alt Hacker NewsYou wouldn't make that trade because you are part of the last generation (loosely speaking, a collection of generations) before it all comes crumbling down. We are living unbelievably privileged lives because we are burning all of the world's resources to the ground. In the process, we're destroying the ecosystem and driving a mass extinction event. Nothing about the way we live is sustainable long-term. We're literally consuming hundreds of millions of years worth of planet-wide resource buildup over a span of a couple of centuries. Even if we avoid the worst case scenario, humans 200 years from now will almost certainly not be able to live anywhere near as luxuriously as we do now, unless there's a culling of billions. In the actual worst case scenario, we may render the planet uninhabitable for anything we regard as intelligent life.
In that sense, we have just enough collective intelligence to be dangerous and not enough intelligence to moderate ourselves, which may very well result in an evolutionary deadend that will have caused untold damage to life on Earth.
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We also live in an era we can create hydrocarbon fuel DIRECTLY from the atmosphere and desalinate fresh water in unlimited supply, from power derived directly from the sun or atomics.
We also live in a time where the human population, where it is most concentrated, is declining rather than growing, so far without too disastrous consequences.
Greening of the earth has been happening since the 1980s- i.e. about a .3% coverage increase per year in recent decades.
Places that were miserable and poor, like China, have been lifted to prosperity and leading out in renewable tech.
There is much to celebrate and after the recent passing of Paul Ehrlich, we should pause and consider just how wrong pretty much every prediction he made was.
That seems both fatalistic and doomerist to me, but time will tell. I would assume germ theory would survive regardless, as would immunology, so I'd hold on to those two at least.
Doomerism is a kind of religion that goes back as far as they eye can see. What's interesting about it is that in spite of being perpetually incorrect in its myriad predictions, it continues to adapt and attract new adherents.
See also (recent only):
- Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (Malthusian collapse)
- The Club of Rome's The Limits of Growth (resource exhaustion)
- Thomas Malthus' Population growth / famine cycle
- James Lovelock's Global warming catastrophe predictions
- Hubbert's (et al) Peak oil economic disaster
- Molina & Rowland's Ozone catastrophe
- Metcalfe's internet collapse
You lost me when you started narrating the fossil doom visage.
With the current progress in solar, as well as the remaining coal, gas and uranium reserves, energy is not going to be what finishes our civilization.
While I don't think we are going to get true collapse, I think we are going to get a lot of technical progress compensating for biosocial deterioration.
The demographics, mental health and dysgenics are all real, quantified trends, and we are going to face the reality of less capable, less taxable population for the rest of this century. It's baked in at this point.