How To Make America Great Again? Infrastructure

It is no secret that we humans cling to familiarity. From a biological perspective the mindset of seeking what has worked in the past is often rewarded with a comfort and success. Unfortunately, our world changes dramatically in the blink of an eye, countries’ prosperity rise, volcanoes explode, wars break out. Most world changing events, we cannot predict. To make anything great, we must accept the risk of failure that comes with innovation. Just ask Elon Musk. Failures, which are temporary set backs are short lived. Successes transcend history. They are the cotton gyn, combustion engines, antibiotics, semi conductors, and computers.

Making America Great Again from an infrastructure perspective is not going to happen clinging to old models of success. To make America Great again we must look into the future and build for it, not the present. So what does the future demand?

• High speed ubiquitous communication
• Connectivity of everything
• Information security
• Autonomous transport at extremely high speeds
• Air traffic control for autonomous low flying vehicles and transports (drones)
• Heavy, ultra large transport of goods through water ways
• Decongestion of living hubs by removing the constrictions of stopping and starting, parking, and resource constraints which requires the removal of lights and utilizes constant flow of AI controlled traffic
• Clean abundant water everywhere
• Clean abundant energy everywhere
• Survivable, scalable protective levies for sea level changes

Pie in the sky? I think not. We have the technical and financial chops to make all of these a reality. Let’s start with clean abundant water everywhere.

Clean Abundant Water

There is plenty of clean water to be had in America. It is in our atmosphere, along our shorelines, in Great Lakes, in basins all across America. It can be moved, it can be desalinated, it can be condensed. We should be building massive canals large enough for container ships as a conduit for clean water and heavy transport as a network throughout America. Movement of goods by water is by far the cheapest and most efficient form of transport. Time to stop squabbling about water rights and do something about it. Water serves everyone.

Communication

High speed, highly available, ubiquitous communication is the backbone to our future. JIT delivery of the appropriate service will save our cities and counties countless dollars supporting every citizen. Just in time delivery of goods and services requires high quality accountable communication. There should not be a single inch of our country that is not serviced with reliable, free, high quality connectivity so that every citizen is safe and can reliably be served by emergency services and high quality sensors. Every heart attack, every fall, every crime known within 10 seconds of the occurrence with the nearest correct resource being directed to resolve the event. We can save 160 billion dollars on emergency vehicle transport that is never used every year in America knowing that someone does not need a fire engine or ambulance.

Autonomous Transport and Delivery

Our future is not filled with old people sequestered in their home waiting for senior care driving services to pick them up. Our future is filled with autonomous vehicles hailed by seniors on command picking them up literally at their door and constantly moving through a network designed for continuous movement. The distance between vehicles is a constant as well as their speed allowing autonomous vehicles to interleave in intersections. We must build the infrastructure to support movement of people across and between intersections. Embracing this future removes untold human hours spent in traffic and adds incalculable hours of productivity.

Abundant Energy

We have been tackling this for a century and are finally arriving at a place where a combination of technologies from fusion to storage will provide cheap, distributed highly available energy to everyone and everything. The expense, availability, storage, and transport of energy is what our future is leveraged on. This is where it all begins. It is not about clean, it is about ubiquitous high available inexpensive energy. This is attained through a matrix of use which starts with removing antiquated government rules and regulations restricting the ability to innovate with respect to local energy production and storage. Local, mobile, efficient production and storage of energy should be the largest redistribution of our tax dollars. It serves every citizen equally and ensures their prosperity. A very big part of the equation is fusion so that we can fuel industrial production at the lowest cost possible.

Levies and Shorelines

Global warming is! Even our best efforts to limit temperature rise over the next 50 years will most likely not reduce the temperature more than a half a degree (http://www.lomborg.com/) What we must do is ensure prosperity. This requires that we protect our sizable investment in the infrastructure of our coastal cities. We need to start designing and building mobile levies that protect us into the future.

We have two choices; to create a future or protect a past. I am for the future.