I predict that in 25 years (or 50 or 100):
- human society will be even richer, more prosperous and more technologically advanced
- people will still be desperately worrying that this is a time of crisis and collapse
Let's see.
- human society will be even richer, more prosperous and more technologically advanced
- people will still be desperately worrying that this is a time of crisis and collapse
Let's see.
If society does continue to be richer and more prosperous, and those concepts aren't somehow fundamentally redefined, continued worry about crisis or collapse seems reasonable as that wealth came at the expense of further increase the amount of resources we burn through.
Energy (oil, coal, etc) is a problem today and is highly correlated with our consumption, but that's mostly a side effect of how we've built economies for the last couple centuries rather than a fundamental link to oil.
I think the more relevant factor is control of natural resources
Climate change will not kill humanity off, but its likely to cause suffering we haven’t seen since WWII (or worse).
Unfortunately I've seen a glimpse of how the bottom 50% of people (not in a developed country but globally) get by today. If one doesnt care for their suffering and their lives, its easy to confirm that the society on average (not on median) will be more prosperous. But that will more likely manifest through a few hundred trillionaires living in space and a few ten thousand billionaires who serve them with their services.
The bottom billions will likely just starve, move around desperately due to war, famine, fire and flood, turned away at closed borders, and who knows what new type of cruelty that will bubble up in the future. What do we tell them?
As another comment pointed out, if you care for the bottom 50%, you should be extremely happy about progress over the past 50 (or 100 or 200) years.
The billion is my number. Almost all scientists and officials underestimate deliberately and naively death tolls. I have a metric that whatever number the new york times publishes for an earthquake on day one, you should multiply it by 100 for the eventual total count. No one estimated a million plus deaths from covid in the US. The moment I read the first comprehensive report from China I assumed 1% of the population will die. Unfortunately in places like India that actually was true. So yeah I do think at the minimum a billion people will die due to climate change in the next 50 years, and billions more will suffer in unthinkable ways. Thats _my_ estimate.
Let's see indeed. I'll reach out to you again each year on this date and we'll see how your prediction is holding up.