Well, than go there and modernize... Good luck.
It is easy to suggest some fantastic idea sitting in your armchair.

Before you can can manage to achieve any kind of "hypermodernity" you will face 2 major hurdless:

1. Physical limits on technology development (final boundary on progress).
2. Resistance to change (more and more "greens", Africans refusing modernization etc).

You may muddle trough 2. for some time, but as I observe, the further you go, the more resistance you meet.

Thanks for not disagreeing with me, EnergyUnlimited. I see that you do not disagree with the substance of the matter, but that you point to limits that could slow down the process of achieving the ultimate goal. I agree with you on this.



I'm actually working on it. Are you?



Where did you read that there are physical limits on technology development? On what do you base this opinion?




Mm, you have a different view of African realities. Have you ever been there? Of all places on the planet, black Africa is probably most "modern" in its aspirations. Classically modern, I would say.

I'd grant you that a small elite of spoiled Euro-American bourgeois with a guilt complex is probably willing to resist change and modernity, just because it's fashionable, for one thing - but definitely not the Africans I know. On the contrary. They're really extatic about modernity and progress. More than your average 19th century Progressivist.

A complex post to respond to, Lorenzo.

I could point to many technologies that have seriously injured us, like the internal combusion engine, the Green Revolution, and the A-bomb---and many many more, perhaps most of them. We are the sum creation of all our technologies, and the world is teetering toward collapse. So the record of the impact of technology is not good, from a sustainability perspective. And yet you say the answer is more technology.

I just don't believe that technology has the capacity to save us, at least not in time. I don't believe we will ever have the means to "reengineer" the whole planet. That's hubris. For every step forward we take to ameliorate deteriorating conditions, we're moving two or three steps backward, and time is very short.

The only hope would be to simplify, not to increase complexity further. To power down, localize, kill the growth model through some sort of revolution. To redefine what is important to our society. The means of simplification are at hand, but your techno-promises remain, as I said earlier, pie-in-the-sky.

This would not mean discarding all technology. But it would mean accepting that survival of our species cannot depend on new technology---it can depend only on letting the natural processes of the earth reassert themselves and repair themselves to the degree possible. So we would let that happen, while holding on to existing technologies that are worth preserving, like good basic dentistry.

No.
However I do not see much effects of all efforts to deliver it.
It appears to me, that if only a bit of progress is achieved in Africa, than civil war (or some lunatic government) comes and most of achievements are destroyed.
This phenomenon is equivalent to "Africans resisting modernity" - if ever they achieve it, they will quickly destroy it.

In respect of physical limits on technology development:

You have few "flavours" of those limitations:

A. Attempt to construct a device working in direct breach of actual laws of physics.

Examples:

1. Attempts to build perpetual motion machine (means "energy for nothing" device).
Limiting law of physics: 1st or 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Conclusion: Will NEVER be done if our understanding of physics is correct.

2. Faster than light travel.
Limiting factor: Special theory of relativity says that infinited amount of energy is needed to achieve it. General relativity suggest, that object with any "rest mass" would collapse into black hole even BEFORE achieving speed of light.
Conclusion: as in 1 above.

B. Material science limitations.
At the moment we have exactly 100 chemical elements, which we had isolated in macroscopic quantities. There is few more elements isolated in quantities of some number of atoms, but too few to weigh them directly. There is about thousand varietes of known elements (these are isotopes).
It may be possible to manufacture 1-2 additional "macroscopic" elements (around Z=114 perhaps) and some more of those available as few atoms only.
In addition to atoms there are only few other forms of stable matter and ca 200 discreete but highly unstable elementary particles.
There may be some additional forms of matter in existance, but we do not know much about it now.

LIMIT: ANY existing device must be made of derivatives of matter described above.

Example: Arbitrary fast electronic circuitry/arbitrary powerful computer.
Basically you cannot make transistor smaller than an atom, and increase "speed of clock" to frequencies higher than those corresponding to UV light (any higer frequencies are BOUND to destroy physical structure of your chip).

This limits are BOUND to kill Moore's law at some point in the future.
They are also going to determine how powerful AI maight be and put limit on that.
One can only argue how far is this limit, say will it come BEFORE Kurzweil singularity - spoiling our fun, or later - than less relevant?

C. Technically possible, but realistically unfeasible device.

Example: [Possibly] Fusion reactor.
It may be possible to construct working fusion reactor but it is also possible that NONE of existing (or realistically imaginable) materials will take the flux of fast neutrons etc for more than say few hours-days-weeks (at most) without fatigue damage.

Conclusion: "Earth bound" fusion even if technologically achievable may NEVER be of any commercial use for us because it is finnancially impossible to replace extremely expensive critical parts of network of power plants every few days or weeks.