Since gundams are too impractical, I think we’ll end up defaulting to this least worst practical answer that satisfies the criteria.
Let us go forth, fellow humans, and b2b SaaSify everything. Vidy has shown us the way out of the meaning crisis.
Problem with bleeding edge science and math civilizational goals is it reduces 99.9999% of humans to mere admiring spectator NPCs. The best we can aspire to is delivering Uber eats sandwiches to the symposium on quantum gravity.
The 1964 NY worlds fair was the last time this kind of “civilizational goals” conversation made any sense.
After Montreal 1967 it was rebranded world expo and became an increasingly tedious cultural nationalism bureaucratic boondoggle.
Here’s the last one. Expo 2020 UAE (actually held 2021-22 due to Covid). Sounds godawful. No marquee showcase tech installation. National cultural derp. Greenwash theatrics. Far cry from the days of space needles and monorails (Seattle 1962 world’s fair)
This sense of civilizational ambitions lost is the reason, despite my distrust of MbS and his textbook authoritarian high modernist shit, I’m oddly fascinated by the Neom project.
It’s og world fairs type thinking, but doesn’t scan as Thielean flying car reactionary nostalgia. I’m sure there is tawdry political calculation there to compete with Dubai, and that the actual project is a shitshow, but I detect a genuine streak of world’s fair excitement
Part of the problem of course is that tech advances since the 60s have all been invisible or atomic scale — Moore’s law and biotech don’t produce gaudy Spectacle City shit the way trains, electric lighting, cars, airplanes etc did 1850-1960.
I wrote this thing for Aeon about the World Fairs vs Solve Hunger type civilizational missions many moons ago. Not really happy with my thinking on this, either then or now. I view this essay at a failed attempt to answer the question in this thread.
All people other than MbS trying to do Gaudy Spectacle City shit are sadly turning to godawful tradarch statuehead cities
Awful choice, but I’ll take MbS’s Brasilia 2.0 over Retvronopolis
What I actually want is New New York complete with sewer mutants and an owl infestation
See, this is a means-ends category error. Education to do *what*? Staff a space program? Build Neom? Train Peace Corps 2.0 to go solve climate change? Make art? Or worse, “all of the above”?
Many of the responses have this issue. You can’t address a vacuum of ends with means.
This is also why, despite all sorts of issues, I am rooting for Meta’s Metaverse to succeed somehow. Civilizational purpose by fiat.
Crypto is just a little too abstract to save this purpose. It will only be exciting to engineers while it is disembodied money-like-substances.
In summary we must build a Gaudy Spectacle City, like Neom but wiggly instead of straight line, and based on tubes, full of b2b SaaS companies and a Gundam Research Lab. Initial funding required: $50B. I’m available to serve as first mayor. No Retvrners allowed.
“The reasonable visionary devotes himself to the world’s Real Problems,™ the unreasonable visionary persists in trying to adapt the world to his psychotic fancies. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable visionary.” — with apologies to George Bernard Shaw
argument that it’s just misguided eternalism but there’s a Wowbagger version of longevity I like as a civ goal. We could all live long insulting each other in alphabetical order (without alphabetical order it is just culture war)
When you take space (universe) exploration off the table… it’s just us …. staring at each other… which we’re already really really good at (TV, Twitter, etc).
Religion is the parking lot of meaning-making projects. It’s what you build when you have empty land you don’t have a building project or development capital for
Shoulda restricted this prompt to 40+. Everybody under 40 has a solid life-stage eigenmotive that’s much too easy to project onto this prompt. You need underpurposed 40+ energy that’s run out of eifenmotives.
Kids: everything is a learning/play problem in disguise
Teens: everything is a friends/dating problem in disguise
20s: everything is a hedonism problem in disguise
30s: everything is a community/ spirituality problem in disguise
40+ you can really worry about Mars programs
All my original ones were either taken or dismissed, so here's one from further down my list:
Being able to harvest hotter peppers that can break 5M Scoville units and/or increase in global average spice tolerance