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| Many thanks to Grok |
I live on a different planet. I come down to 'earth' every now and then. To have a look to see if anything has changed. Call me God if you like.
On a recent trip to a planet a really clever man called Mr. Ex invented a fantastic labour saving device called IA.
Now, for each hour of labour worked, and dollar of capital employed, 1000 times more wealth could be produced than before Mr. Ex invented IA. All thanks to IA.
People started planning to escape this planet called Rent to move to planet Rent+1 there was going to be so much money to be made there. And many believed people would not last long on planet Rent.
But for some reason in spite of all the new wealth very few people could afford a house on planet Rent+1. Especially the young who started to complain angrily about old people, who themselves once had similar complaints. The young were not listening and just wanted free stuff and a target to blame for not getting it.
However, a few of the young found a way to rise above this and succeeded in getting a new home on Rent+1. No one could figure out what the secret was though. Just some of them rose above it.
Trouble was, that as this new IA device started to help produce more wealth, the demand for the new locations in which the most wealth could be made, rose with it. Everyone obviously wanted to move to those locations to get their hands on the new wealth, or at least the opportunity to.
And given the new planet was of a fixed size, especially the best locations, they rose in rental value too, side by side. More wealth, higher rent. Forever it seemed to those who could not rise above it.
In the end a scientific study was conducted by The Cheka Weekly and it found the value of these locations sucked up all the gains in productivity from this new IA device. All of it. Or at least the total value of all new wealth created by IA was the same amount as the total rise in rent for all locations across the whole planet.
Was it a coincidence? Maybe.
So most of the poor kids who could not rise above it and worked so hard to make all the new stuff with IA could never catch up, the rental was always one step ahead of their ability to do more work.
Except for the few who managed somehow to rise above it. Some said it was pure hard work, others that it was their skill. No one ever said it was luck or wisdom.
So in the end the kids voted to confiscate all the land from their own parents who already owned most of it during a special election and referendum. Well, the history books called it a confiscation and election. But it was really euthanasia through a slow destructive insurrection and devastating multi decade revolution.
Mr Ex was highly vocal on all this. And eventually found another planet called Rent+2 to terraform just in time because Rent+1 was being laid waste and he decided it was his job to save consciousness. What a good chap. But had he left the unconscious behind?
Moving on a century and the same thing happened there thanks to the great work of Mr. Why who invented another fantastic labour saving device which delivered the identical effects. People soon forgot the last time it happened, and how and why. And everything just seemed to work out OK. Until the entire population once again were forced to move to planet Rent+3 a hundred years later.
It went on and on for a thousand years. Each time a new planet was terraformed the value of it rose a thousand times. And no one remembered enough to care about their last home for some very odd reason.
On and on until the mastership of mankind had reached Kardashev level III - soaking up the entire energy resource of the trillion stars in the galaxy. Where humanity finally met me, far far away. We all decided to move on to the next galaxy, together.
Thanks to 'Over to You' by Black Sabbath from Never Say Die! '78, while writing this.