Concept
Near-Zero Marginal Cost
The threshold condition and its historical parallels.
The threshold condition under which post-scarcity dynamics begin to apply, and its historical parallels.
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Tag
history
12 articles tagged “history”.
Concept
Ephemeralization
Buckminster Fuller's doing-more-with-less, reread for the present.
Buckminster Fuller's long-run tendency to do more with less, and its uneasy modern renaissance.
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History
Resource Scarcity and War
The historical thread from grain and oil to rare earths and fresh water.
A survey of how competition over scarce material inputs has driven interstate conflict, and how abundance reframes the underlying logic.
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History
Energy Wars
From Gulf tankers to European pipelines — and why distributed solar changes the map.
How control of energy production and transit has shaped conflict, and how distributed solar-plus-storage alters the strategic map.
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Crossover
Military Innovation Crossovers
When wartime urgency becomes civilian abundance.
The recurring pattern by which wartime-funded technologies escape their origins to become civilian abundance infrastructure — with an honest moral ledger.
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History
ARPANET to Internet
Packet switching, Cold War origins, and the foundation of coordination abundance.
A Cold War research network that, through successive commercializations, became the public Internet and the substrate for most other abundance pillars.
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History
GPS
From nuclear-submarine navigation to global civilian positioning.
A U.S. military satellite-navigation system, released to civilian use in stages, that became a foundational utility for mobility, logistics, and time.
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History
Nuclear Power from Weapons Programs
Civilian reactors as a partial inheritance of the Manhattan Project.
Civilian nuclear power as a partial inheritance of wartime fission research — with real abundance potential and real costs that must be accounted together.
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History
Jet Engines
Wartime propulsion research and the democratization of long-distance travel.
Wartime turbojet research that became the engine of commercial aviation and near-universal long-distance mobility — with an unresolved climate tail.
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Crossover
Satellite Communications
From signals intelligence to rural broadband.
Dual-use satellite communications — descended from signals-intelligence and C2 programs — now the principal route to connectivity in places terrestrial networks cannot reach.
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Crossover
Drone Tech Dual-Use
From military UAVs to agriculture, logistics, and delivery.
A tightly coupled dual-use technology: military UAV maturation produced the civilian drone industry, and the two trajectories remain difficult to separate.
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History
Cryptography
From codebreaking to the foundation of digital trust.
From wartime codebreaking and Cold War SIGINT through the public-key revolution to the load-bearing primitive behind digital trust and verifiable identity.
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