zlacker

>>Simon_+(OP)
The whole world is going this way: Japan is just an early adopter. It’ll be good for the planet to have fewer people: our challenge is to run a flourishing society that isn’t based on continual growth.

>>michae+p6
Citation needed. The earth has tons of resources and can easily support several times the number of current humans.

It is bad for the species to have fewer people. It's also bad for the production of novel art.

>>sneak+N6
We have burned through approximately 70 million years' worth of carbon and hydrocarbon resource [1] in less than 200 years, certainly enough that any anthropologist will tell you the rebuilding of our civilisation would be impossible. We have additionally created a mass extinction [2], and already drastically changed the climate of, for example, Europe, created unprecedented wildfires [3] - a Europe which is also, coincidentally, rapidly deindustrialising now Vlad's turned off the spigot [4]. Living standards have already declined [5], with the obvious answer: we no longer have the abundance of resource per person. That,not money, as every economist on the planet is supposed to know, is wealth.

No, we are not being supported. You are coping.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction [3] https://greekreporter.com/2022/07/20/greece-wildfires-2022/ [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2022/09/11/europe-is-... [5] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/there-s-a-generation-...

>>yodels+gb
Petrochemical resources, I believe, will turn out to be some of the least important ones, all told.

Solar and fusion will, in the long run, be vastly more important. Talking about the how and the what of oil in terms of human advancement is sort of talking about printing ink production in 2023.

>>sneak+Nb
Nothing, absolutely nothing in the modern world works without fossil fuels being part of the production chain.

A future where fusion and solar are the main energy sources we tap into would be beautiful, but to get to that point we are still going to burn a lot of fossil fuels to sustain the current modern amenities we got used to. The question is: how much longer do we have to completely shift our energy dependency? The clock is ticking at a very fast rate, we are not doing enough to be independent from our energy needs supplied from fossil fuels.

Believing that "someone will eventually figure it out" is a form of illusion of continuity, there's nothing in the Universe guaranteeing we will continue human advancement, there's no continuity if we don't work for it. Working for it means: facing that we are in very uncharted territory, which as far as we can predict seems to be leading to a catastrophic outcome.

The "long run" part depends on changes to be done right now to allow a "long run" to exist, if we continue the path we are there's absolutely no guarantee there will be a long run where solar and fusion are powering civilisation...