As material things themselves, via nano technology for example, move into the category of information technology, which is itself rocketing towards almost scary heights due to exponential evolution, you will see many examples of "aluminum" again. The front cover of Peter Diamandis' book, "Abundance", is an aluminum foil wrapper. A mere 100 years ago it was more rare and precious than platinum. The King of Siam, for example, would have aluminum forks and knives, while his noblemen would use silver. And all the other people at the table would have to use a lesser metal. Then things changed and aluminum literally had the value of dirt as people discarded it in their kitchen trash cans. It was due essentially to information. Science discovered electrolysis and figured out how to rearrange the molecules in such a way to produce aluminum for virtually free. As we look towards decentralization and lowering of costs of all things as, one by one, everything moves into the category of information technology.
We're in the middle of a fundamental paradigm shift, where one by one, industries and sciences are being converted to or massively influenced by information technology. The premise at company called Scanadu is that health care is turning into an information technology and as such, it now (1) rides the wave of exponential growth in processing speed and memory capacity and (2) it progressively moves towards being dirt cheap. This trend is so powerful and picking up so much steam across all aspects of society and technology and science that you anyone interested should invest time to read Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near" and Peter Diamandis' book "Abundance". Both books are focused on hard trend data.
What
is it all leading to? It's leading to a
titanic shift of economies. Or put
differently, the economic systems and control groups people are rightly
complaining about are soon to be washed out with the tide. It's hard to argue this clearly without
getting some background research by picking up a couple books like the ones
above. Some of the smartest scientists
and leaders in the world have come to these conclusions as of late. It's a powerful new way to look at the future
and act in the now.
There is a powerful new physics which can be discovered mathematically and through imagination, just as Einstein did. We realize that we're talking about particle physics now. But we have a gut feel that the idea of using ultra expensive particle accelerators might seem barbaric by future scientists "on the other side" of the time divide between now and when our species discovers a deep fundamental geometry and algorithm of change at the Planck scale of reality. If it is true that this discovery can be made purely through mathematics and creativity, then the question is whether or not there are experimental techniques that can be derived from that future understanding which are more elegant and far less costly than smashing together particles and watching the resulting ballistic patterns. We'll go out on a limb and say that FOR SURE in the future there will be a more elegant and cheaper experimental way to probe these ultra small scales of reality.
