Whew! It's not just me? That's reassuring (As in, yes, there IS a monster on the wing of the plane, but that's so much less scary if you see it too. Little Twilight Zone reference there.)
> What's the alternative?
I don't actually know. However...
Bucky Fuller calculated that we would have all the technology we need to supply our needs globally for everyone, if only we applied it efficiently, by sometime in the 1970's. We have arguably already passed that point, meaning that our problems today are not physical, that they are just psychological (or moral or religious or spiritual if you prefer.)
Starting in the mid-1970's a kind of effective cybernetic psychology has been developed (under a kind of trade name Neuro-Linguistic Programming) that provides simple algorithms for correcting a great deal of malfunctioning psychology. (Be aware that the Wikipedia article for NLP is crap, it's haunted by skeptics. I can vouch for NLP. Not only is it grounded in hard science, I myself was cured of serious debilitating depression. I owe my life in a sense to NLP.)
To sum up, we have the technology to supply our needs, and the technology to overcome our psychological problems, so I think it's a matter of A) dispelling ignorance of the possibility, and B) logistics.
Tag, you're it.