Re:Breaching a “carbon threshold” could lead to mass extinction
by carapace on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @01:33PM
(#20404270)
Just to emphasize what lisper is saying, the core problem is exponential growth, even if we invent FTL spaceships, even if we invent warp drive, the core problem is still exponential growth.
We could turn the Galaxy green† and still not have enough room. We could fill it with Ringworlds, with Dyson Spheres, and still not have enough room.
The core problem is exponential growth.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Coloni...
No, it isn't. The core problem is exponential growth. The population today is double what it was just 50 years ago, so you could cut resource usage in half and all that would accomplish is taking us back to the problem as it stood in 1970 or so.
It's true that this is a social issue, but even there the problem is very difficult. The entire world economy is built on the premise of eternal exponential growth in something with economic value. That is fundamentally unsustainable. At some point we will have to transition to at leasy polynomial growth, if not an actual steady-state solution. No one is even talking about that AFAICT.