We need to listen what the science is telling us for 40 years now with the report from the club of rome "limits of growth", and slow down our consuption levels.
Apply new techonologies as an excuse to keep growth (green growth) will accelerate the degradation of the environment.
Edit: typos
The way we measure growth is nuts. the best way to acknowledge that is to watch this speech from Robert F Kennedy
That's a bet that many of us are not willing to take. Sure, you can imagine that a future technology we haven't thought of yet will save growth, but I think it's very important to think about scenarios when that won't happen. Are we really wanting to bet humanity's future on just "technology"?
If you read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed[1], you'll realize that socities that did collapse were over confident. Let's no repeat that mistake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse%3A_How_Societies_Choo...
So don't take it. But don't complain when you end up losing out to people, institutions, and countries that haven't adopted this defeatist attitude.
As for Collapse: Diamond is wrong on many of his specifics (e.g. Easter Islander depopulation) but even in his own framework, collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.
Don't you think it's safe to assume that technologies might not save us and that we should work on some alternatives, just in case the first scenario doesn't work?
> collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.
So you're saying that the _only_ way of preventing collapse is by technological advance? And that we should not try to make sociaty sustainable without growth, or at least to do some reasearch on how that might be possible?
This reads like prosperity gospel and law of attraction nonsense rolled together and repackaged for a technical audience.
A kilogram of anything from space is orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire than a kilogram on Earth. No technology will change that within my lifetime. If there are no physics-redefining advances in nuclear fusion and/or nuclear fission, my grandchildren will probably be able to make the same claim.
Eh, that's because you, like most of humanity, like to hide 99% of the cost. What is the cost of pollution? What is the cost of environmental destruction? Once you destroy a habitat on earth, there is no more cost associated with it, it's just gone and no amount of money can ever bring it back.
Mining asteroids and colonizing other planets will do more to destroy Earth's environment than just building nuclear, solar, wind, and hydro, and improving battery technology without leaving this planet.
This is true, if you are on Earth and wish to remain there.
If you are in space already, and don't have deal with pesky things like gravity and friction, it could conceivably be way easier to chip a lump of metal off an asteroid and hurl it in the general direction of where it needs to be, than to dig it up and put it on a boat. It's a bit chicken and egg, but it's easy to imagine a scenario where off-world becomes the new Shenzen.
So easy to imagine that we've been doing so for 40 years [0]. In fact, the basic technology seems to have been in place for 40 years as well, but no economic incentive to execute on these grand plans for permanent human habitation in space has yet been found. Furthermore, I have yet to see any evidence that such incentive will ever be found.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colon...
Of course it makes absolutely no sense to put "human ingenuity" in the same category as oil, metals or fertile land. It's just a way for entrepreneurs to justify their entrepreneurship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem
This problem is weirdly everywhere. Especially in software, this should be understood. We can't have exponential anything, it's just reckless.
Although you would need to differentiate. Growth in resource consumption? Nobody would want that. Growth in wealth? Yes, please...
Maybe logistics and communications had litte effort to keep up with exponential growth, but other sectors certainly seem tired from time to time. It just isn't possible to grow food with exponential efficiency, even if recent developments (last ~200 years would have us believe otherwise).
Is this a general notion, or is there a limited set of dynamics in play?
What are the capabilities and limitations of those dynamics?
What are the role of latent, occult, or unintended consequences? How do those develop with time?
What is progress? What are the goals of progress? What are its limitations?
What are technology traps? What are progress traps?
I'll let you play this for a bit.