I believe that the inequality we experience is directly related to the size of the corporations and economy in whole. If the planet was bigger, and could support ten times as many people than the inequality would be even greater. The richest in that world may have wealth that exceeds even the richest today -- likely by a factor of five to ten.

If Ted Nelson's Xanadu we could have had an ad-free net (or nearly so). In his Xanadu you would be paying out small fractions of cents for every word you read to the original authors. If you were an author you would get paid for all your work but not those you quote. This would have made the Internet more democratic and egalitarian. Also instead of traffic being highly concentrated among a small number of websites, it would be spread out more.

This system would have greatly reduced the need for advertising because it would provide another way to make money off the Internet. It would help us wean ourselves of the corruption of advertising and the rampant consumerism it causes. Perhaps Xanadu could have made us stand up to the religion of continuous economic growth before we completely trash our planet.

Gee whiz, we can't call it Internet Exploder anymore.

Human beings are currently with its power are winners against the rest of nature. If we can prevent the exhaustion of our resources we will be in better shape as the exhaustion of our resources is an issue that haunt us within our lifetimes.

Human beings are the most dangerous invasive species on the planet.

There are efforts to bring back the Passenger Pigeon from extinction. Even if successful, don't expect too much from this strategy.

According to Jared Diamond, human beings have caused the extinction of a large fraction of the megafauna after settling into new areas. North America had more big game animals than Africa has today prior to the arrival of the first people in North America 11,000 years ago. After 500 years, the Mammoth, Saber-tooth Tiger and many more were gone. This situation was least severe in Africa where human first evolved, but bad in Australia and every island in the world.

Not much has gone extinct in the USA or Canada likely. True. This also likely applies to Europe and other first world nations. In general, extinction rates are not too bad in the temperate part of the world. But the situation is bad in tropical places.

Compare:
People are richer in first world nations and can afford conservation instead of in a desperate fight for survival that leads to slash and burn practices. Animals in temperate climates must adapt to harsher climatic conditions and have larger ranges. In tropical areas the biodiversity is great and animals have much smaller ranges.

On the other hand, even in first world nations the situation is not necessary rosy. Some plants and animals are declining and in trouble. Particularly freshwater mussels. The Photo Field Guide to the Freshwater Mussels of Ontario states that 28 out of 41 of the native species in Ontario are in decline. Aerial insectivores are the types of birds in the most trouble. This points to trouble with insects ...

Also of note is the fact that much of the manufacturing and pollution has been moved to third world nations. We have a cleaner environment while the Chinese and others suffer.

But cooking at home does reduce having to drive to a restaurant...

Global warming is clouding the bigger issue of habitat destruction. Human beings have altered the planet significantly. We have taken a significant proportion of the planets biomass to devote to agriculture. The fact that aerial insectivores are doing badly suggest that flying insects are in significantly lower numbers and biodiversity. Bees are in trouble due to colony collapse disorder leading to losses of crops because flowers are not getting pollinated as often.

We have made great cities. Aside from the land these cities take, a substantial amount of resources are required to sustain them. Wood, fossil fuels and minerals are all required in vast quantities. Forests get altered, the air and water get polluted.

The oceans are in trouble due to overfishing. For most commercial fish there is only 10% or less of its original abundance. Plastic is accumulating in the ocean.

MInor in comparison are street lights. Nocturnal bugs get trapped by lights and are easy prey in the morning. Many nocturnal species of bugs are getting reduced in numbers or going extinct.

Massive habitat change will cause climate change ... and the consequences are complex and unpleasant.

If it is nature of life to expand and utilize every niche available then any spacefaring civilization should be able to expand into the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light while utilizing every sizable rock in every solar system on the way. That means a civilization could take over a significant portion of the whole universe in a billion years or so. How can that not be detectable? See the book Millennial Project by Marshall Savage.

If life expands in this matter than our universe probably has many planets with primitive life (bacteria/viruses) or a few very old civilizations that span millions or even billions of light years. Other civilizations at our stage of development are unlikely due to the extreme short time scale of a technological but pre-space colonizing civilization like ours.

What has been released so far is a tease. It demonstrates nicely the transclusion and transcopyright concepts. For it to be truly useful it needs the ability to make your own documents with the ability to charge micropayments. Even then it will take awhile before people start to use it, but once it hits critical mass, it will be a solid alternative for publishing. Much better than the web. A global publishing system based on transclusions and micropayments would even things out -- and put serious but smaller scale publishing in the hands of ordinary people. The power would not be concentrated among the worlds most popular web sites and our culture would be less subverted by the need to advertise to pay the bills.

What hasn't been shone in the docs well is what the authoring tools will be like. The better the authoring tools, the better the adoption of this software. Ted Nelson wants something called "real cut and paste". This is simply slicing and dicing a document into pieces and rearranging them. Astonishing that no software today can do this. So software today will even allow you to draw sentences around. Freeplane, a mind-mapping program, comes to doing real cut-and-paste. Rearranging text like you rearrange text in a mind-mapping program would be best accomplished on a 4K monitor, although dual HD monitors would do. Cut-and-paste as it is today is more like hide-and-plug -- the text is temporarily taken off the screen and put into a new place.

Give the Xanadu project its due. It is still relevant today and needed. And while the Xanadu project is Ted's big idea ... he has others as well. I particularly like his Floating World(tm) spec. I myself have been working towards creating part of this Floating World idea in my spare time (development has been slow, oh well). Though I want to get the photo organizer and checklist software parts done first. If the programmers on this latest attempt at Xanadu succeed they may beat me to getting around to the Floating World ideas (although of course not quite as laid out in the old design). If so, I am OK with that.

Would it not be pointless? How could the people on planet Earth gain any benefits from putting printable people on other worlds?

We are at the top of the food chain because 50,000 years ago we were the first animals with the ability to accumulate knowledge. Not to mention fossil fuels in the last couple hundred years that provides each individual with thousands perhaps millions times more energy than food alone can provide. The rest of nature didn't stand a chance.

I do rolling stops at stop signs and complete stops at red lights (I sometimes process to cross on the red light if the intersection is completely empty and I see no cars coming from any direction). I always try to get the eye contact of anyone stopped at an intersection, if they do not see me I will slow down or stop until they do see me or they leave the intersection. Very important. I once tried to cross a busy intersection and the car turning left from the opposite intersection didn't see me as I was making my way across. I had to adjust my path considerable to avoid him/her. I never try to cross that intersection anymore.