Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. Fuel cells are for ene

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. Fuel cells are for energy storage, not generation. Something has to make the hydrogen (or hydrocarbon) to power them. Also, fuel cells use platinum as a catalyst. You know, rare expensive stuff that has to be dug out of the ground, processed, and refined before it can be shipped to factories that build fuel cells. Living off the grid would require land for solar cells and/or wind turbines, and energy storage mechanisms for when it's neither sunny nor windy. Building this stuff requires factories (again), raw materials (again), infrastructure, and R&D. A small community can't afford these things. And that's just for basic stuff like electricity and transportation. The small communities could solve this by banding together and contributing resources to a collective pool. Some sort of federated system... Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias. So... what happens to the old people? How do these small communities trade? I'm guessing quite a few will be landlocked. If trade is limited, how do these little utopias have modern medicine? An MRI machine needs to be topped up with liquid helium to maintain its superconducting coils (which are manufactured in factories-blah blah blah). Contrast agents use rare elements like gadolinium. The writer doesn't seem to realize just how interconnected the world economy is. Almost nothing I own was made anywhere near where I live. I can't start my day without touching something built at least 1000 miles away.