The Venus Project

Website: http://thevenusproject.com

This is the opening statement from The Venus Project website:

“The Venus Project presents a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture. There are many people today who are concerned with the serious problems that face our modern society: unemployment, violent crime, replacement of humans by technology, over-population and a decline in the Earth's ecosystems.

As you will see, The Venus Project is dedicated to confronting all of these problems by actively engaging in the research, development, and application of workable solutions. Through the use of innovative approaches to social awareness, educational incentives, and the consistent application of the best that science and technology can offer directly to the social system, The Venus Project offers a comprehensive plan for social reclamation in which human beings, technology, and nature will be able to coexist in a long-term, sustainable state of dynamic equilibrium.”

Even though The Venus Project is being promoted as a complete solution to the social problems that we face today, I don’t think that it can be realistically seen as such. The model of society that it advocates is severely unbalanced by excessive emphasis on scientific thinking and technological solutions at the expense of some other, equally important, aspects of human existence. Furthermore, no plan is offered for putting this model into practice, apart from stating that it relies on the collapse of the present system.

If we disregard the project’s positioning and simply examine the suggestions, however, we will find that it has some thoroughly thought out ideas and initiatives to offer. The three that have caught my attention are: The idea behind resource-based economy is to create a functioning global economy without the use of currency. It is a bold concept that I consider to be an inevitable step on the evolutionary journey of our civilisation, barring stagnation and collapse.

All of the major sources of sustainable energy are considered in the project. These include solar, wind, river, wave and tidal power, and especially geothermal. The project instigators are far from being the only ones to advocate their usage, of course, but their material is still a convenient place to get a good sense of the potential of these energy sources.

The project also proposes automation of all the activities that constitute work and that we’d rather not do if we had a choice. This obviously includes all routine activities – washing clothes, watering crops, manufacturing, and myriad others – that are presently automated for people and organisations that can afford it. The project goes much further than that, however, and proposes automation of the entire farming sector, the creation and maintenance of infrastructure and utilities, even the decision-making that affects the distribution and usage of resources. This raises the question of how much automation can be achieved in the near-to-medium future, as well as how desirable it is. I have reservations about the desirability of widespread automation – some of my most satisfying moments have come from routine activities – but it is a topic well worth engaging.