I realize it- months don't really matter when we're talking about the survival of the human race. We have never produced a self-sustaining closed system. The space station, Biosphere 2, and not any of the other closed environments we have ever created managed to stay closed and succeed without outside intervention. We have invented nuclear energy, and then have chosen to not utilize it at scale. The other forms of electrical energy we have created are exactly the problem- we have now realized we were doomed the moment we built the first coal power stations and created this faustian bargain with our environment. We can grow tropical plants in Canada at a huge expense of energy and utilizing fertilizers produced by fossil fuels. This carbon-rich energy let us balloon our population so that now we can't just turn it off- we are stuck. It isn't hyperbole- the soil, the insects, and the marine life that sustain us are disappearing and we have no technology to survive without them.

If that were true, why wouldn't we be doing it now? You could feed the world from the Sahara.

The fact is that ecosystem management is incredibly important technology, absolutely required for things like Mars missions, planetary terraforming, and Not Killing Earth - and we do not have it yet.

Obviously there's more efficient farmland elsewhere that works better than the Sahara. Why would we do it now when we feed 7 billion people under the current system?