Oil would still be needed for lubricants and plastics.
I would go with the Squoze technology from John Varley’s Red Thunder. This is the tech that allows you to basically squeeze massive amounts of matter into these tiny little soap bubbles (which now contain massive amounts of energy!). So you solve the landfill/toxic waste issue and you wind up with essentially free energy (by a controlled release of the energy from the bubbles) which can be used to power cities, create star-drives and the like.
Why produce money if you can produce the stuff money can buy? Skip the middle man! OK, sure you can’t produce land - but you could produce all the parts to your own starship and go find your own planet.
Traditional money wouldn’t mean anything though. You’d have to use something that you couldn’t replicate (eg. “gold pressed latinum” in Star Trek)
I like the power sources ideas better. Mr. Fusion is a good one. Small, tons of power, accepts garbage. You’d probably need it to run a replicator. I imagine those things use a lot of juice!
Phasers to phase out the House and Senate…Bwahahahahahaha
I’d use a dimensional gate to find a parallel Earth with no humans on it, and swap the new Earth to China for enough cash to cover the national debt.
Not just hop to the new planet and leave the Chinese holding the paper?
While you’re free to stop at the Mr Fusion, I’m more interested in Doc Brown’s time machine.
Pills to make politicians grow up.
Warning: do not point Amaz’n Laser at the President.
I’d grab the intelligence-boosting gizmo from Spock’s Brain (or the pills from Limitless) and use my new 400 I.Q. (I guess a mere doubling will suffice) to fix the economy.
Or possibly I’d realize that it can’t be fixed in any lasting way.
Come to think of it, one of Doc Smith’s Lenses wouldn’t be a bad thing, either. Especially since it’s inherently impossible to misuse one, since they can only be used by those few who are worthy.
I think that’ll be harder to get than a Shipstone, though.
Infinite oil generator. Sure it would annihilate the environment, but that’s long after we’re all dead and we could all be Oprah rich!
What story is that from?
Hmmm. I remember phone booths. I’m picturing people working up the nerve, entering a suicide booth, and having it fail to work.
I guess I misunderstood the OP. I was going with the non-literary definition of “fictional.” Though I suppose a Star Trek replicator could do it, though the rules governing the device are inconsistent at best.
It’s a bit of a tall order, but the Stargate network. Access to colonizable, as-yet-untapped worlds would do a lot for scarcity issues.
If that’s too tall an order, then naquadah generators or Zero Point Modules from the same franchise for low-cost energy.
Just build a new planet (via Project Genesis in Star Trek, Titian in Titian A.E., The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, etc.) and sell real estate and the new abundant resources.
I want Dr. Shrinker’s shrink ray. That way I can shrink everybody in the planet down so we do produce so much polution and garbage or require as much food.
Shrink everybody down but me, of course.
Where are you putting this planet?
Let’s say you have the Genesis device from Trek II. Which planet in our solar system are you going to terraform? (I assume either Mars or Venus.) You don’t have warp or even impulse drive; how do you plan to move people from Earth to there, or resources from there to Earth?