The future of the countryside
The future of the countryside depends on the future of agriculture.
To know where the countryside is headed, we must first look at the future vision of agriculture as an industrial sector.
So, what will the future of agriculture look like?
Suffice it to say – the agriculture of the future is probably completely different from the agriculture of today.
One of the most important changes is the industrialization of food production.
This kind of industrialization does not refer to the use of mechanized production tools on large plots of land. Rather, it is to establish food industry centers in ideal areas with superior transportation and energy conditions, close to population centers.
Solar or nuclear energy is harvested in the vicinity and transmitted to highly intensive three-dimensional cultivation facilities through the power grid, where improved crops are mass-produced under near-laboratory conditions under full factor control.
There are no pests, no diseases, no "land compaction", "irrigation works". The resulting products are almost indistinguishable from each other because of their highly identical genetic sequences and growing conditions.
Whether it is picking, processing, transportation, consumption and surplus materials**, it is closer to standard industrial production than to "plantation" based on land cultivation.
In other words, the existing agriculture – i.e., the food and cash crop growing and production sector – will be integrated into the industrial sector, repositioning itself regionally along the lines of energy and market centres.
The entire economic structure of the traditional countryside would be almost abolished – a transformation that would be common in the last hundred years.
Under this new industrial structure, the traditional agriculture needs a large amount of farmland water conservancy construction costs, a large number of extensive soil treatment costs, and social governance costs caused by sparse population. The economic advantage is overwhelming, and the traditional form of agriculture has no power to fight back against this change.
This point will come at a speed beyond people's imagination with the new intelligent manufacturing giants like Tesla, especially the comprehensive rise of China's whole industry intelligence, new biotechnology, and new energy technology.
The concept of "rural areas" is likely to fade away in the next 100 years.
So, what does the future hold for rural areas?
It will first be repositioned as land for ecological management and environmental engineering.
It is necessary to restore a multi-level, elastic and capacity natural ecology with human intervention in a large area from the highly simplified state of the existing planting industry.
Return the land to the natural ecosystem with layers and strategies. Increase the ability of the biosphere to tolerate the impact of climate change and human society, so as to greatly reduce the ecological vulnerability of human civilization.
Without this deep foundation of ecological fault tolerance, especially the experience of planetary-level ecological practices, it is impossible for human beings to truly go to the sea of stars.
The infinite spontaneous adaptation scheme inherent in natural evolution, which is not limited by human cognition, is an eternal revelation that human beings cannot give up**. These revelations will be far more important to the fate of humanity in the future than the results of the brainiest human elite sitting in the laboratory and meditating on it.
Let the ecosystem thicken and put more resources in the hands of this teacher, so that this teacher will have more spare energy to spontaneously explore "high-end projects" and give the greatest inspiration to mankind.
If the world's biomass production were to be completely brought under the control of humanity itself, humanity would be tantamount to killing the teacher, which would completely kill the hope of humanity becoming an interstellar race.
In the future 50-100 years from now, a large number of small-scale biosphere research projects will begin to emerge, and research projects to build orbiting space stations, intra-solar system transport ships, deep-space transit station ecosystems, Mars biospheres, lunar biospheres and other terrestrial planetary ecosystems will occupy a large number of the current rural areas.
These changes are most likely to be initiated in China, which implements the ownership of the whole people and is in power, and then extends to emerging countries in Africa and energy-advantaged countries in the Middle East along the Belt and Road Initiative.
What happened after that is hard to predict for humans now. Because at that time, I am afraid that human beings are no longer the same as human beings now.
Thinking about the rural construction plan is thinking about how to plan in advance the path from the current situation to the inevitable future with the least pain and the greatest benefit.
What does this picture mean?
This means that the "rural areas" of the future will be inhabited more by engineers and researchers than by manual laborers.
In the future, it will be the specialized functional areas within 200 kilometers of the existing urban agglomeration that will be responsible for the production of food. and not the traditional rural areas of today.
This means that the concept of "arable area" may need to be redefined. The concept of redlines for agricultural land and cultivated land may become obsolete in the coming decades. This can lead to great uncertainty about the political rights of traditionally agrarian populations in a vote-based country.
This means that the upper limit of the population that the earth can carry will be further increased, and the management of population growth will become a new challenge.
If you look down at this picture, you can see much more than just rural construction.
Because the rules of the world are going to be rewritten.