Reflections on a Pivotal Year

Dear friends,

“I have always thought of Christmas time ... as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

Dickens wrote those words through the voice of Scrooge’s nephew Fred, who pushed back against his uncle’s insistence that Christmas merely left one “a year older, but not an hour richer.” The miser’s arithmetic was impeccable, but his vision was impoverished. We stand at the threshold of an abundance that could do for humanity what Christmas does for a season.

Consider what has converged in just this year. Renewable energy has surpassed coal as the world’s leading electricity source for the first time in history. Solar power, which cost $30 per watt in the early 1980s, now costs less than fifty cents. In the sunniest regions, electricity costs two cents per kilowatt-hour—cheaper than any fossil fuel. Battery storage costs have fallen 89% since 2010.

Meanwhile, AI inference costs have dropped a thousandfold in three years. Tasks that stumped advanced systems months ago are now solved by models small enough to run on a phone. And in fusion energy, this year brought plasma sustained at 50 million degrees for over 22 minutes, with energy yields more than doubling previous records. The question is no longer whether fusion will work, but when.

These are not disconnected developments. They are the convergence of cheap, clean energy with cheap, capable intelligence—the two inputs that determine the cost of nearly everything we make, grow, and build.

There is a truth we sometimes hesitate to voice: society tends to be as generous as it can afford to be. Scarcity breeds fear, and fear closes hearts. When resources seem fixed, another’s gain becomes my loss, and I guard what I have. This is not a unique moral failing; it is the arithmetic of survival under constraint.

But when technology allows us to furnish everyone with comfortable living conditions and optimal nutrition for a fraction of the present cost, scarcity’s mentality gives way to abundance. The spirit of hoarding yields to generosity; not because human nature has changed, but because the constraints that warped it have lifted. The ancient curse begins, at last, to ease.

And when it eases, something else becomes possible: time. Time for education, for family, for the cultivation of wisdom and the care of souls. Time, as Joseph Smith taught, to be “instructed more perfectly” in all things pertaining to the kingdom of God.

Yet if this were only about comfort, it would be incomplete. The deeper promise is the time and health and capacity abundance might afford for the higher work of becoming.

This year we witnessed the first personalized gene therapy designed and administered to a single infant in just six months, correcting at the root a defect that would otherwise have claimed a young life. Base-edited therapies achieved 82% deep remissions in previously incurable cancers. A gene therapy slowed Huntington’s disease by 75%.

Dickens grounded human solidarity in our common mortality; but we are, in the long run, “bound on other journeys.” Our faith whispers of a deeper solidarity—not merely in dying, but in what we might all become. As our science advances toward extended health and life, we glimpse what such solidarity might mean: not merely companions in suffering, but companions in flourishing. Not merely fellow creatures, but heirs of God, with a destiny beyond anything mortality alone could contain.

None of this is inevitable. The same technologies that liberate could be hoarded; the same plenty that opens hearts could be captured by the few. The spirit of Scrooge does not die easily.

Our work is to insist otherwise. To build institutions and cultures that widen the circle of abundance. To demonstrate that generosity is not naive but realistic; that scarcity is not fate but a problem to be solved; that shut-up hearts can, by grace and effort, be opened.

May we meet the coming year with strenuous hope. May we open our hearts freely. And may we see in every fellow traveler—rich or poor, near or far—not another race of creatures, but companions on a journey toward greater things.

With gratitude and anticipation,

Carl Youngblood
President
Mormon Transhumanist Association