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Comment by korantu | Hacker News Reader

This is very dangerous point of view, which will lead to a lot of suffering.

Humanity managed to lift vast majority of itself from abject poverty, grow enough food for everyone, prevent children mortality - unimaginable 100 years ago.

And this is called modernity, which if reversed will bring back hunger and misery.

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That's a very human centric point of view you show. Also if you look at anything but GDP it's a much more complicated picture, happiness certainly hasn't been on a never ending upward trajectory. We've also made life miserable for so many animals. We are currently in the sixth mass extinction. We are the sixth mass extinction.

Recognizing a problem does not imply a solution. Do I think it's reasonable or realistic to go back to pre agricultural revolution? No.

Is modernity a reckless party with finite resources? Yes.

https://www.jeremychin.com/repository/hard-truths/0002.jpg

We want to have and do a lot of stuff that we absolutely don't need. For example, going to the canaries on holiday. It doesn't even make us happy most of the time. We can get rid of that and still be a long way from misery.

Modernity has poisoned our waters, created and unleashed novel sicknesses upon the world, harnessed the atom in order to destroy life, and hides behind medicine as if that excuses all of it.

Yeah it's like we're currently stuck in a local minima in regards of environmentalism, and we can choose to go forward and try to improve using technology, or go backward and improve it by impoverishing ourselves.

I'd argue that our actual minima is around 1950s, which means we are halfway forward to be able to geoengineer ourselves to a better earth than if we're not here at all. But it may be a futile hope.

For many years I believed in our ability to engineer our way out of this one. I'm an engineer by profession, and so are you I assume. It certainly shapes the way we view the world.

If we continue our current growth of energy use, we'll be using the entire luminosity output of the Milky Way galaxy in 1000 years. Color me skeptical, but I say that won't happen. So something will have to give, and that's never ending growth. There are a lot of humans https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/ecological-cliff-edge/ and increasingly fewer other animals. Extinction rates are up a thousand fold to the background and accelerating. Geoengineering like so many other ideas in this space are the lie we want to believe that there is a way forward that won't involve fundamentally changing our way of life. Let's just keep doing the same thing we have been doing, a way that is demonstrably causing the sixth mass extinction, but this time with ~sustainable growth~ ~green energy~ ~carbon offsets~ ...

The number of humans is going to plateau and start gradually declining by the turn of the century; that should put an end to the endless growth assumed in whatever model assumes that ludicrous use-of-entire-Milky-Way-luminosity prediction.

Slime molds in pitri dishes are famous for using up their resources and then plateauing ..

Sustainable growth is like saying humane torture. An oxymoron and a lie. Sustainability is all about an equilibrium and long term circular processes, how can that be compatible with ever increasing resource usage, aka growth?

Our financial and societal systems are built on growth, we define prosperity in terms of growth. A traded corporation isn't considered successful when it earns as much as last quarter, it needs to earn more every quarter, ad nauseam.

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