And other things aren't that good. Some things are worse, and we should understand why and focus on that. In fact it may not be clear that the world is better today that 20 years ago (again, in some aspects unequivocally yes). The typical "it's the best time to be alive in human history so far" sounds almost defeatist, like a license to become lax.
Also, nobody claims "this is the worst time to be alive".
Such as?
If you live in a country whose population gives a fuck about other people, YMMV.
Want what you like; but (1) pretty much everyone else wants that so it goes without saying, (2) it is common for people with plans to make things better achieve the opposite because they are lousy planners. The existence of things we don't like doesn't mean we know how to deal with them. People come up with ideas that sound good and don't work.
You can absolutely do it, but you're crawling by your fingernails. And then you have to multiply that by thousands of different factors and different problems. I've thought about this a bunch through the lens of building a game in a world like this and done quite a bit of research, and I tend to think that most of what you might consider "ready resources" in such a world require a pretty significant amount of re-bootstrapping that become really, really hard without easy hydrocarbons.
Maybe doable! Probably really really hard.
I’m really tempted to post spoilers by way of example, but part of the fun of the book is putting the pieces together and realizing what’s going unsaid because the narrator either takes it for granted or doesn’t understand it himself. Very strong recommend if you have any interest in sci fi/fantasy.
I don't disagree, necessarily, but I would be fascinated to know if there are any books or articles that game out this scenario in detail. What would industrialization without massive reserves of hydrocarbons look like?
Can you expand on what you mean by this? I’m not finding much through search.
Those are the basic examples of the few animals which are docile herbivores, breeding in captivity, growing to a large, breeding adult in a couple years, and which live in social groups that accept humans at the top of the hierarchy. Building a society with protein and labor from cows is much easier than, say, harnessing turkeys. There are a billion cows on the planet, but if human society grinds to a halt and we stop artificially inseminating them and running the feed plots those species might not survive.
"We might get lucky" - humans have overcome every adverse condition in our 2 million years alive, why do you have the hubris to believe that you know we can only survive if we get lucky.
"stop the coming disaster" - again, hubris to think that the only possible outcome for humans is a disaster.
"could snap back to...centuries ago" - this has happened once in the past 2000 years, you really think you're going to be alive when we enter a 2nd Dark Age.
I think it's the same sort of thinking with the "Jesus is coming back in the next 5 years" religious crowd. You want to feel important and part of something bigger than yourself, something planet-wide, so you're almost looking forward to being a part of it so you can feel like you're part of history.
Mental disorders are at an all-time high. Extinction levels are well beyond their natural baseline rate, due to human activity. Environmental destruction is at an all-time high. Now, with the Internet, we've managed to build a system that can amplify nearly every negative aspect of human society but at the same time offers a shield of sorts from those effects.
Yes, humans are likely to survive in the same way that a virus survives. We find a way but it isn't always a virtuous path. We humans have yet to understand that nature is a balance and that we choose to operate outside of that balance. Everytime we progress we invent new ways for people and other animals to suffer.
Please provide some references that show mental illness is higher now than during the Dark Ages. Or in Egypt among the slaves under the Ptolemy's.
> why do you have the hubris to believe that you know we can only survive if we get lucky.
They didn't say we can only survive if we get lucky. The dichotomy they painted was between 'getting lucky' and civilizational regression, not extinction.
> again, hubris to think that the only possible outcome for humans is a disaster.
This is clearly not what they said: they said 'some technological or social innovation' might 'negate or stop the coming disaster'.
You can make an argument that we should lean more heavily on base rates rather than an inside-view attempt to predict the future. But here you've just psychoanalysed a strawman.