The greatest tool mankind has for commencement is knowledge and wisdom. What I’m about to describe is probably utopia, but should still be a goal we actively try to accomplish.

Currently, mankind is continuously “reinventing the wheel”. Because a huge part of the results from the research and invention being done in the world are considered to be commercial business secrets, the same things are being discovered several times by different people around the world. Other discoveries are kept secret by the various governments because they are of great value to the military or various clandestine agencies.

All this is necessary from a business perspective, or a security perspective. However, it greatly slows down the accumulation of human knowledge, and thus also the commencement of mankind.

We could expand our combined knowledge base virtually exponentially if we didn’t have to worry about revealing our discoveries and research papers to the public.

Imagine a free (as in beer), well organized, easily searchable central database storing everything mankind currently knows about everything - stored in such a way that it’s easy to follow every piece of information from conception to current version. A perfectly organized Wiki, so to speak… If there are things scientists disagree upon, then there would be different pages describing each view, and you could easily trace each piece of information backwards and see every other piece of information it builds on. You could see where each view on a subject parts from the path taken to reach the other views. Everything would be well documented (explained in extreme detail) with all available proof or evidence (or references to such).

This is, of course, only a vague description of how such a database should work – but you get the picture (I hope). With everyone having access to such a database people would be free to build on the research and discoveries of others, without worrying about patent issues or copyright infringement.

This could never become a reality, of course, in a world where any research is focused on making a weapon intended to be used on Earth – or in a world ruled by capitalism.

Regarding the weapons thing: I wish people would just grow up and work things out peacefully (which is theoretically possible in EVERY situation). Regarding the capitalism thing: I believe the best solution we currently have is a mix of capitalism and socialism. Pure capitalism would end in disaster and so would pure socialism. So we can’t, at least currently, rule out capitalism. That in turn means that we can’t currently make this system where all knowledge is in the public domain a reality. We can still try to work towards it though. The more knowledge in the public domain the better.

Google is currently, to the best of my knowledge, the company doing the most about achieving a similar goal. Their ultimate goal is to make all information (with a broad definition of information) freely searchable. Achieving that goal is probably the closest we can come to the utopia I just described - since this world is mostly ruled by various degrees of capitalism.

Feel free to debate!

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