen?