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Comment by lurkerperpetual | Hacker News Reader

"Deprecate the base of Maslow's pyramid" Inventing cheap and healthy concentrated 'food' that would allow people to eat once a month or even more rarely. Almost all other problems have a root in our needing to eat (work and cars, pollution, corruption, fighting for social status and it's consequences). You'd have the autonomy and time to take long trips without needing to carry much.

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There's no science in this unfortunately - if you gave someone a month's worth of food in one meal then they are going to put on a month's worth of food in fat in one day and spend the next 29 days starving hungry, consequently slowing their metabolism and making them fatter.

There are plenty of advances to be made for sure, there's not much science for it 'yet'. That is why I mentioned 'healty'. Not some super-food to get you through a short period of intense physical/mental/emotional effort, but something that does not wreck your metabolism and plays well with your organs' age-old habit to be useful and doing their thing. So it would definitely not be just some bunch of nutrients but nanobots too that get cooperate with and monitor your organism. It's probably very hard, but if solved, it would make most (all?) other problems mentioned in this thread be non-issues :)

What if something was to break down slowly over the period of a month - possibly sitting in the stomach? Providing the correct sustanance on any one given day.

You're right, combining with a hunger inhibitor would be a great start.

This is a little silly. In the developed world food is remarkably cheap. Go into a grocery store and price a 5lb or 25lb bag of flour or rice, we're talking pennies per meal. It's incredibly inexpensive (less than a dollar a day) to feed oneself at a subsistence level, what is interesting is why so few people choose to do so, even when it would make economic sense.

Sigh. It's not only and indeed not primarily about price. What about the effects on the environment of growing and transporting that rice? Also I sure would like to go on a hike in the mountains without needing to carry 25 Kg of food for a week. It is not silly, you are looking at it very conservatively.

On the other hand, eating isn't just about consuming food. On the average day I probably spend more time talking face-to-face with people while I'm eating than I do for the entire rest of the day. And I doubt that that's unusual these days.

That is a consequence of needing to eat, not that of needing to interact with others, and you do that because 'more important things' such as work prevents you from taking the time to talk. You could talk to those people face to face without eating as well. Nobody would prevent anyone from eating, but for those who would rather do something else it would be a very welcome invention.

> 'Nobody would prevent anyone from eating'

That isn't really the point though. Whenever there is progress the majority of people stop doing the 'old' thing in favour of the 'new' thing. Hardly anyone in the first world makes their own clothes these days as our standard of living/price of clothing makes it easy not to, most young people wouldn't even consider making their own furniture, people don't hand-write letters. I'm not saying that these things are necessarily bad, just using them as examples of things 'nobody would prevent anyone from [doing]' which people don't (generally) do.

My team at work tends to go out and get our lunch together then sit in the kitchen and eat together. We probably talk more in that half an hour than we do the entire rest of the day. If we all took our magic food pill in the morning then that just wouldn't happen. No one would be stopping us doing it but we still wouldn't do it; it'd be far too easy to tell yourself that you're too busy to take that half hour break.

Having the tech available would indeed not prevent anyone from using the old ways. I wonder why not answer this to all proposals in this topic as those problems being solved would make people stop doing stuff the old way.

Also you miss a huge point: with such magic pills there would be no team. You would not need cranking out software for industries that would go away entirely if the problem was solved or for niche domains that would also become irrelevant. Most of our problems and solutions we are looking for today are indirectly related to our need to live and thus eat. Name one problem outside the realm of metaphysics, arts, emotions and the like that is not solved if the food problem is solved.

I don't understand what you mean. Even imagining a world where we didn't need any food at all; we'd still have teams of builders building the houses we live in, teams of teachers teaching our children, teams of bankers doing what it is they do with our money, teams of printers printing the newspapers we read, teams of IT workers at ISPs. How would any of those jobs become obsolete because of the fact that we wouldn't need to eat food?

Imagine for a moment that you do not need food, then see how many of the services you currently use you can do without as a consequence. Bankers? Really? What to use money for when nobody is anymore threatened by hunger. Even today you have plenty of people doing volunteer work, any problem in a society where there's no competition for resources would make that the norm. I am very disappointed that the answers to this thread are given without much thought.

There are hundreds of millions of people in the Western world who are not 'threatened by hunger', and yet the vast majority of those people still go to work every day, still use banks, still want to earn more money than they could ever need for food. You seem to imagine that if everyone had enough food then our economy would grind to a halt; that there would be no commerce anymore. I think this is unrealistic because people will still want 'things'. I might want a larger house to live in, I might dream of owning a Ferrari, you might want to learn to fly a helicopter, someone else might want a new refrigerator. The point is that there are luxuries, as well as necessities, which people will want; it's possible that in this magical hunger-free world people will produce these things and give them away for free, but it seems a lot more likely to me that these things will be available to buy, and that if you want to buy them you will have to go and do some work, to earn some money, to pay for them. And so yes, bankers, really. In a world where you have to pay for things, even if those things are not food, people will want a way to maintain the value of their money, at the very least so that when they're old they'll be able to heat their homes, repair their homes, buy new clothes to wear, afford transport and afford medical treatments.

I don't understand your disappointment with this thread, you're taking a line of argument which I find completely fanciful, and which I'm sure at least some others do, where you remove one factor from the world (hunger/the need to eat) and extrapolate to all the ills of the world being cured, with no logic in between.

why would one need a new refrigerator??? Having hunger solved in the western world is vastly different from having it solved globally and even more different from not needing food at all. Not having plenty of food. Not needing food at all. I am disappointed by what seem very shortsighted, almost knee-jerk remarks which illustrate the poster did not think much about the problem. As if the logical next step after realizing you do not need to eat is to go and work some more in that saved time to have more money. Depressing :)

I think we should stop this discussion. You don't seem to have any interest in discussing how this hypothetical society would actually work, only in nit-picking mostly irrelevant points (and in response: given that people would be free to eat if they wished, why should they not want refrigerators).

Thanks.

> 'I wonder why not answer this to all proposals in this topic as those problems being solved would make people stop doing stuff the old way.'

It wouldn't be inappropriate to - it's always worth considering both the positive and negative consequences of progress.

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