CRISPR, Decentralization, Wealth, and Freedom

I avidly follow @theouterlight, and today watched his report with interest, as it regarded CRISPR, which enables genetic engineering. I posted a lengthy reply on his blog, as he has not objected to my walls of text in the past, but reckon that reply is worthy of a stand alone post, so reproduce it here.

"...it is noteworthy that only CAS 9 CRISPR is today well understood and used in research. However, recently a survey of bacterial genomes has shown that thousands of different CAS mechanisms are used by bacteria to modify their genomes as part of their immune mechanisms to deal with virii that insert snippets of DNA into them to parasitize their cellular mechanisms.

"This strongly suggests that far higher utility of CRISPR is potential that we have yet to even consider exploring, much less have mastered. The limitations to PAM sequences is particular to the widely used CAS 9 CRISPR used today, that isn't a limitation the thousands more CRISPR mechanisms that exist in the wild, or the many more we might synthesize, suffer. Even the one CRISPR mechanism we are aware of enables people to take ownership of their DNA by themselves determining their own genome. It is not widely known, but CRISPR is able to be used by individuals with appropriate tools, and the tools are very inexpensive, comparable to the price of a nice lunch out with friends, and can be employed on a kitchen table. They do not require hordes of PhD's to use, specialized and expensive devices, or rare and expensive reagents. CRISPR's cheap as dirt, quick, and easy.

"What is the only real barrier to ubiquitous application of CRISPR by everyone alive today is the specific understanding of genetics necessary to choose the genome we decide to have.

"There is a revolution happening, rather, an evolution of technological ability available to individual people. Historically centralization has been necessary to produce goods and services economically. However, across every field of industry today the decentralization of the means of production is the cutting edge of technological advance. Increasingly every good we require to enjoy the blessings of civilization is potentially able to be produced on our kitchen tables, in our garages, or in a local shared communal space. Commonly available tools like inkjet printers, aquarium pumps, inexpensive 3D printers, and common resources like recycled plastic from beverage containers, have been developed to enable food, power sources and storage, electronic circuits, and almost everything we interact with to live daily, to be manufactured by individuals in their homes.

"Politics, corporations, and money are all aspects of centralization, which enables management of collective labor and pools of capital to parasitize industrial production, government, and hoard money. Decentralization of production that enables individuals to make what they need to enjoy civil society completely defunds and renders moot that management and parasitism of collective enterprise. We, if we undertake to use modern tools to produce what we need ourselves, become independent of management.

"Independence is freedom. Insofar as we are today required to submit to parasitism to attain to the goods and services that create the blessings of civilization, we are enslaved to overlords, to masters, and it is obvious that such masters care only about their own wealth and power. When we are free of masters, we keep our wealth, and those that would be masters can no longer parasitize us for their wealth and power. It is not reported to us this independence we today are able to enjoy, the freedom we can make ourselves, that eliminates all the power of overlords to compel our subjugation to them. Clearly they want to keep that parasitic pipeline of wealth and power and aren't going to explain to us how to reduce them to mere peers. Nonetheless, it is plain to anyone that investigates these technologies that we can today produce what we need and stop bleeding wealth because when we make what we consume there is no profit to corporations, no middlemen taking a cut, and no taxable event that sucks our wealth into the maw of corrupt government. We retain 100% of the wealth we produce.

"The fact is that the laws of physics, that cannot be bribed, blackmailed, or bamboozled by corruption, enable humanity to be free of overlords, and to reduce the overlords of the world to what wealth they can create themselves, the same as the rest of us. Those of us that adopt these tools are creating a freedom that does not rely on masses of people agreeing with us. We are creating a civilization of free and independent people that attain to the wealth they merit, by making what they have themselves. More, we do this on the cusp of the Space age, where illimitable resources are just laying around that no one owns, no one guards and hoards to themselves, that are available to whoever makes the effort to develop them into wealth that is inconceivable, that has never existed before in history.

"The asteroid Psyche alone is estimated to be worth >$1Quadrillion - more wealth than has been produced in human history. There are billions of equally valuable resources across the solar system alone, and what lies beyond our lonely sun and it's surrounds is incalculable. In 2023 Terran I was launched by Relativity Space, the first 3D printed spacecraft. Now, in 2025, almost every spacecraft and part manufactured in the industry is 3D printed in whole or part. The prices of the 3D printers used to manufacture spacecraft are today ~$1M, but the prices of 3D printers are plummeting and the supply is exploding, and this technology is dispersing across the population with almost the speed that smart phones did. More and more, faster and faster, this clinal boundary society is transcending overtakes the political, industrial, and economic dinosaurs lumbering across the landscape, making them easy meals for fast and lithe modern predators - us - to devour and build our free society from.

"We are on the cusp of new heavens, and a new Earth, where our posterity will enjoy freedom and prosperity we can not even imagine. The lies and crimes of parasitic profiteers are becoming irrelevant - as irrelevant as we make them by producing ourselves what we need to live. Once we start developing the resources in space even the most powerful warlord on Earth cannot even suggest we pay them some sliver of our production. There will be no way to send a tank, or a platoon of marines to beat us into submission, and the hostility of the space environment will make any such force they try to send utterly vulnerable to the least bit of defensive security we might deploy. Just a pinhole in whatever spacecraft that is sent to subjugate us will make it uninhabitable, and simply shining a mirror reflecting the sun's light on any machine will destroy whatever can't survive on the sun itself. The traditional application of gangs of armed thugs will not be possible in space, and not even automated robotic devices will be either.

"We are on the verge of complete and utter freedom of humanity from overlords, from profiteers, from masters of any kind, and from poverty, scarcity and need of anything we cannot ourselves provide. Every good and service that is possible to imagine will be ours, produced by we ourselves at our sole whim and option, save one. There will be one thing that will only become scarcer, and more valuable, the more we disperse to develop the resources that will create inconceivable prosperity in absolute freedom.

"The more we are able to develop our own wealth, the less we will congregate and work together. The more we are dispersed, the less we will keep each others' good company. The mass democides that have occurred in the last century, and that are continuing today, will be lamented more and more in time as their good company is sorely missed by lonely people scattered across the stars, where journeys of 10k years will be necessary to sit down together and break bread.

"Nothing is more valuable than each other, and the more material wealth we have, the more true that will become."

I added the above video just to show that with only a little imagination, we can design our homes to be lovely gardens and fountains in which we enjoy the beauty that producing our own clean, nutrition enables. Wherever we can ourselves survive, this system can be used, and in fact can completely enable any sealed environment to produce the necessary life support system humans require. The plants produce all the O2 we need to breathe, and clean the water so we can drink it. Together the multiplicity of nutrients, gases, and liquid we need is produced by a well designed aquaponics system - that also uses our own waste products as nutriment and fuel to produce what we need. Light, regolith, and a sealed environment with enough gravity so enable water to flow is all that is necessary anywhere in the universe - and we can make light - that we can design an ecosystem using terrestrial species (even including such genetic engineering we may desire, via CRISPR) to provide not only survival, but sybaritic luxury beyond anything anyone has ever enjoyed in history.